I’d be curious to know how many movie reviews Roger Ebert has written, and of that number what the exact tally would be for the times he has revisited a film and changed the star rating. I seem to recall him having a pretty militant view about not tinkering with his stars and, according to Wikepedia, “Ebert stood by his opinions with one notable exception: when Stern pointed out that he’d given The Godfather Part II a three-star rating, but had given The Godfather Part III three and a half stars.” And yet, despite this, an internet search reveals that the three-and-a-half stars remains! So the tinkered star must be rare indeed, and The Whole Shootin’ Match (1979) is one of the few films to get the bump; Ebert originally gave it three stars after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival in 1980, and upon a recent screening of its restoration changed his rating to four stars.

The Whole Shootin’ Match was the directorial debut of Eagle Pennell (1952 – 2002), a Texas native who would direct four other feature films, including Last Night at the Alamo (1983), which Ebert also praised. If these titles don’t ring a bell it’s probably because Pennell worked on shoestring budgets of around $30,000 for his films, which were cobbled together on weekends. Truly independent films like The Whole Shootin’ Match, shot on grainy black-and-white 16mm film, simply didn’t have many distribution outlets back in the eighties, so they were mainly seen on the festival circuit. Richard Linklater, who was influenced by Pennell’s work, is quoted in an article by Bruce Bennett as saying that “when Robert Redford saw Whole Shootin’ Match, he put it out as the kind of work to champion the formation of the Sundance Film Festival.” Bennett adds that “Mr. Redford has also gone on record saying that Pennell’s first feature inspired him to establish the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker development labs.”

I recently screened the digital restoration of The Whole Shootin’ Match as part of the film series I program and the film can be seen in limited runs in other venues that take a chance on eclectic fare. One ticket holder later emailed me and wrote: “I am just reeling and buzzing from The Whole Shooting Match… great restoration and what a masterpiece of pathos and humor, saga and script. I can’t even compare it to Midnight Cowboy or that African-American saga about the guy working in the meat plant.” (That would be Charles Burnett’s film from around the same time, his 1977 debut: Killer of Sheep.)

Of The Whole Shootin’ Match, Ebert notes that the “few surviving prints were battered and beaten, but a good print turned up a few years ago in Germany and has been lovingly restored by Mark Rance of Watchmaker Films.” A short trailer clip that helpfully adds some background and gives you a sense of the film can be found on youtube at:

The film begins with Loyd (Lou Perryman) wandering in and waking up his friend Frank (Sonny Carl Davis), who is asleep on a pool table. We hear them talking about past get-rich schemes that backfired and see them launch into another ill-fated business plan (this time in the polyurethane business). Along the way we see Frank wrestle with family and marital issues while Loyd works on more inventions, including one that actually results in a paycheck – but the victory is short lived. As we meet other people there is a certain hit-and-miss quality to the acting, but Perryman (who also goes by Perry) and Davis are both great, and they carry the film. Kudos also to the director’s kid brother, Chuck Pinnell, who provides the perfect soundtrack for this film with original music that is melodic, moving, and playful. (According to imdb, Eagle Pennell changed the spelling of his last name “as both a tribute to director Arthur Penn and an homage to Ford’s western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.)

For Ebert the film is about alcoholism because the “characters drink in almost every shot of the film.” Ebert also notes how Pennell himself was an acute alcoholic who, in his last years, “spent every dollar he could beg or borrow on booze” and “lived on the streets or on the sofas of his shrinking number of friends.” It would be a mistake, however, to view The Whole Shootin’ Match as a melodramatic “issue” film. It is not. Far from being preachy, sappy or even just polished, the beauty of The Whole Shootin’ Match lies in a feeling of profound integrity and authenticity which is infused in every bumbling character, in every sparse setting, in the rough-and-tumble quality of the framing, not to mention all the moments where we see people just being so damn human. One can easily sense that the filmmaker is not taking a patronizing or condescending view on his characters, but rather chronicling his own tribe with a heartfelt tribute, and it never feels mean-spirited or contrived. For me, its greatest beauty lies in the surprising bursts of humanity and forgiveness that seem to cap every drunken mistake or bar fight that precedes it.