Film Studies: 'The Alamo' - it's flopped again. And here's why...

In March 1836 - you know this from the movies - Mexican soldiers under General Santa Anna captured a modest but insurrectionary American garrison at the Alamo, in San Antonio, and wiped out every last man. A month later, a vengeful Texan army under Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto. A Republic called Texas was established and an independent entity was asserted and thrown in the face of Mexico, which owned the territory.

In 1845, Texas gave up its autonomy (some Texans have never agreed to this) and joined the Union of United States. In 1846-8, US forces under Zachary Taylor invaded Mexico and took Mexico City. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo assigned Texas, New Mexico and California to the US for $15m with the Rio Grande as border.

In 2004, after two production enterprises had set out to film again the glorious history of the Alamo etc, Ron Howard agreed to become producer on John Lee Hancock's The Alamo, in which Billy Bob Thornton is Davie Crockett, Dennis Quaid is Sam Houston and Jason Patric is Jim Bowie. This Alamo (a Disney film - the studio can do nothing right these days) has been a disaster. Yet it's no worse, really, than the 1960 version, the one John Wayne directed with himself as Crockett and Richard Widmark as Bowie.

That picture was a great hit even if it didn't quite win the Oscar for best picture which Wayne believed it had earned. In 1960, people wanted to see that story and remember the Alamo. Two other pictures had been made in the Fifties, The Iron Mistress and The Last Command, where Alan Ladd and Sterling Hayden played Bowie, the inventor of that lethal aid to hand-to-hand combat.

Why did it flop this time? Well, let's throw in this report - I cannot verify the numbers cited in it but it came during an interview with the actor Edward James Olmos (born in LA, but the son of a Mexican welder) who was promoting a new television series, American Family (playing on Public Broadcasting). Talking about the relative scarcity of Mexican material on US screens, Olmos dropped this news: that already in the US half the children of five and under are Latino.

To be Latino implies birth in Latin America, so the awesome statistic includes Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and all the other nations "down there" as well as Mexico and Cuba. And, of course, those nationalities do not necessarily see themselves as all part of one basket, no matter that to American eyes they may all look alike. That goes on, even in well-intentioned enterprises. The cast of American Family includes Olmos, Sonia Braga (born in Brazil), Esai Morales (born in Brooklyn), Rachel Ticotin (born in the Bronx) and Raquel Welch (born in Chicago, the daughter of a Bolivian). In the past few years, a terrific television movie was made about Pancho Villa in which the lead part was taken by Antonio Banderas (born in Malaga, Spain). And if you recall Frida, don't forget that just as the film was led by Salma Hayek (actually born in Mexico), still its Diego Rivera was Alfred Molina, born in London.

From which you might deduce that progress is a slow, and nearly comic, victim to the general Hollywood wisdom that good actors can do anything - above all, good actors can spare us the real experience of actual ethnic character. Nor is this simply the condition of trashy films. Instead, an automatic assumption presides in film-casting that roles are negotiable, that good actors can suggest the different roots and experiences of the world. So even a respectable film such as Lawrence of Arabia has for its "Arab" characters actors born in Alexandria (Omar Sharif), Chihuahua, Mexico (Anthony Quinn), and London (Alec Guinness), plus a Turk from Puerto Rico (Jose Ferrer). It's not that any of them betrays the film, but ask yourself how far the attitude behind their casting marks an innocent indifference to Arab locality not unlike the attitude among British map-makers who carved out Iraq after the First World War.

No, I'm not suggesting hard rules about actors having to know the roots of the characters they are playing. On Gone With the Wind, when the English girl Vivien Leigh was cast, the author of the book, Margaret Mitchell, said better an English girl than a damn Yankee. But one of the subtle ways in which film-making plays fast and loose with history, with the realities of experience and with local difference, is akin to the arrogance with which the US seeks to organise the affairs of remote countries its citizenry could not find on an atlas, if they had such a thing in the house. An element of truth is steadily ignored when casting is so casual about where actors have come from and what they have known.

Of course, the Mexican dilemma is far more urgent and pressing. The numbers quoted by Olmos back up predictions about a Latino governor for California and greater representation in Washington. After all, why should we keep electing an Austrian? This will not settle in easily, because Latinos in Los Angeles often fill menial ranks: they are janitors in office buildings; au pairs in Santa Monica; gardeners in Bel Air; they drive the buses and collect the garbage. Yet a statistical reality is not that far away in which Latinos (if they are prepared to be so collected and organised) are an unstoppable voting force.

You could not guess this from the American screen. Latinos scarcely figure in movie-making outside of Salma Hayek, a great beauty, and Jennifer Lopez, a tabloid sexpot (born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents), as well as Banderas and Andy Garcia. Go back over the history of Hollywood and you will find not many more: Dolores del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Antonio Moreno and Anthony Quinn.

It is evident from US statistics that huge numbers of the population meet and work with Latinos. Yet that experience is not much better recognised than a similar kind of interaction with blacks before the Second World War. It is clear by now that American action in the Middle East has been confounded by massive ignorance of what its inhabitants believe and feel. That failure is already close enough to disaster, and it seems bound to draw America into reckless and ill-informed strategies. But that is not quite as devastating as the failure to recognise the life and experience of fellow citizens. Yes, some Latinos are in the US illegally, and a way of thinking persists that would magically repatriate the illegals. But millions are there legally. They are also chronically, if helplessly un-American: for the most part, they believe in God, family, poverty, pleasure and happiness. They even play football.

'The Alamo' is released on 3 September

d.thomson@independent.co.uk