You Can Always Blame Me
Last Night at the Alamo (1983)
directed by Eagle Pennell
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched on iTunes
Last Night at the Alamo arrived five years after The Whole Shootin' Match. I don't know that the personal problems Pennell dealt with in his life were any worse than those of someone like Sam Peckinpah, but clearly Pennell didn't have the support system that some people do. You don't need to talk about the person that Pennell became to talk about The Whole Shootin' Match, but Pennell didn't write Last Night at the Alamo, and it feels, in part, like someone else's movie.
Kim Henkel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame wrote it. Henkel plays the reticent Lionel, who proves a perfect foil to the gentle patter between Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. But Henkel the screenwriter favors short bursts of frustration over the easy grace that characterized Pennell's first feature, and the shouting and arguing play havoc with the inherent subtlety of the gathered cast and crew.
A great low-key beginning makes cars on Houston highways look like trees in the breeze. Inside the bar, those pretty Ben Carlton Mead lithographs for Pearl Beer line the dark walls. The room is as muggy as the air inside a pick-up parked outside. The world is unfair in The Whole Shootin' Match, but here it is harsh, too, in spite of the setting. Still, Pennell is someone who is able - and wants - to make Sonny Carl Davis the sort of man a Houston socialite might take for a cowboy on his way out to Hollywood. Davis and Perryman talk about the movies, sure, but the entrance of Davis - little ol' Frank - has to sell it.
Davis plays a man named Cowboy Regan, and instead of jumping off a bridge, a young barfly who might have played Billy the Kid in another world is chided for willingly jumping in the "ship channel" if Cowboy asked him to. The director appears in a pool table scuffle, barely audible in a sleeper hold but unmistakable with his sunglasses case on his belt (and bandana on his head, and mustache on his face, and his smile). Wrestled from the bar, Pennell makes it back behind the camera to capture a girl fanning her skirt to cool her legs in the midst of a "chug-a-lug" tequila contest with Hector, the proprietor of a local Mexican food restaurant. Hector loses, of course, but Pennell should have followed him back home, or found Davis and Perryman something to eat, or at least given them a few more quiet moments in the parking lot outside.
directed by Eagle Pennell
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched on iTunes
Last Night at the Alamo arrived five years after The Whole Shootin' Match. I don't know that the personal problems Pennell dealt with in his life were any worse than those of someone like Sam Peckinpah, but clearly Pennell didn't have the support system that some people do. You don't need to talk about the person that Pennell became to talk about The Whole Shootin' Match, but Pennell didn't write Last Night at the Alamo, and it feels, in part, like someone else's movie.
Kim Henkel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame wrote it. Henkel plays the reticent Lionel, who proves a perfect foil to the gentle patter between Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. But Henkel the screenwriter favors short bursts of frustration over the easy grace that characterized Pennell's first feature, and the shouting and arguing play havoc with the inherent subtlety of the gathered cast and crew.
A great low-key beginning makes cars on Houston highways look like trees in the breeze. Inside the bar, those pretty Ben Carlton Mead lithographs for Pearl Beer line the dark walls. The room is as muggy as the air inside a pick-up parked outside. The world is unfair in The Whole Shootin' Match, but here it is harsh, too, in spite of the setting. Still, Pennell is someone who is able - and wants - to make Sonny Carl Davis the sort of man a Houston socialite might take for a cowboy on his way out to Hollywood. Davis and Perryman talk about the movies, sure, but the entrance of Davis - little ol' Frank - has to sell it.
Davis plays a man named Cowboy Regan, and instead of jumping off a bridge, a young barfly who might have played Billy the Kid in another world is chided for willingly jumping in the "ship channel" if Cowboy asked him to. The director appears in a pool table scuffle, barely audible in a sleeper hold but unmistakable with his sunglasses case on his belt (and bandana on his head, and mustache on his face, and his smile). Wrestled from the bar, Pennell makes it back behind the camera to capture a girl fanning her skirt to cool her legs in the midst of a "chug-a-lug" tequila contest with Hector, the proprietor of a local Mexican food restaurant. Hector loses, of course, but Pennell should have followed him back home, or found Davis and Perryman something to eat, or at least given them a few more quiet moments in the parking lot outside.
posted by NPK at 12:22 PM
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