Command Performance

Been watching The Last Command (1955), a movie about legendary knife-wielder Jim Bowie (the great Sterling Hayden, hence my viewing) that climaxes with…well, you know.  Seems John Wayne was supposed to star, but parted ways with longtime employer Republic Pictures when prexy Herbert Yates wouldn’t let him direct it as well, which he later did on his own elephantine version of the same historical events.

I’ve seen several Alamo-vies, but it seemed like this one did a better job than some of explaining the events leading up to the siege (sort of the anti-Zulu, if you will) and emphasizing why the Texans’ sacrifice mattered.  In other words, assuming any degree of historical accuracy here, it’s not so much, “Well, we’re outnumbered and trapped and we’re all gonna die.  Sucks to be us” as it is, “If you choose to fight—and inevitably die—rather than try to escape—and probably die—or surrender, you’ll weaken Santa Ana’s army and buy time for Sam Houston [whose namesake city has been my oldest brother Jonathan’s adopted home for about 40 years] to raise his.”  Hey, I’ll get a lump in my Maudlin Man throat from that.

No formal review/synopsis—y’all know how it comes out anyway—and I am not especially familiar with the careers of director Frank Lloyd (a silent-screen vet best known for the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty), whose last film this was, or screenwriters Warren Duff and Sy Bartlett (who wrote several vehicles apiece for, respectively, James Cagney and producing partner Gregory Peck).  But holy cats, what a cast:

• As the señorita who—too late—captures Jim’s heart after his wife’s tragic death, the charming and fetching Anna Maria Alberghetti proves she had a career before serving as the Good Seasons pitchwoman in my youth. (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Rula Lenska.)
• Genre star Richard Carlson (Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon) as Colonel William B. Travis, played by Laurence Harvey in Wayne’s 1960 version (which featured the formidable Richard Widmark as Bowie).
• Arthur Hunnicutt, one of those guys you instantly recognize but (at least in my case) whose name you don’t know, as Davy Crockett. A tad less imposing than the Duke, but what the hell, I was never a big Wayne-fan anyway, and he’s pretty entertaining.
• Up-and-coming Ernest Borgnine (later to appear in such BOF faves as Ice Station Zebra, The Wild Bunch, and Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix and The Dirty Dozen), who starts out looking like his typically sinister sagebrush self of the period (e.g., Aldrich’s Vera Cruz), but turns out to be an okay guy with an extra-dramatic death scene.
• The pan-ethnic J. Carrol Naish (Sahara, House of Frankenstein, The Beast with Five Fingers, Dracula vs. Frankenstein), an interesting choice as Mexican General Santa Ana.
• John Russell, who starred on Lawman, for which—believe it or not—Richard Matheson wrote more scripts than any series except The Twilight Zone.
• Jim Davis, beloved of my friend Fred for his role as Jock Ewing on Dallas and, oddly enough, a fellow survivor of Al Adamson’s epically awful Dracula vs. Frankenstein.
• Eduard Franz, best known to weirdos like me for such genre films as The Thing (from Another World) and that WNEW Creature Features staple The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake.
• Otto Kruger (Dracula’s Daughter, Hitchcock’s Saboteur), as Steve—excuse me, Stephen F.—“I Want a City Named after Me, Too” Austin.
• Russell Simpson, another guy I instantly recognized but couldn’t name (and a member of John Ford’s stock company, e.g., as Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath), as the hilariously laconic Parson.
• A young(ish) Slim Pickens, billed with Hayden nine years before Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Dr. Strangelove…in which, of course, they had no scenes together as, respectively, bomb-riding Major “King” Kong and “just a little funny” General Jack D. Ripper.
• And, last but far from least, unbilled genre mainstay Morris Ankrum (Invaders from Mars, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, et military cetera).

Photographed by Jack A. Marta (an Emmy nominee for Matheson’s Duel), with a title tune composed by film-scoring pioneer Max Steiner (of that other King Kong) and warbled by Oklahoma! and Carousel star Gordon MacRae.  In short, I can think of far worse ways to spend 110 minutes.  “Remember the Alamo!”

Addendum:  Be sure to check out my substantially revised post for The Fly, featuring new material on Return of the Fly.