Well hey! What a great site this is.
With respect to the new Alamo movie, I rushed to see it but only saw it once, and didn't buy it.
First nit-picking... to someone familiar with Texas the movie was clearly shot in the Texas Hill Country, not in a river-bottom setting where the Alamo (Spanish for "cottonwood") was/is located. Not much the filmmakers could do about that to be sure, likewise the brief scene of San Jacinto was set in an arid field in late summer, not at all like East Texas in March... but again production schedules is production schedules...
At least the White-eyed Vireo singing around the Alamo (probably present on the movie set) was correct, but the San Jacinto soundtrack had a jumbled set of bird calls in the background apparently comprised mostly of house sparrows, entirely wrong for that time and place (hey, for a bird watcher such things are as glaringly obvious as an AK-47 would have been).
I thought Billy Bob Thornton nailed the character of Davy Crockett, a complex man with the 'nads to stand up against Indian removal, voting his conscience as opposed to what was popular. Besides, anyone who closes his term in Congress with "you can all go to Hell, as for me I'm going to Texas" (or something like that) is all right in my book.
Crockett's revulsion at the atrocities committed during Jackson's 1813 campaign against the Creeks is well documented, although it should be pointed out that, disgusted or not, he had rejoined Jackson in time for his Florida campaign the following year.
Jason Patrick was disappointing as Bowie, Patrick didn't come across as anything like a brawling slave trader/adventurer fast approaching middle age. It has become fashionable of late to tear down Bowie as a fraud. Allow me to (once again) quote Noah Smithwick, an amazing but surprisingly little known source who absolutely did it all in early Texas, including meeting Crockett and knowing Bowie personally. FWIW Smithwick speaks highly of Bowie, here writing of the previous battle to take San Antonio (Smithwick narrowly missed the Alamo, being bedridden with a fever, likely malaria, 100 miles away in Bastrop at the time)...
"...Bowie was a born leader, never needlessly spending a bullet or imperiling a life. His voice is still ringing in my deaf old ears as he repeatedly admonished us, "Keep under cover, boys, and reserve your fire; we haven't a man to spare;" and, had he been obeyed, not a man would we have lost..."
http://www.oldcardboard.com/lsj/olbooks/smithwic/otd7.htm
Certainly not the useless drunk as has become fashionable to portray. He was, at least, apparently genuinely fond of and grief sticken over the recent loss of his young San Antonio bride, Maria Veramundi, to cholera.
Dennis Quaid was OK but insufficient I thought as Sam Houston. With respect to earlier comments made here, Houston comes across through history as anything but a devious schemer who would somehow contrive to send Travis, Crockett and Bowie to their doom.
Houston apparently was a highly principled man who never did betray the true cause of the scandalous and sudden failure of his early marriage, which separation effectively ended his promising political carreer. Likewise he never did betray his trust with the Cherokees with whom he spent much of his life, supporting fair treatment of the Tribes several times in the face of political expediency, and losing office over it. Finally, although Govenor of Texas at the time (IIRC), in 1861 he boldly spoke out against Secession. A stance which, at that time and place, got lots of innocent men and boys in Texas murdered over the next four years. Likely Houston's revered status saved him from a lynching, but doubtless he had to seriously watch his back.
I did think the movie went overboard in its attempt to portray the average Mexican as a good guy. Simple mention of the thirteen Texas Hispanics who chose to die there (despite abundant opportunities to leave) should have been enough. Very believable that the average Mexican soldier might have admired the American's courage, and that some should have known of Davy Crockett. Also believable is that some of the Mexican Officers might have pleaded for Crockett's life. Indeed the extreme reluctance of the Mexican General Jose de Urrea (not present at the Alamo) to execute American prisoners on a number of occasions during the Texas campaign in defiance of Santa Anna's direct orders is well documented.
It should be remebered though that in the turbulence of Mexican politics at the time, the execution of those who took arms against whatever Government happened to be in power was the norm. In other words, Santa Anna was doing nothing out of the ordinary when he executed any Alamo survivors, and later all 240 of Fannin's men at Goliad
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/GG/qeg2.html .
The protrayal of Santa Anna was probably the worst fault in the movie IMHO, not that he wasn't an egotistical, pompous, bloody handed killer, that part is all true. But at the time he was only 42, much younger than the actor portraying him appeared. A probable heroin addict (laudanum) and a compulsive womanizer (while in San Antonio he arranged a sham marriage, with one of his men dressed as a priest, to gain access to a local belle. And the stories of him being shacked up in his tent with a slave woman at the outbreak of San Jacinto are right in character).
Whatever he was, he was a tough and charismatic survivor, the loss of Texas being only a setback in a long and devious political career stretching more than thirty years after the Alamo (and punctuated by the State funeral of his leg, given a hero's burial after being lost in battle, and much later dug up and dragged through the streets by his opponents :
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None of this sort of man is even hinted at in the movie.
Birdwatcher
