John Wayne & The Alamo
The Summer of 1960…
In the summer of 1960, as a nearly 13 year old out cycling with my friend Graham, we were stopped by our local police constable for riding over a road junction without stopping. It was a perfectly clear junction with no traffic in any direction, which was usually the case, and we’d ridden over it a hundred times without stopping; but it was our bad luck that our new village policeman ( when villages had policemen) caught us, booked us, informing us we would be taken to court for our heinous crime.
What has this to do with John Wayne’s The Alamo I hear you cry? Well, quite a lot because it meant we now had only forty five minutes to cycle to Stratford — 5 miles away — to get to the cinema to see the new Wayne film, something we’d been looking forward to for ages: and to be delayed by the cops was annoying to say the least.
But we made it with minutes to spare and sat through one of the finest films I’d ever seen. In fact we sat through it twice: once having paid, and the second time by hiding in the loos until the second screening started. What would our keen new policeman have made of that I wonder?
I’ve watched The Alamo numerous times since, and always with the degree of enthrallment and commitment to the story of the few against the many, and a belief in Wayne’s Crockett, that has stayed with me.
