Wayne at the Alamo

IN the course of my duties as one of two utility infielders on the staff of a sixty-cent magazine, I am frequently dispatched to see movies. (Despite its sedentary nature, this is referred to around the office as “doing legwork,” and is much respected.) Ever since the day when my companion infielder, an old Barnard girl, admitted that she liked Rossellini, the nouvelle vague, Jules Dassin, Peter Sellers, Ingmar Bergman, and movies made on the West Side with local talent and some leftover sixteen-millimeter film, I have been able to wallow in my own favorites: the Movies that are Better Than Ever, the twenty-four-carat Coast Product.

Despite a distinct preference for movies released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, mostly because their Broadway projection room features murals showing great scenes from great MGM movies (it is an inspiring thing to sit there of a rainy Wednesday afternoon and contemplate the old days, when Dalton Trumbo was writing movies like A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo), I committed myself instead not long ago into the care of United Artis’s, to see John Wayne’s The Alamo. (I use the possessive advisedly: Mr. Wayne not only produced it, directed it, and played Davy Crockett in it, but cast both his teenage son, Patrick, and his toddling daughter, Alissa, in featured roles.)

JD

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Joan Didion

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IN the course of my duties as one of two utility infielders on the staff of a sixty-cent magazine, I am frequently dispatched to see movies. (Despite its sedentary nature, this is referred to around the office as “doing legwork,” and is much respected.) Ever since the day when my companion infielder, an old Barnard girl, admitted that she liked Rossellini, the nouvelle vague, Jules Dassin, Peter Sellers, Ingmar Bergman, and movies made on the West Side with local talent and some leftover sixteen-millimeter film, I have been able to wallow in my own favorites: the Movies that are Better Than Ever, the twenty-four-carat Coast Product.

Despite a distinct preference for movies released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, mostly because their Broadway projection room features murals showing great scenes from great MGM movies (it is an inspiring thing to sit there of a rainy Wednesday afternoon and contemplate the old days, when Dalton Trumbo was writing movies like A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo), I committed myself instead not long ago into the care of United Artis’s, to see John Wayne’s The Alamo. (I use the possessive advisedly: Mr. Wayne not only produced it, directed it, and played Davy Crockett in it, but cast both his teenage son, Patrick, and his toddling daughter, Alissa, in featured roles.)