Remembering The Alamo; Mike Davies jogs the memory with Billy Bob Thornton.
Byline: Mike DaviesA s a boy, inspired by the Disney TV series and movie King of the Wild Frontier, I fondly recall dressing up in a coonskin hat and playing at Davy Crockett, much impressed at how, as the theme song boasted, he 'killed him a bear when he was only three.'
I wasn't the only one. However, while I merely went on to write about films, a fellow Crockett fantasist went on to star in them and, eventually play his childhood hero.
Sporting shoulder length hair and long sideburns and looking uncannily like the real thing, Arkansas born Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton leapt at the chance to portray the legendary frontiersman in John Lee Hancock's retelling of The Alamo, the story of how a handful of Texas settlers held out against thousands of Mexican soldiers. But, like the film itself, this is a far different picture of history and of the character to both those Disney shows and the classic flagwaving 1960 film starring John Wayne.
'Most people just know Davy Crockett as a guy who was a bear hunter and someone who swung his rifle at the Alamo and that was it,' explains Thornton. 'But he was a Congressman, and not everybody knows that. He was seen as a hillbilly Congressman and was actually ridiculed in Congress quite a bit when he first got there. So I'm portraying him not as some sort of macho hero, but as a real hero.'
But, while there is one scene where he does wear the famous raccoon tailed hat and buckskin clothes, that is most definitely not an image Thornton ascribes to the real Crockett.
'I think the reason most people picture Davy Crockett that way is because back in his time they did a play about him and this guy who played him wore this ridiculous outfit with a coonskin hat with a bunch of tails, and that became the sort of romanticized version of Davy Crockett,' he explains.
'But the thing is, Crockett was a legend in his own time. It wasn't like he became a legend later on; he was a rock star then. And then this play came along and got the whole coonskin hat thing started, so when he would go around to see people, they expected this version of Davy Crockett. He really preferred to be called David Crockett, especially once he became a Congressman. He wanted to be respected that way even though he was still kind of a hillbilly. 'But he was a very smart and very entertaining guy and people really liked him. He loved to tell stories and every now and then he would put on the hat and the clothes just to sort of live up to the legend. But that wasn't really part of his normal wardrobe.'
It's not just Crockett that's been given a revisionist makeover, as Thornton points out the film has taken pains to apply historical authenticity, even at the cost of dramatic impact.
'I studied the Alamo as much as anybody else, but as a student, you don't really know the ins and outs of it. All we knew was that the Texans fought the Mexicans, and Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie were there, and that was about the extent of it.
'So before we started doing this movie I boned up on it and started reading more history books and learned that, as in anything, these people were human beings with a lot of different dynamics. It wasn't like the people came to the Alamo to defend it just because it was a flagwaving thing. A lot of people wanted to come to Texas because it was a new land and they wanted to stake their claim. Plenty of wars have been fought over land and this was another one. This just happens to be one that stands out in history because of the numbers. It was like 189 inside the Alamo against a Mexican army of 4,000; that's why the Alamo has become so legendary.'
Maybe because the film refuses to subscribe to the old one-dimensional heroic myths, showing the likes of Bowie, Sam Houston and Crockett in all their human flaws, it was greeted with a less than favourable response by critics and cinemagoers alike when it was released in America at the height of Gulf War patriotic fervour. Thornton is unrepentant.
'In the beginning I was a little nervous because we're making a historically accurate movie about the pursuit of happiness, land and the future, and you wonder, what will Texans think?' he admits. 'But we've made something that should make them proud. We've made a movie that is based in fact and is as close as you can get to the diaries and books. It's more than likely the last movie about the Alamo they'll ever make, certainly in our lifetime, and I'm proud to be a part of it. Usually when you're making a movie, you can tell about halfway through if it's the real thing, and this one is.'
The Alamo opens on Sept 3
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Billy Bob Thornton plays Davy Crockett in the historically-accurate remake of The Alamo
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| Title Annotation: | Features |
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| Publication: | The Birmingham Post (England) |
| Date: | Aug 31, 2004 |
| Words: | 865 |
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