It's a safe bet that a good number of these old-time Crockett fans (now in their '50s and '60s), their kids, various Alamo enthusiasts and others in this general tribe of believers in American fortitude will experience at least a measure of disappointment about this aspect of Disney's big new film, THE ALAMO (opening December 25), which dramatizes a darker, far-less-rousing account of Crockett's demise.

But before everyone in this little fraternity freaks out too much, they should understand that Disney's Touchstone Pictures and the film's writer-director, John Lee Hancock, didn't decide to do this all on their lonesome.

Setting aside the voices of the die-hard traditionalist crowd (mostly Texans, although subscription to the proud Alamo myth knows no regional or territorial boundaries), no historian or academic of any serious standing believes Crockett died in valiant Fess Parker fashion, or in the way that John Wayne's Crockett bought it (i.e., blown to bits inside an exploding ammo depot) in his 1960 epic THE ALAMO.

And now Hancock has backed away from this also, and for what appears to be good historical reasons.

That's because the generally agreed-upon fact is that Crockett didn't expire like a macho action hero, but was put to death in cold blood by several sword-wielding Mexican soldiers who were hastily following an impatient order barked out by the Mexican conqueror, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

I haven't seen the new Disney film or read Hancock's shooting draft of the script, but according to at least four sources with a first-hand or semi-priveleged knowledge of how THE ALAMO depicts Crockett's death, this is pretty much what happens to Billy Bob Thornton's legendary backwoodsman in the film.

(Aww, come on... you guys aren't gonna call this a spoiler, are you? Every kid over the age of 8 knows that all the Alamo defenders died in their brave fight against the Mexicans.)

There might be an upside to this: The Crockett role is well-written and highly appealing (I've read an early draft of the script), and Thornton is said to be quite good in the part. Add to this the emotional punch of a tragic conclusion, and he might just put himself into competition for acting awards or other forms of success d'estime.

A guy claiming on Ain't It Cool News to have attended a first-anywhere screening of THE ALAMO a few days ago in Orange, California, called Thornton's performance "the film's saving grace. He portrays an aging Crockett who is shadowed by his own legend. He accepts his heroic position, but acknowledges that it is not really him."

Thornton handles this role "with charm and subtlety," the guy added. "He is also the film's sole comedic relief, which is appreciated. He is sorely missed when he's not on screen."

The legend of the Alamo -- 187 Texan freedom fighters, outnumbered but unbowed, slaughtered in a battle for freedom and independence -- carries almost religious significance in the minds of right-thinking patriots and traditionalists everywhere, and especially among the sub-culture of Alamo enthusiasts and amateur historians who buy Alamo books, collect paraphernalia, and get together online to trade opinions and argue stuff out.

I personally prefer the old-fashioned image of a fearless Davy Crockett slugging it out to his last breath, but sometimes you just have to let that romantic crap go. Particularly when history and the opinions of most fair-minded, non-agenda-driven historians say otherwise.

Their general belief is that Crockett and between four and six others were taken prisoner in the final stages of fighting by Mexican General Manuel Castrillon, and taken to see General Santa Anna after the smoke cleared.

Castrillon wanted their lives spared, but Santa Anna was angry at this, barking that Castrillon shouldn't have taken prisoners. Santa Anna then turned to some nearby soldiers and said, "Shoot them!" When the men hesitated, Santa Anna's own retinue rushed forward and killed the half-dozen or so men with swords on the spot.

There are three documents that back this account up to differing degrees, and four if you want to be liberal about it.

The most prominent is a 400-plus-page memoir written by Lt. Col. José Enrique de la Peña, a Mexican army officer who served under Santa Anna in Texas during the Mexican army's campaign to suppress the Texas Revolution.

The de la Pena papers haven't been subjected to the utmost in scientific testing, but they've stood up to general scrutiny as being almost certainly authentic. They were attacked by the Alamo loyalists when they first surfaced in the 1970s, and even called forgeries. But no one outside of the Alamo Denial Squad is saying that now.

Who are these staunch defenders? One is Bill Groneman, an arson investigator in New York City and amateur historian who has published two books that claim the de la Pena papers are fake. (One is called "Defense of a Legend: Crockett and the De La Pena Diary.") Another soldier is Thomas R. Lindley, an amateur Austin historian who also claims the manuscript to be a forgery.

I don't know anything, but I'm told that a Texas-based expert on forgery named David Gracy has done "extensive forensic research" on the de la Pena papers and reported in an article for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly that they "appear authentic."

