There’s a Lot to Question in This History of ‘Texas’

Remember the Alamo, forget the TV show.

From border to border, “James A. Michener’s Texas” is weak storytelling and questionable history. You get saddle sores just from watching.

Yes, ordinarily no big deal, just another of TV’s mainstream historical dramas benignly punctuated by fantasy, an escapist two-parter not to be taken seriously, if taken at all. Charmless but harmless.

In this case, however, the license taken by a teleplay has an ugly side that, however inadvertently, subtly devalues Latinos and helps nourish an atmosphere of prejudice in which a loose tongue like Howard Stern believes he can get away with using the airwaves to demean the heritage of slain Latina singer Selena. All of this polarizing ethnobias doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, it has a history, a residue of ignorance that has thickened from generation to generation.

Buying into the myth about white supremacy in the old Southwest, the TV story--and a near-identical Republic Pictures Home Video version that has been available in stores for five months--gallops roughshod over some of the historical nuances that author Michener himself astutely inserted in “Texas,” his fact-and-fiction novel on which the ABC production is based.

Filled with factoids, Charlton Heston’s voice-over narration gives TV’s “Texas” a stony resonance that belies the story’s weightless vacuity. Like the book, it mingles imaginary figures and historical ones such as Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston as a device to chronicle this territory’s turbulent independence from Mexico and drive for statehood, from roughly 1821 to 1845.

As the peace-loving, platitude-spewing leader of white settlers and so-called “Father of Texas,” Patrick Duffy’s Austin spends both nights of the story in full glow beneath a halo, ultimately buckling under the crushing tonnage of his own goodness, to say nothing of the bulky period suits he’s made to wear. Austin is such a thick fence-post that he can’t be stirred even by fetching colonist Mattie Quimper (Chelsea Field). When she enters his office in an affectionate mood and orders him to lock the door, he rejects her, saving his passion for Texas.

More responsive to Mattie is dashing Mexican patriot, Benito Garza (Benjamin Bratt), son of Spanish nobles whose land was seized by whites. This fictional pair does some heavy cavorting before settling down to domesticity. Garza later takes up with the lush Lucha Lopez (Maria Conchita Alonso), and together they briefly enliven the bleak moonscape of “Texas” as Mex-hip young marrieds who maraud their way through the territory until colliding, guns blazing, with Garza’s former protege, Texas Ranger Otto MacNab (Rick Schroder), a first-class yutz.

Everyone here is obsessed. Inevitably, Austin’s own obsession with Texas takes its toll. By the time he departs melodramatically late in the story, he’s such a suffering, quivering wreck of martyr that you’re relieved both for him and yourself. Meanwhile, another of his co-protagonists is Stacy Keach’s swaggering Houston, who is elected president of the independent Texas republic en route to fulfilling his goal of bringing the territory into the United States. Houston’s high calling doesn’t spare him from some of the mystifying dialogue in Sean Meredith’s script. For example, Houston makes this contribution to early 19th-Century usage: “What the hey.” And here he is schmoozing in close quarters with famed knife fighter Jim Bowie (David Keith in a wig where birds could nest):

Houston: “Can I see it?”

Bowie: “Whaddaya want to see it for?”

Houston: “I want to see if it’s as big as everyone says it is.”

Then Houston looks down and observes, “That’s big--can I hold it?” At this point, you half expect the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to dance across the screen. As it turns out, though, it’s the size of Bowie’s blade, not his You Know What that has Houston captivated.

Meanwhile, what sort of pretentious, heavy-handed Sam Peckinpah poetry is director Richard Lang going for by gratuitously using slow motion on nearly every violent fatality in “Texas”? He delivers this laborious nobility-of-death message with a sledgehammer.

If there is nobility in death, “Texas” detects it only in the deaths of whites, for the most part. The first half of “Texas” is foreplay for the famous battle for the Alamo, where fallen whites merit sad musical tributes and hordes of faceless Mexican dead get the silent treatment.

The Alamo fight occupies the thick, slabby center of these four hours, feeding the folklore of Hollywood movies that the vastly outnumbered 187 whites barricaded inside were largely selfless, courageous, freedom-loving heroes whose fight to the death came against an attacking army (led by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna) consisting of Mexican regulars who were a modern military machine for their day.

Although there are hints here that some of the Alamo defenders are in Texas at least partially as adventurers and profiteers, in the main they emerge as idealists who willingly sacrifice their lives in battle against the Mexicans merely “because it’s right.” Naturally, this moral superiority elevates them above their foes in “Texas,” as these undermanned, under-equipped whites cover themselves with glory by fighting bravely at the Alamo before being overrun and obliterated by Santa Anna’s precision-trained, bugle-blowing, spit-and-polish, impeccably outfitted, artillery-laden forces.

“Two of them were as good as nine of ours,” acknowledges an admiring Garza about the slain defenders. Which would be true, perhaps, if the fable were necessarily true.

Yet according to some historical accounts, the Alamo defenders lasted as long as they did not because of superior will and heart but because the Mexicans advanced in the open against their concealed, crack-shooting targets, and also because Santa Anna’s larger army was mostly a ragtag group with inferior weapons and not half as many cannons as their opponents. “In short, ill-prepared, ill-equipped and ill-fed Mexicans attacked well-armed and professional soldiers,” Cal State Northridge Prof. Rodolfo Acuna writes in “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.”

But “Texas” is history through the eyes of white people.

“Some day people will live and work and love and prosper in Texas . . . your Texas,” Mattie promises Austin when he’s in the dumps, the assumption being that the Mexicans and Native Americans already living there are not people. That sounds almost racist. Yet what the hey, if they don’t like it, let them make their own movie.

* “Texas” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.