A wonderful, unjustly forgotten little beaut of a film, a wryly seriocomic and sharply observant slice-of-life character study focusing on the feckless, outmoded, past his prime modern-day "cowboy" and his increasingly woeful, insignificant plight in a rapidly changing contemporary society that no longer has any room or tolerance for the cowboy's rowdy, roughhewn, obstinately conservative he-man way of life. A small Houston, Texas bar called the Alamo is going to be razed to make room for a high-rise building. The tawdry Texas tavern's a popular hangout where the brittle, pathetic, alcoholic nobody regulars -- a bunch of hyper-masculine strutting redneck yahoos stuck in a permanent state of arrested adolescence -- pour their hearts out about how they're catching lots of flack from both their wives and at work while also drowning their sorrows in a sea of liquor so they can feel better about their poor, wretched old selves. The Alamo supplies a means of escape for its lower middle-class blue collar patrons, a fantasyland where the otherwise weak, inconsequential male regulars can parade forth their flashy, hoked-up machismo and pretend to be kings rather than the lowly, powerless serfs that they really are.
Independent Lone Star state filmmaker Eagle Pennell's incisive, restrained direction deftly captures and conveys an elegiac, realistic nighttime down-home feel, a wistfully reflective and melancholy tone that in turn creates a poignancy which proves to be extremely moving because it never seems remotely forced or contrived. Brain Huderman and Eric A. Edwards' plain, stark, gorgeously unadorned monochromatic black and white cinematography lends the film an authentically gritty, quasi-verite look, palpably evoking a smoky, grungy, unglamorous barroom milieu with remarkable vividness. Most impressive of all is the caustically witty and perceptive script by Kim Henkel, who co-wrote both "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Eaten Alive" for Tobe Hooper. Henkel's exceptional screenplay, loaded with often sidesplitting, full-bore and surprisingly eloquent profanity, offers a touching, trenchant critique of the all rugged and stoical on the outside, but quite anguished and vulnerable on the inside macho male condition, convincingly showing how the common male hang-up of refusing to mature and accept responsibility as one gets older can prove to be highly counterproductive to both emotional and intellectual growth.
Moreover, although the picture takes the immature manly man attitude to the cleaners, the characters are never drawn in a smug, condescending way. In fact, the warts and all guys who populate the movie come across as a genuinely likable, sympathetic and affecting bunch. This is largely due to the uniformly top-notch acting, with particularly superb performances by Sonny Carl ("Melvin and Howard," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") Davis as the blustery, arrogant, much-revered Cowboy, who gets exposed as an inadequate phony little nothing with unattainable big man delusions; Steven Mitilla as the scrawny, insecure, irritable William (a.k.a. "Ichabod"), Tina-Bess Hubbard as William's sweet, long-suffering girlfriend, and the incredible, under-appreciated Lou ("The Blues Brothers," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2") Perry, who brings a funny, touching pathos to his role as Claude, an excitable, despondent, hen-pecked working class stiff who spends half the movie on the phone making fumbling attempts at reconciling with his estranged wife. Made at a time when countless big-budget Hollywood action blockbusters glorified macho excess and made it seem very attractive, "Last Night at the Alamo" stands out as a marvelous anomaly that's totally out of sync with the brutish, testosterone-charged no-brainer mentality of its era, eschewing breast-beating machismo for a quietly astute and bittersweet introspection which makes for a beautifully smart and revealing portrait of hard-headed masculinity and its unfortunate consequences.