A guy in the middle of the debate is Dr. Stephen Hardin, an "alpha dog among Texas historians," according to one wag, and author of "Texian Iliad: a Military History of the Texas Revolution." Hardin was hired by Hancock as one of the movie's historical consultants. A History Channel documentarian who came to know Hardin slightly during filming of a doc about the revising of the Alamo legend says Hardin "is inclined to think that the de la Pena account is probably true."

Two of the best-known de la Pena supporters and Crockett-legend debunkers are James Crisp, associate professor of History at North Carolina State University, and Brian Huberman, associate professor of Media and Film Studies at Rice University and maker of a documentary about the controversy called THE DE LA PEÑA DIARY: A MEMOIR OF AN OFFICER OF SANTA ANNA, INCLUDING THE DEATH OF DAVY CROCKETT. A video version is buyable on Amazon.com.

And then there are some in the Alamo community forever straddling the fence. Crisp says he knows an Alamo enthusiast who "agrees with me in my argument with Groneman, and yet he can't quite bring himself to agree that Crockett died by execution."

De la Pena's account states that one of Castrillon's prisoners was a man "of great stature, well-proportioned, with regular features, in whose face there was the imprint of adversity, but in whom one also noticed a degree of resignation and nobility that did him honor. He was the naturalist David Crockett, well-known in North America for his unusual adventures."

After Santa Anna's order, members of his personal staff thereafter "thrust themselves forward, in order to flatter their commander, and with swords in hand, fell upon these unfortunate defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. I turned away horrified in order not to witness such a barbarous scene. I confess that the very memory of it makes me tremble and that my ear can still hear the penetrating, doleful sound of the victims."

There's also the account of Crockett's execution passed along by a confidante of a Mexican officer named Juan Almonte when he was a prisoner of war on Galveston Island to a bilingual Texan sergeant named George Dolson, who thereafter wrote his brother in Michigan and told him of this account of Crockett's death, which was very similar to de la Pena's.

"Almonte knew who Crockett was," says Crisp. "He spent most of 1834 in Louisiana and Texas...he was a very knowledgable man." Crisp says there's also an anonymous account of Crockett's death, described along the same lines. This allegedly came from another Galveston Island prisoner of war.

The fourth source, according to Crisp, is a Spanish-language account of the Texan revolution, written by Santa Anna's personal secretary, Ramon Martinez Caro, and published in 1837. Caro doesn't mention of Crockett by name, nor does he describe him in any way, but he writes about a small group of Texans who were executed upon Santa Anna's order in the wake of the battle.

"I can't think of any serious person today who would argue there were no executions," says Crisp.

I got into all this material in a similar article than ran in July 2002, but I was just riffing back then about what Disney might or might not do with the de la Pena papers. Now that Hancock has bought into the de la Pena story in spirit and put a version of it into THE ALAMO (not precisely the same, but close enough), we're in a whole 'nother realm.

I talked about the de la Pena account with screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (TRAFFIC) last summer after my 7.02 article went up. I told him I thought that Crockett's execution might work for the film as a whole, because it would enrage audiences and create a hunger for an emotional payback, which comes at the tail end when Sam Houston (played by Dennis Quaid) leads Texan forces to victory over Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto.

Gaghan was rewriting John Sayles' ALAMO script at the time for the film's then-director, Ron Howard. The aim of Howard and his producing partner, Brian Grazer, was to make an R-rated epic to the tune of about $120 or $130 million. But then Howard and Grazer had a falling-out with Disney over money, and Hancock was brought in to make it for $80 million or so.

Hancock hasn't gone with de la Pena's story chapter-and-verse. According to an account I came across last weekend, he's stirred things up a little by inventing an exchange between Crockett and Santa Anna. I'm not going to spill, but think of Steve McQueen mouthing off to that stiff-necked commandant of the prison camp in THE GREAT ESCAPE.

Boiled down, the fracas over budget came about because Disney chief Michael Eisner had a gut-level feeling that rolling $120 or $130 million on this project wouldn't pay off.

I'm wondering if THE ALAMO's going to be any kind of sizable hit with mainstreamers. Do people care all that much about this story, outside the hardcore faithful? John Wayne's 1960 version, a decently made, epic-looking thing, wasn't very successful. It cost $12 million but took in only $7,190,000, and people were more straight-ahead patriotic back then.

What this upcoming tempest-in-a-teapot seems to boil down to (and I'm not predicting anyone beyond this small group of Alamo advocates on either side is going to care about Crockett death modes all that deeply) is a battle between conservative sentiment and academic reality, between emotional patriotism and historical exactitude.

"Most people, most historians believe Crockett was captured and executed," says Huberman. "The people who have a problem with this tend to be blue-collar patriots...people involved in keeping alive the myth. They consider historians to be lily-livered sons of bitches who are against the Iraq war and all that stuff."

