Heroes of the Alamo

I have a certain fondness for this movie. Granted it's a "Poverty Row" production, with most of the Texians dressed like cowboys in a Grade C Saturday-matinée western and the Texian settlements obviously standard back-lot western-town sets, but it tries, and it means well. The Alamo set is laughable compared to the huge, detailed, more-or-less accurate recreations of the mission-fort in John Wayne's THE ALAMO and the more recent version with Billy Bob Thornton; but given the low budget they had to work with, the Alamo set in "HEROES" is better than expected, and it's more accurate than the Alamo set in the Disney version. (At least it has the palisade.) (If you get the DVD version of HEROES OF THE ALAMO you can see parts of one of these silents, WITH DAVY CROCKETT AT THE FALL OF THE ALAMO, the surviving fragments of which are the DVD's bonus feature.) The story of the growing rift between Mexico and the American settlers in Texas is reduced to cartoon simplicity, but at least it tries to give you some idea of the reasons for the conflict. It's interesting to me that the Mexican officer at the beginning is shown not as a monster but as a reasonable man doing an unpleasant job. Compare him to the bestial subhuman "greasers" of the silent MARTYRS OF THE ALAMO. As Alamo expert Frank Thompson states in his prologue on the DVD version, "HEROES" is unusual among Alamo movies in that the main characters are not the larger-than-life "trinity" of heroes--Bowie, Travis and Crockett--but Almaron Dickinson and his wife Susanna. The Bowie in this movie is a weird, rednecky guy who looks like he might gut and skin hoboes just to keep his knife sharp. The Travis in this movie is kind of bland compared to the more dramatic and romantic Travises of the screen, but he grew on me. (The production values were so cheap, however, that apparently they couldn't get him a sword and he has to draw the famous line in the dust with a rifle butt!) The Crockett is an unusual and somewhat oafish geek, and his death scene is probably the weirdest Crockett Death Scene of any Alamo movie, ever. His strange last line always makes me chuckle.