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Show I I I I I i 1 I i hX -1 yf by Itiek Broufh A hero of the Old West fades away in 'Alam( ' . - im iiiiiiiHMiirmr T-" TtrniiHrww i s A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists V ony J Last Night at the Alamo Maybe the last stage in the evolution of the Western movie is to show the West turning into an urbanized area. Director Eagle Pennell, who has admired the films of John Ford, carries the Western forward in this bittersweet tale (accent on bitter) of a dying redneck bar. With an opening montage, Pennell shows the freeways and skyscrapers of Houston, which are all closing around the Alamo bar, due to be demolished the next day. Inside the building, the director trains his camera on the front door, where the local characters drunks, bullies and malcontents-walk malcontents-walk in out of the blinding Texas sunshine. Finally, the camera reverently rever-ently pauses before the closed door and in walks Cowboy (Sonny Carl Davis) the cool, self-assured hero of the bar, who winks knowingly know-ingly and says he just might keep the wrecking ball away from the old place. The treatment here is a tribute and a prophesy. Cowboy looks good because of this bar environment. Once it becomes clear the Alamo will be destroyed, Cowboy's magic begins to fade. Clearly, he has ridiculous fantasies. He thinks he can - ... . , , ' .-'Y ( ' ,' i " 1 1 ''' i : 'If f h' J ; ill j i ? '- Alamo' Director Eagle Pennell. ph0, "vchaia. go out West to Hollywood and star in Westerns with his buddy Claude (Lou Perry-man) Perry-man) as his sidekick. His other stories wear thin too. (He says he wasn't fired from a construction job but quit, washing his hands of an ignorant boss.) Cowboy's cocksure personality per-sonality even overcomes his appearance. He's short, balding and has the face of a character actor, not a hero. (In fact, Davis looks very much like Robert Duvall.) In his own way, Cowboy is large-spirited. In one last chug-a-lug contest, Cowboy intentionally loses to a young buddy. Fatefully, this is the last time Cowboy has any control over events, and from then on he suffers a string of setbacks. He's rebuffed in two sexual liaisons. In a fight with an old enemy, he manages to "kick ass" but is badly shaken up. A phone call to an old school buddy (now a state legislator) fails to save the bar. Finally, he sounds like an overgrown kid with his schemes to shoot the bulldozers as in the Alamo of old, which disgusts his one-time admirers. Cowboy is tragic because he's not just a blowhard king losing his kingdom. He's a shadow, however pale, of his ancestors. And he's the only one of the bar patrons who genuinely loathes the on-rushing on-rushing wave of plastic houses and 7-Elevens. Sonny Davis, who has got to be one of the best actors in independent inde-pendent films, ably plays a likable shallow pillar of strength gradually consumed con-sumed in vulnerability. It would be very misleading mislead-ing if I spoke of the film as a downer. The movie is full of good humor, especially from Steve Matilla as a rail-thin redneck who is called "Ichabod," much to his annoyance. (Matilla looks like an albino Hal Holbrook. ) Lou Perryman is the rangy Claude, who complains com-plains about hig wife and her fancy new house. (He uses cuss words to build up a rhythm. The obscenities chug-chug out of him like a locomotive.) The bully, Steve (J. Michael Hammon), constantly con-stantly taunts Cowboy for his failures. Like an old Western heavy, his character charac-ter is immediately sketched when he walks in the bar and knocks down someone's meticulously-built house of cards. And Kim Henkel, the script writer, is the very laconic Lionel. Another death knell strikes for the Alamo when Lionel speaks his longest sentence in the movie. He suggests that everyone should switch his allegiance to the new Yankee bar. Even Director Pennell has a small role as a rowdy pool player who is thrown out of the bar early in the picture! "Last Night at the Alamo" has all the hallmarks of the well-constructed story a limited time span, micro-cosmic micro-cosmic setting, and a hero who goes through a major change. But its heartbreaking, heartbreak-ing, funny story reverberates reverber-ates beyond the walls of the little Alamo bar. Ironically, while Cowboy couldn't get help from old school-buddy connections, director Eagle Pennell did. His partner and writer, Kim Henkel, went to Henkel's brother, who went to an old law-school colleague, whose father had a bar called the Old Barn in south Houston. (Its facade looked like the Alamo, which Pennell had already settled on as the name for his fictional bar.) The Old Barn, Pennell told the Record, has had the same patrons for 20 to 30 years, but is sparsely attended. "If it has five people in it, it's a busy place," he said. The story, he said, was inspired by the town of Crosby, some 25-30 miles east of Houston, which is being absorbed and subur-banized subur-banized by the metropolis. Pennell secured partial funding for the film in 1981 from the Southwest Alternate Alter-nate Media Project. He was one of a handful of people accepted among 2,000 applicants, appli-cants, he said. The story was shot in the summer of 1982 in black and white. The absence of color may suggest cheapness to many, but Pennell pointed out, "No one understands that it's more expensive to shoot in black and white than in color." Once people get into the story, he believes, they won't have a hang-up about it. Sonny Davis and Lou Perryman also starred for Pennell in his first picture "The Whole Shooting Match," about a Mutt and Jeff pair of Texans who hope to strike it rich with an invention. Doris Har-greaves, Har-greaves, a supporting actor in "Shooting Match," appears in the new film as Janet, who lives next to the Alamo and is everybody's "easy gal." The real find in "Alamo." Pennell said, was Steve Matilla as drunken Ichabod. "He's nothing like the character," said Pennell. "He's a typical neurotic New York actor." Matilla added an important impor-tant final note to the movie. After Cowboy's last discouraged dis-couraged exit, Ichabod appears as a comic coda to the story. "I didn't want people to leave the theater feeling really down," said Pennell. "And I wanted to show that these people are going to go on." "Shooting Match" won a special jury award from the very first Utah independent film festival in 1978. But since then, Pennell noted, it's been seen by more Europeans than Americans. It was exhibited on television televi-sion or in theaters in Paris, Rotterdam and Germany. His most moving experience, experi-ence, said Pennell, came in a Yugoslavian hall "sar-dined" "sar-dined" with viewers. The soundtrack on the film failed, but the people were so hungry for new entertainment entertain-ment they sat eagerly during the film while a few people who could understand the German subtitles explained what was going on. After "Shooting Match," he was a cinematographer in Texas on a feature film, and worked a few industrial films in Saudi Arabia. He traveled to Hollywood, but a deal to write a script at Universal Studios did not work out, and he prefers not to talk about it. At the same time, he resists the temptation to write off Hollywood as a collection of jerks. Although he appreciates his native region, he likes to get out of the state and meet with his peers in New York. "I'm a bit of a Lone Ranger in Texas," he said. In the future, "Last Night at the Alamo" will play at Dallas' USA Festival in March. The Record only had one question left. In the film Cowboy starts a joke "What do you get when you cross a burro and an onion?" but we never hear him finish it! Eagle Pennell satisfied our curiosity. "When it played in Telluride, Roger Ebert came up afterwards and said, 'I know what it is! It's a piece of ass that'll make you cry your eyes out!"' |