YMMV / The Alamo (1960)

• Awesome Music:
  • "The Green Leaves of Summer", a hauntingly sweet melody.
  • The last song of the movie. Short, but skillful at stirring up Texas pride.
  • The soundtrack suite, which contains the two above songs as well as some other of the best.
  • Marty Robbins's release of the main theme. It may not entirely be historically accurate, but he sings with a lot of feeling.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The film earned several Oscar nominations, but its chances of winning any were torpedoed by Chill Wills, nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Wills took out ads in Variety and other publications promoting his nomination, while insisting that true patriots among the Academy voters would choose their "Alamo cousins" to win. John Wayne, for his part, was disgusted by Wills's campaign and publicly repudiated it.
• Values Dissonance: Actually averted, if you can believe it. While the film never truly cuts to the Mexican side to show their point of view, Santa Anna is shown in a much more noble light than in The Alamo (2004). Much is made, in fact, of how much the Texans and Tennesseeans come to admire how honorably the Mexicans fight, and treat their dead, and so on. Additionally, there are several Mexicans sympathetic to the defenders, although none of them are defenders like many of them were in real life, and Bowie even calls out a minor character for questioning their loyalty.
  • Played with in the instance of Bowie and his slave, though. Bowie's ownership of the man is downplayed for most of the film so much, one can be forgiven for thinking the man's just a hired servant/sidekick, and nothing less—until the scene where Bowie gives him his freedom and tells him to save himself. And the now-freeman tells him I Choose to Stay. It's up to the viewer to determine whether this is problematic window-dressing or not.
    • To be fair, Bowie does bluntly tell his slave that he isn't freeing him and that he will be his property 'until he dies.' He just also just so happens to be surrounded by the Mexican army and tuberculosis is causing him to slowly cough up his own lungs.

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