Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the historical epic, "The Alamo," released by United Artists in 1960.

The movie is produced and directed by John Wayne, who also stars as Davy Crockett.

Richard Widmark and Laurence Harvey costar with Wayne, with Frankie Avalon, Patrick Wayne, Linda Cristal, Chill Wills, Ken Curtis, Joan O'Brien, and Richard Boone appearing in supporting roles.

The movie is intended to tell the whole story of the siege of the Alamo by Mexican forces under the command of General Antonio Miguel Lopez de Santa Anna, but perhaps more important, the story of the events leading up to it.

In 1836, the territory of what is now the state of Texas is part of the first Mexican Republic.

Both American and Mexican settlers in the territory initiated a rebellion against the government of President Santa Anna.

A rebellion that, by 1836, was under the leadership of Sam Houston, with the Texians, as they were then known, badly outnumbered.

Houston needs time to build an army.

He entrusts Lieutenant Colonel William Travis and a small contingent of soldiers to defend the Alamo, a makeshift fort built around a former Spanish mission near the village of San Antonio de Bexar.

Santa Anna's army must pass through the village if he is to engage Houston's troops.

Colonel Jim Bowie, who has extensive land holdings in Texas, arrives at the Alamo with 100 Texian volunteers.

But he is soon at odds with Travis, whom Bowie considers a martinet.

Colonel Davy Crockett, a frontiersman and former congressman, then arrives with a troop of Tennesseans, who are eager to join the fight.

Travis is surprised to find Crockett, despite his rough frontier exterior, to be both intelligent and resourceful.

Crockett is also aware that Houston's aim in his war with the Mexican government is to establish an independent Republic of Texas.

While in the village of Bexar, Crockett meets Flaca, a young Mexican widow whose family has been killed by Santa Anna, and begins courting her.

Meanwhile, a disagreement arises between Travis and Bowie over the best way to slow Santa Anna's progress and give Houston time to recruit more troops for his army.

Travis wants to hold the Alamo at all costs, while Bowie wants to abandon the fort and harass Santa Anna's troops with a series of ambushes.

When a Mexican courier arrives from the General, Travis answers the order to abandon the Alamo with a volley of cannon fire.

The die is cast, and the heavily outnumbered defenders of the fort begin preparations to hold it at all costs against the rapidly approaching Mexican troops.

"The Alamo" was always a very personal project for John Wayne.

He first decided to make a movie about the famous battle in 1945, and began to work on it seriously after completing work on John Ford's "The Quiet Man," in 1952.

Wayne was under contract to Republic Studios, and in 1948, Patrick Ford, son of Wayne's frequent director John Ford, produced a screenplay, but Wayne and Republic Studios head Herbert Yates disagreed over the proposed $3 million budget for the film, and Wayne ended up leaving Republic to produce the film on his own.

Republic retained the rights to Ford's screenplay, which was rewritten with an emphasis on the role of Jim Bowie and produced as "The Last Command," in 1955, starring Sterling Hayden and Anna Maria Alberghetti.

Wayne had formed a production company, Batjac, with producer Robert Fellows in 1952, and Wayne had been producing films since "The Bull Fighter and The Lady," in 1951.

To ensure that the movie would turn out exactly the way he wanted, Wayne elected to direct the film himself, saying, "I've always wanted to direct ever since I came into pictures."

Wayne commissioned a new screenplay from James Edward Grant, with whom he had worked several times before.

Wayne originally planned to stay behind the camera while making "The Alamo," but his backers wanted to guarantee the movie's success by having him play a part in it as well as direct.

Wayne first suggested that he play Sam Houston, a relatively minor role, but when he signed with United Artists to distribute the film and provide a substantial part of its costs, part of the agreement was that Wayne would appear more prominently.

That's how Wayne ended up playing the lead role of Davy Crockett.

John Wayne invested one-and-a-half million dollars of his own money in "The Alamo", taking out loans and second mortgages on his houses to do it.

He also secured part of the budget from wealthy Texans anxious to present their state's founding legend on the big screen.

Wayne had originally planned to shoot the film in Tucana, Mexico, to keep costs low, but his Texas backers were adamant that Wayne should shoot the movie in Texas.

So in 1958, crews began building a faithful adobe three-quarter scales reproduction of the Alamo on a ranch 14 miles outside of Brackettville, Texas.

Wayne was disconcerted when he met the builder, who was Mexican.

He asked, "Do you think you can build the Alamo?"

The builder replied, "Do you think you can make a picture, Mr Wayne?"

After filming was completed, the set had a second life as the tourist attraction, "Alamo Village" until it closed in 2010.

The Texas location presented a series of problems.

The cast and crew had to deal with crickets that would spoil shots by chirping or jumping on the actors.

Then there were the state's less pleasant native critters, from scorpions and skunks, to rattlesnakes.

Hank Worden, who played Preacher, remembered, "There was something like thousands of rattlesnakes every square mile."

The Texas weather was a problem as well.

Even in September, it was often unbearably hot and humid, with temperatures as high as 98 degrees.

Wearing buckskin and a coonskin cap, Wayne would be drenched in sweat, sometimes having to change just before he went before the cameras.

There were also conflicts on set, notably between Wayne and co-star Richard Widmark.

For one thing, Widmark felt he was miscast.

Although he was 5'9, he was playing Bowie, who was known for being larger than life, in part literally, since he was reportedly 6'6.

Widmark hired Burt Kennedy, well known for his scripts for movie westerns, to rewrite some of his lines.

He also openly took issue with how Wayne was directing the picture, particularly Wayne's insistence that actors do what he told them, despite their own interpretation of their characters.

Widmark and Wayne reportedly almost came to blows on set.

But after threats of legal action, Widmark agreed to finish the movie.

Afterwards, he and Wayne were to remain professional during shooting, but otherwise had little to do with each other.

"The Alamo" originally ran over three hours, but when into general release a two hours, 40 minutes.

Even so, many critics complained about the length of the film, the scenes and storylines that had nothing to do with the events leading up to the siege, and the long-winded dialogue served up in James Edward Grant's screenplay.

Much of this speechifying reflected Wayne's right wing politics in the midst of the Cold War.

Wayne's daughter, Aissa, who, as a young child, played Almeron and Susanna Dickinson's daughter, Angelina, believed the movie was shaped in part by her father's decision not to enlist during the Second World War.

She later wrote, "I think making "The Alamo" became my father's own form of combat.

More than an obsession, it was the most intensely personal project in his career."

The Alamo also reflects many of the prevailing misconceptions about the siege and its role as the founding story of the State of Texas.

It provides little context for the Texas Revolution, or why the battle took place.

It incorrectly depicts most of the Alamo's defenders as white Americans, ignoring the large number of Mexican and European Texans who also fought there.

Two historians hired to serve as historical advisors for the movie insisted their names be removed from the credits.

There is a long list of historical inaccuracies and distortions, both major and minor, promulgated by "The Alamo", to cast a heroic sheen over what was, after all, a military defeat.

Timothy Todish, a historian of the battle, has said, "There is not a single scene in the Alamo which corresponds to a historically verifiable incident."

Overall, the Alamo reflects the attitude summarized two years later in another John Wayne movie, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Audiences flocked to "The Alamo", and made it the fifth highest grossing movie of 1960.

But it's high production costs offset most of the profits, and it was only after five years in success in Europe and Japan that the movie broke even.

John Wayne personally suffered a significant financial hit.

He later said, "That picture lost so much money, I can't buy a pack of chewing gum in Texas without a co-signer."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.