Word: alamo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Alamo (Batjac; United Artists), which is the first picture ever directed by Hollywood He-Man John Wayne, is also the biggest western ever made. Wayne & Co. have not quite managed to make it the worst. Shot in Todd-AO and exposed on color film that is practically fluorescent, the movie was produced on location in a $1,500,000 replica of the Alamo and the village around it, employs 1,500 horses and seven instantly recognizable human beings (Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Richard Boone, Frankie Avalon, Linda Cristal, Chill Wills). Released as a reserved-seat feature...
...case of The Alamo, forever is almost attained in one projection; the film runs three hours and 38 minutes, including an intermission. The first three hours, moreover, are as flat as Texas. Plenty happens: a seduction, an orgy, a murder, a battle royal in a barroom. But it all seems to have happened before, in some other John Wayne western, and in any case most of the action has nothing to do with the Alamo...
...much of the dialogue ("Yuh doan git lard less'n yuh boil the hawg"), and worst of all is the teary sentiment that blears every other frame of the film and wallows to a climax of blubbering bathos when a little girl, as the carnage at the Alamo concludes, turns to her mother and piteously inquires: "Mummy, where's Daddy...
...Imperialist beast. Bandit, hypocrite, thief!" screamed the radios in Fidel Castro's Cuba, denouncing the U.S. "The U.S. wants to prepare public opinion for military action," raved Revolution, Castro's mouthpiece paper, "the same technique as the Alamo in 1836, the Maine in 1898, the Lusitania in 1915." Said Cuba's Prime Minister himself: "Those who committed this sabotage are those who were interested in our not getting these arms-officials of the United States Government...