| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

The Alamo. Directed by John Lee Hancock; produced by Mark Johnson and Ron Howard; written by John Lee Hancock, Leslie Bohem, and Stephen Gagham. 2004; color; 137 minutes. Distributed by Touchstone Pictures. Remember The Alamo. Directed, produced, and written by Joseph Tovares. 2004; color; 60 minutes. Distributed by PBS-TV.
The cry "Remember the Alamo" echoes through American history, memory, and popular culture as a call to heroism and freedom, and today the Alamo still stands as the shrine of Texas liberty and is among the most popular historic sites in the land. Not surprisingly, a story so big ended up on the big screen. Indeed, the myths surrounding the events that led up to and occurred at the San Antonio mission/fort in 1836 and the characters who died there have attracted over a dozen filmmakers, starting in 1911 and capped off in 1960 by The Alamo, produced and directed by and starring John Wayne. Wayne's film cast the fight as a Cold War metaphor for no-questions-asked patriotism and profiles in courage and as an indictment of what he regarded as lily-livered liberalism. Although shot in color, the 1960 film was black-and-white in its bows to white superiority and manliness. Such images and messages, already emblazoned in American popular culture, made it almost impossible for students and visitors to the Alamo to approach the Alamo story except in Wayne's terms and persona. Good men died for a noble cause.	1
Historians demurred. They have challenged the details of the myth and images, especially those surrounding the death of Davy Crockett, and the meaning of the event and its place in the public imagination. On the latter count, by viewing the Alamo from the perspectives of the Tejanos inside and outside the fort, the Mexicans assailing it, and even other Mexicans and "Americans" with a vested interest in it, historians over the past decade or so have discovered a more complicated story of competing political ambitions, idealism, democratic yearnings, pride, personal greed, racism, and more. What films left out, historians brought in, especially the darker side of the Texas creation story—the importance of slavery and land grabbing in the Americans' push for "freedom"—and the realism of Sam Houston in sacrificing the men at the Alamo to buy time to build an army and get a rallying cry. The myths began in 1836.	2
Texas-born director John Lee Hancock read the historians and took in the mythology. In this 2004 Disney version of the Alamo, he sought to provide at once an epic strong in narrative and accurate in detail. In doing so, he followed the line of most recent historians in presenting the famous Alamo defenders as a gathering of failed and even desperate men who had come to Texas looking for a second chance. Anger, angst, and avarice marked their character as much as any courage the approaching Mexican army evoked. Hancock also embraced the "new history" of the Alamo by peopling the mission/fort with Tejanos, although they remain largely a backdrop to the central Anglo characters such as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, and by including the black slaves of William Travis, who end up looking out for their own interest rather than slavishly joining their "master" as part of the carnage. Hancock enlisted a small army of historians to "authenticate" his film, and the result is the usual specificity in costume and setting that disguises the narrative fictions persisting in "history movies." Directors never give up the story to outsiders. Hancock pays scrupulous attention to the details of dress, uniform, speech, even tableware; skips the legendary, but heretofore obligatory, story of Travis drawing a line in the sand and asking all who would be men to step over it; and bestows a courage on the Mexicans rushing the fort in a nighttime assault that no previous film acknowledges, or evenly properly places before dawn. The film is sometimes gorgeous in its shots of Texas country, and it shows the confusion of battle much like the few contemporary accounts relate it.	. . .

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