Eagle Pennell was an American film maker who made two very successful low-budget independent films -- The Whole Shootin' Match (1977) and Last Night at the Alamo (1984). Pennell, who was born Glen Irwin Pinnell, was a middle-class kid raised in a college town in Texas; his father taught engineering at Texas A & M in College Station. Pennell had a happy childhood and led a charmed existence through the completion and first showings of The Whole Shootin' Match. He was tall and handsome and a basketball star in High School. He was talented and industrious, raising money for the micro-budget indie, The Whole Shootin' Match, from local businessmen in Austin, Texas. He made the right local contacts, knew gifted actors and actresses who would work for nothing, and put together his first film on a shoe-string, shooting with borrowed equipment on weekends so that his cast and crew could work their day jobs during the week. The resulting film was seen by the right people -- Roger Ebert gave it an enthusiastic review and it played at colleges and festivals, making no money at all, but assuring that Pennell would get another chance to make a bigger movie with real Hollywood stars and a real budget. The Whole Shootin' Match is not a masterpiece and has some baffling defects, but on the whole it is a very entertaining, although ultimately melancholy film -- it's not as lyrical as Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep which it closely resembles but it is funnier and has a better story. The film is the closely observed tale of two small-time businessmen, would-be wheeler-dealers, living on the margins of society -- the people that the elites call "white trash", alcoholic good ole boys with ambitions far beyond their humble stations in life. Sure enough, Hollywood beckoned to Pennell and he went there but did nothing, apparently, but drink and snort cocaine -- the projects that he pitched were half-baked and he burned his bridges with a series of misguided and drunken sexual assaults on female executives who might otherwise have been persuaded to help him. Pennell dried himself out, went back to Austin, Texas and started over again -- he gathered financing and made another micro-budget picture Last Night at the Alamo and, then, relapsed into hopeless alcoholism. He alienated all of his lovers and friends and ended-up homeless, living under a freeway overpass in Houston. He died a few days short of his 50th birthday. I've simplified his story but the outline is accurate -- Pennell made three other features when he emerged long enough from his alcoholic stupor to direct, but everyone agrees these pictures are scattered, rambling and only marginally coherent and not even very interesting. The titular King of Texas was a script that Pennell peddled in Hollywood -- the only part of the script completed was an opening scene in which a lost cowboy in a thicket encounters a huge feral longhorn. It was a great opening for a Western but there wasn't any movie behind the anecdotal first few shots.
The documentary is directed by Rene Pinnell, Eagle's nephew and the son of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother who recorded the plaintive mandolin and guitar soundtracks for The Whole Shootin' Match and Last Night at the Alamo. Rene Pinnell says that he didn't even know his uncle was a film maker until he was about twenty years old -- to him, he was just the old, offensive drunk guy who came around on holidays and ended up insulting everyone. There are aspects of the documentary that I don't like: too much is made of Eagle's grandpa who was a Midlands, Texas rancher -- his hagiography of the old West is misplaced: in the fifties, when Eagle was born, just about every family was one generation off the farm and so there isn't anything particularly special in this aspect of the film maker's biography except for the fact that Pennell had a particularly soft spot in his heart for the elegiac Westerns of John Ford. Two songs punctuate the film and seem out-of-place: the songs are good enough but they don't add anything to the picture. The movie luxuriates in a particularly dusty, broken-down Texas squalor that is unique, I think, to the Lone Star State. Eagle's collaborators from his glory days are now fat old alcoholics themselves although they still have a certain rusted-out charisma. (Richard Linklater sits on a couch under a spectacular poster for a movie, but he doesn't have anything memorable to say; Willie Nelson appears for a minute and tells one dirty joke -- but it's not clear why he's in the picture; Charles Pinnell runs a well-known recording studio in Austin and probably induced the musician to stop by for a few minutes.) The woman who worked on the screenplay for The Whole Shootin' Match, Linn Sutherland is a busty, good-looking Texas matron, tough as barbed wire who also is a hoarder -- she's got a spectacularly messy semi-trailer, it seems, where lots of artifacts are hidden in ruined filing cabinets or buried in plastic buckets. The film doesn't sugar-coat Eagle's nastiness -- he was the kind of man who reveled in bar fights and propositioned the sister of his bride at their wedding. And the ending of the film is suitably harrowing. But the picture ends on a note of very modest triumph -- a reasonably complete version of The Whole Shootin' Match was discovered in Berlin and it was restored for a revival during SXSW festival in Austin in 2007. Everyone was amazed at how good the film was. The movie ends with a sad shot of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother walking away from the brightly lit theater in a rainstorm. Eagle's other films are hard to see -- his most highly regarded picture, Last Night at the Alamo (as you might imagine the Alamo was a Houston bar scheduled for demolition) is inaccessible and, I suppose, awaits rediscovery. The movie makes a surprising admission -- Eagle Pennell needed collaborators, when he had great collaborators, he was a kind of home-grown genius; without collaborators, he was just a mean drunk. (The King of Texas is a companion disc to The Whole Shootin' Match as re-released on DVD by Watchmaker Films.)
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