Glenn realizes how this movie is going to look on his resume’
THE MAN FROM THE ALAMO is dumb western fiction about a guy who escapes the Alamo in order to protect the families of the men left behind. Everybody thinks he’s ‘yeller’, until he takes on Victor Jory’s renegades. No regard for accuracy in props, costuming, settings, sound effects. One scene shows a poster of President Rutherford B. Hayes on an office wall. Hayes was thirteen at the time this story takes place. Oh, well… Glenn Ford does not change his expression throughout, maybe because he realized what claptrap he’d signed on for.
“You mean, they’re actually going to release this movie?”
The director, Budd Boetticher, handles the action sequences with flair, and there is one brief shot at the start, of the Alamo being bombarded, that shows some imagination. Everything else about this 1953 flick is so phony you’d have to be starved-for-boredom to watch. Playing havoc with historical timelines vis a vis anachronisms can work, as in 1961s rollicking The Comancheros, but this one is just absurd. With Julia Adams, Chill Wills (wait ’til 1960 for the real deal, hoss), Hugh O’Brian (two more years and I’ll be Wyatt Earp, thank you, God), Jeanne Cooper, Neville Brand, Guy Williams (seven more years and I’ll be Zorro, gracias), Dennis Weaver (two more years and I’ll be ‘Chester’), Stuart Whitman, Brett Halsey and Trevor Bardette. 79 minutes. It dried up at #119 among the years takers.
Ford slugs producer in desperate attempt to flee the production
