John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [117]
Carl Foreman was incensed by Wayne’s actions to stop Sinatra making his film. At his London office in 1978, Foreman told me, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 218
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“Wayne always boasted he’d run me out of Hollywood, and I decided it was payback time. I made a film called The Victors, which was an antidote to all the flag-waving films that glorified war—the kind Wayne had made for years. It was an antiwar film, and I wrote into it a scene where American GIs are forced to watch the only American deserter to be shot in the Second World War. The whole scene was played in the stark whiteness of the snow at Christmas, and on the soundtrack, over the whole scene, I put Sinatra singing
‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ That was my swipe at Wayne, and Sinatra loved it.”
Wayne was aware of Foreman’s “swipe,” but disregarded it, saying, “The Victors was probably the most unsuccessful war film of the 1960s. Nobody went to see it.”
Wayne continued postproduction on The Alamo until he finally had to accept he’d reached a point where he could no nothing more.
He was ready, in May 1960, to begin work on his second picture for Twentieth Century Fox, North to Alaska. The comedy Western reunited Wayne with Henry Hathaway. “After The Alamo,” Duke told me, “it was a relief not to have to do anything but remember my own lines.”
Meanwhile, the publicity campaign for The Alamo got under way, run by Russell Birdwell, the man who had promoted, among others, Gone with the Wind and The Outlaw.
“I made a bad error of judgment over the publicity,” Wayne said, blaming himself for what turned out to be one of the most infamous publicity campaigns in Hollywood history.
Ken Curtis said, “Duke’s mistake was in giving Birdwell a free hand. In fact, his mistake was in hiring Birdwell in the first place.
Birdwell’s greatest success was in selling Jane Russell’s breasts [in The Outlaw]. But selling The Alamo was different. We all know Duke made the film as a patriotic statement, but that wasn’t the angle to sell to the public. They wanted action, romance, comedy. They didn’t want to be told that if they were patriots, they would see The Alamo, and that’s what Birdwell’s publicity campaign said. It was in poor taste, and it upset—well, not so much the public—it got the media’s backs up. That’s why I think the critics went for it in such a 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 219
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savage way, they were like hounds tearing a deer apart. They just didn’t give the film a chance.”
When The Alamo was premiered 24 October 1960, at the Woodlawn Theatre in San Antonio, the critics, as Ken Curtis said, did indeed go for it like a pack of hounds.
The most famous criticism of The Alamo came from Newsweek, which called it “the most lavish B picture ever made.” Time was a little less cruel: “The Alamo is the biggest Western ever made.
Wayne & Co. have not quite managed to make it the worst.”
The New Yorker said that Wayne had “turned a splendid chapter of our past into sentimental and preposterous flapdoodle. Nothing in The Alamo is serious. Nothing is true. The Alamo is a model of distortion and vulgarization.”
Variety thought the picture had “a good measure of mass appeal”
but noted that “in spite of the painstaking attempts to explore the characters of the picture’s three principal heroes, there is an absence of emotional feeling, of a sense of participation. With the rousing battle sequence at the climax, for which a goodly share of credit must go to second-unit director Cliff Lyons, the picture really commands rapt attention. It is as actor that Wayne functions under his own direction in his least successful capacity. Generally playing with one expression on his face, he seems at times to be acting like a man with $12 million on his conscience.”
The most damning criticism came from the Southern California Prompter which, as Wayne had said, reviewed Duke’s politics and not the film. “If [Wayne] is saying that what America needs is about ten million men with the courage and determination of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie,