Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

LeonLouisRicci There is always something interesting and just a bit different in this Director's Movies. This one is no exception. It is replete with thought provoking ideas like cowardice, bigotry, loyalty, and other values only found in the better Westerns.This is an action filled Film with guns blazing, galloping Horses, Wagon Trains, bushwhackers, Mexican impersonators, fist-fights and all that is expected in this type of thing. But the difference here is the intelligence. The injection in a popular genre some things that rose above the material.Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, and sometimes John Ford and Howard Hawks always gave more than the raw material. This is a modest effort from one of the Greats with an OK cast and a Production that looks so much bigger than it was. That was Boetticher, he was always so much bigger and better than what he was allowed.

mark.waltz Glenn Ford has been put in jail for desertion over the fight at the Alamo, and nobody believes that he actually left his post for honorable reasons. When the town that has turned its back on him shows up to lynch him, he is briefly lucky when an American bandit (pretending to be Mexican) shows up and abducts him, falsely believing that Ford is on their side. In reality, the villain (Victor Jory) was responsible for Ford's family's deaths, and Ford is determined to expose the truth that Jory is out to rob the wagon train that these settlers are now in to get to California.The beautiful Julia Adams ("The Creature From the Black Lagoon", the TV soap "Capitol") is a feisty heroine who may look fragile but isn't above loading and using a rifle to keep the bandits away from her group which includes an obvious Caucasian kid (Mark Cavell) playing a Mexican whose family worked for Ford's. Daytime soap diva Jeanne Cooper may be hard to spot for those expecting to find "The Young and the Restless's" Katherine Chancellor, but once you do, you'll be delightfully surprised. Chill Wills, as a one-armed member of the wagon train, seems to have taken over here the roles that Walter Brennan was playing just a decade before.Overall, this is a fast-moving, colorful western, no classic or historically accurate, but fun and filled with action. Ford proves again he was one of the more versatile actors in Hollywood with his ability to go from comedy to romantic lead to film noir hero to action star.

aimless-46 Deserving of its obscurity, "The Man From the Alamo" (1953) is probably Director Budd Boetticher's weakest Western and Glenn Ford's weakest film. While not actually horrible, it is not something to seek out for exciting entertainment or for a showcase of the talent of those two Hollywood immortals. It's another of those lame historical fiction stories that would be at least tolerable if the names and places had been changed to protect the innocent. In fairness, the film would have been easier to take back in 1953, a couple of years before Fess Parker and later John Wayne told slightly less fictional Alamo stories and established lasting mental pictures of the event and the participants. "The Man From the Alamo" is probably most noteworthy for its overuse (and misuse) of "day for night" filming. There are endless "day for night" scenes with many among the worst examples I have ever seen. One camp scene is so underexposed (to simulate nighttime darkness) that it's just five minutes of disembodied voices. The scenes at the Alamo itself are lame sound- stage stuff.Also amusing are the sequences of the wagon train traversing the same California valley in scene and scene (the high hills in the background and the dry valley just don't square with the alleged East Texas location).While Boetticher was normally excellent at pacing, in "The Man From the Alamo" he dissipates the tension way too early and the film drags along to an unexciting (snore) ending. The wily renegades turn out to be totally inept cream-puffs and the viewer is left waiting for a tactical surprise that never happens. The story opens with John Stroud (Glenn Ford) as part of the Alamo's garrison. We never meet General Santa Anna but there are brief scenes with Travis, Crockett, and Bowie. Stroud and his group draw lots to see which one will leave the Alamo to protect their ranches and families from a band of renegades. But he arrives too late and finds all the ranches have been burned and most of the families killed.Since no one at the Alamo survives, Stroud is labeled a deserter and is about to be lynched in the first town he enters. But the renegades attack the town and Stroud infiltrates their merry little band led by Jess Wade (Richard Jory) so that he can get revenge. There is not much challenging acting required although Neville Brand is quite effective as one of the Renegades. Hugh O'Brien gets a lot of mock fest moments as a kind of combo of George Custer and Kit Carson; complete with a tight buckskin costume. Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

paulo BH During the war of independence of Texas, a group of five men of the city of Oxbow chooses, for a raffle, who would leave the fort Alamo to save the families of all them of the Mexican troops. Stroud is the chosen, but is considered a coward by the other men of the fort, that don't know about the real reason of his escape.However, when arriving to his home, his family and the one of all his companions had been killed by American renegades, that struggled beside of the Mexicans. Now, is the hour of the his revenge! But how to face the hostility of all the Texans that considered him a coward for fleeing of the Alamo?Happily, his heroic behavior due to the adversities, as when leading a caravan of Texans before an attack of the renegades, will show to his compatriots him real value!Good film, with good interpretations. An excellent western for a Saturday afternoon.