O.K., is historically inaccurate, too long, here and there rhetoric and verbose, and very, very patriotic. Bus is also sincere, often moving,and probably the film in which Wayne expresses his more strong convictions. ¿Conservative? Yes. ¿Repubican? Of course. ¿Fascist? Only if you are the obnoxious left wing guy who thinks that everyone who dissents with you is the cousin of Mussolini. A funny story: some years ago, I purchased a VHS of the film in Madrid, dubbed in Spanish, and discovered that in the famous scene of the "Republic speech" (Wayne to Laurence Harvey) the word "Republic" was replaced for "Independence". In the almost fascist Franco's Spain, republicans were the Bad Guys of the last Civil War. Interesting trivia. The final battle is obviously borrowed from the famous combat in the ice of "Alexander Nevsky" (1938), by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Both sequences show first shots of individual soldiers, then little groups, then long shots of all the enemy army, and the soundtrack combines various lines of the principal musical themes of the film. The question: mention two famous ukrainian musicians who studied together in San Petersburg in 1913, with professor Alexander Glazunov. The answer: Sergei Prokofiev (author of the music of "Nevsky") and Dmitri Tiomkin (idem for "The Alamo"). Tiomkin also was piano's teacher of Glazunov's daughter. I suspect that he and Wayne (or his second unit director Cliff Lyons) have "Nevsky" in mind when filmed the battle. Is obvious too that the Duke don't tell us the story of the Alamo, but his legend (the final chorus insist: "let the old men tell the story, let the legend grow and grow"), and conceived his film as his particular version of Homer's "Iliad". The conflict of leadership between Travis and Bowie it's inspired by the confrontation of Agamnenon and Achiless in the old poem, with Crockett (¿Ulysses?) in the middle. And in terms of American politics, there are a sub-plot in the film: Travis is the manipulative hamiltonian leader, Bowie a jacksonian populist figure, and Crockett a jeffersonian that accepts the decission of the majority. Politics and history aside, the film is a good epic, that grows in his splendid 45 final minutes. And Wayne plays fair with his enemies: the villain is the concept of dictatorship, not the mexicans (the only individual bad guy is an opportunist American). "Nevsky", indeed, painted the story in white and black, making his hero as a parable of Uncle Joe Stalin. ¿Who is the "reactionary" an who the "progressive"?
