John Wayne's big noisy Valentine to America- I can't believe it was so hard for him to get it financed. Maybe people were worried about the unhappy ending - or the budget blowing out like it did - or Wayne's inexperience behind the camera.
The direction's perfectly fine, by the way. He's no Ford, but its competently put together. Impressive spectacle at the end (still don't think it should've cost $12 million or whatever it did).
John Wayne plays John Wayne in a coonskin cap more than Davy Crockett. Wayne was a good enough actor to play a proper Crockett but he isn't given much in James Edward Grant's script - he does the John Wayne thing and occasionally talks about politics.
It's not much of a screenplay .- the battle is put in little context, the characters aren't that interesting. Richard Widmark's role as Jim Bowie took up surprisingly little screen time. A kind of quasi romance between Crockett and a Mexican girl played by Linda Cristal took up a surprisingly large amount of screen time at the beginning (there's not much action in the first half by the way... really it all comes at the end).
There's a lot of Chill Wills hanging around being colourful. Frankie Avalon looks completely ridiculous in a coonskin cap as a friend of Crockett - he does his best, and Wayne acts with complete sincerity in all their scenes together, he just looks so modern and out of place in this movie.
The biggest surprise for me was Laurence Harvey as Colonel Travis - I find Harvey can be very hot and cold but he was reined in here, and gave an excellent performance.
There's plenty of hokey moments - Bowie freeing his slave who then stays on to fight, women refusing to leave their husbands, character actors being "colourful". But it's a grand story still and Wayne's vision does have integrity.
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