"By showing Crockett dying by execution, the moviemakers are not going out on a limb," says Crisp. "They're following what most academics say what happened...except for one or two people who seem motivated by the conclusion that they want to hold onto -- Gronemann and Tom Lindley. It's the devotees of Davy Crockett who want to hold the line."

"American men's sense of themselves when it comes to Crockett is bound up in this idea of the swinging rifle...that whole notion of 'I'm out of ammunition but I won't surrender,'" Huberman remarks. "This is much more impacting than to watch Crockett and the others getting hacked to death by swords.

"Davy as Fess Parker is a God, and Davy rendered by de la Pena is a man. But for some people out there, he's got to remain a myth."

Mystical

"Got to disagree with your take on MYSTIC RIVER. You say it's not 'transforming' but for me, and I'll bet others, it has some of the power of classic Greek tragedy. The audience identifies with the protagonists, lives through their agony and emerges with a cathartic experience. And that's high cotton for Dirty Harry to be standing in. Nowadays 'transforming' in a Hollywood movie often means A BEAUTIFUL MIND, a true story bent out of shape to tug the heartstrings by playing on all the obvious sentimental notes. The audience has its prejudices confirmed and emerges 'uplifted. Bah, bullshit!

"Drawing the audience into a far darker place (child abuse, murder) and making them share the emotions of the characters is a far more daring and daunting task. And who's to say the mass audience won't respond? They responded to MIDNIGHT COWBOY, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, FIVE EASY PIECES and many other difficult pieces in the 70s. We see less of them now because the studios are frightened of them and don't know how to sell them. MYSTIC RIVER is the best film since The Pianist, and may well be headed to the same kind of Oscar certification." -- John Kane, West Hollywood.

Turtle Blues

"I ain't no Jesus or Krishna, but I will tell you not to feel too bad about the poor walloped turtle of your youth. I had the exact same experience at that age, batting out of the air and then stomping to death a beautiful yellow monarch butterfly for no reason at all (how about empty, brainless sadism?) and instantly -- and enduringly -- feeling overwhelming guilt. I too have never, ever forgotten the incident, and since then the idea of hunting or fishing makes me ill (though I must admit I'm no vegetarian, and have wasted my share of cockroaches).

"Anyway, it happens. If you feel guilt, good. It probably means you'll never do it again. Many people never learn such a lesson (ask Ted Nugent)." -- Yours in wanton murder, Tim Merrill

"Your brief [piece] on the turtle was incredibly moving. It was great writing, and I doubt anyone could have read it without reflecting on their own moment that neither Jesus nor any other deity could offer absolution that was greater than their private self-condemnation. " -- Griff Griffis.

"You wrote last Friday, 'What does MYSTIC RIVER leave you with? Not a whole lot.'

"Really? Sounds like it took you where it took me . . . because in the next article you type 'but thinking about MYSTIC RIVER and its haunted-childhood theme brought out a memory of my own."

"In the five hours since I saw the movie, I've been back to where it took me -- my childhood." -- Zonnifer Bonifer

Kill Bill

"I have to almost totally disagree with you about KILL BILL. I fail to see any reasoning behind praising it for its lack of content. There is nothing to this film. It has the depth of FREDDY VS. JASON and I don't mean that jokingly. Both movies have a clumsy setup and then are nothing more than a fight scene for the rest of the movie.

"At least FREDDY VS. JASON had decades of build-up to the fight and the fight was anticipated and enjoyable. KILL BILL runs through people indiscriminately with no build-up. I didn't care if Uma Thurman died or not. She meant nothing to me. The only fight with any build or anticipation to it was when Thurman fights Gogo. Then instead of going to O-ren Ishi, which basic psychology would indicate would be the plan of action, we get a ridiculously long drawn out fight with hundreds of facless guys no different then the guys she killed before she fought Gogo. Then when she finally fights O-Ren its the weakest fight of the whole film.

"I also disagree that violence has to be sincere to be upsetting. It can also be upsetting if it's boring. I found Tarantino throw fight after bloody, meaningless fight on the screen offensive in that it was such a waste. I don't think that expecting fights and scenes like that to mean something is too much to ask. I think this is just as upsetting in that it treats life as such an unimportant thing to be just casually tossed aside by the truckload without any thought or care.

"This is not to say I've hated every action movie I've ever seen, because I haven't. But every movie, or if you want to get technical every franchise, exists in the world it creates. You can't expect me to feel for Thurman's character's loss of her child then not feel anything as she slices her way through hundreds of people." -- Mark Volzer