But they were just that, a low wall and a big empty bit the size of a football field. The old outer wall and compound are long gone. What remains is the old mission (nope, there's no basement so Pee Wee's bike couldn't have been there) and the long barrack which is now a fascinating museum. The whole Alamo site no longer exists of course progress took care of that.
Their mythic stature has enlarged them in the popular imagination. The remaining Alamo buildings - much like Elvis' Graceland - are surprisingly small. But neither that nor the Imax version around the corner from the old mission prepares you for the actual battle site itself. It's less commonly known however that they weren't there to fight for America against Mexico, but for the independent Republic of Texas (which lasted almost a decade before Texas became a state).Īll this - and the bickering between Travis and the boozy, sick Bowie, the aftermath when that catchphrase was on the lips of their avengers, and the defeat of Santa Anna who was a treaty-breaking dictator and self-styled "Napoleon of the West" - is in the new movie. It was never going to be the former, and they all knew it.Ĭall it heroism or call it folly (it was certainly a measure of both), the actions of those men inside the walls who knew they were going to die has been distilled into the spirit of Texans. Travis' famous letter to other revolutionaries to come and assist them said, "victory or death". They expected and waited for relief that didn't come. In short, a ragtag band of about 180 Texians (as they were then called) holed up in the old mission station and faced down Santa Anna's army of a few thousand for 13 days. The story of the Alamo, like that of the British at Dunkirk, is one of military failure turned into moral victory.
#Elsewhere san antonio movie
The recent Billy Bob Thornton movie The Alamo - in which Thornton plays a convincing and engaging Crockett who owes nothing to the downhome wise-cracking and tight-lipped heroics of John Wayne - should give the story of the siege by Santa Anna's Mexican army in 1836 a chance to breathe free of some of the more shallow cultural accretions it has acquired. These are perhaps not the things you are expected to call to mind when asked to "Remember the Alamo". It was, unfortunately for him, the historic Alamo. But he got caught short so pissed on an old brick wall. His wife Sharon hid his clothes so he couldn't go out, but Ozzy put on one of her dresses and headed for the nearest bar. Oh, and Ozzy Osbourne back in the good old days when he was drinking earned the ire of San Antonians. I remember a Donovan song in the 60s about the Alamo ("A hunnidneighty were challenged by Travis to die, by a line that he drew with sword when the battle was nigh") and at the start of some dissolute 70s tour the Rolling Stones posed there looking like drug-addled buccaneers.
It's where Pee Wee Herman went to find his missing bike in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, for example. That was where John Wayne, Captain Travis and Jim Bowie (pronounced "Boo-ee" and of some kind of knife fame) fought off hordes of pesky Mexicans in tight trousers and with evil moustaches.Īfter that I don't remember much except that Wayne (as Davy Crockett, who gave his name to the nearby hotel and a mini-golf course in his home state of Tennessee) died valiantly and the name of the Alamo lives forever as a defining moment of heroism in American folklore.įrom our cultural distance the Alamo - as in "Remember the Alamo" - probably doesn't mean much. It is of the inevitability of a massacre. The battle for the Alamo was a forgone conclusion so any retelling of the story - and there are many variants - isn't one of military strategy. "If you'all ask me," says the portly Texan beside me, "they never had a chance anyways. Tourists, few of them international if the visitors book can be believed, waddle through the old barracks where the worst of the carnage took place. From here the Crockett Hotel looms above the old mission, and street cars and taxis rumble across land which was once splattered with the blood of hundreds. A hot Monday morning and I'm sitting outside of what remains of the old Alamo in the centre of San Antonio, Texas.
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