The Brown Dirt Cowboy

by Richard Luck

Since Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was the last film Peckinpah made with Warren Oates, now is as good a time as any to shine the spotlight on Sam's favourite actor and on-screen alter ego.

The finest character actor of his or anybody else's generation, Warren Oates looked like a cross between Emilio Zapata and the post-pilsz George Best. "I already had my bath!" he bellowed when questioned about his hygiene in Peckinpah's Major Dundee, but to look at Oates in any of his 40-odd movies, it's hard to believe he'd even heard of the concept of water. A surly, unsanitary mess of a man, Oates came to own outright the franchise on thugs, derelicts and degenerates. While his early career consisted of playing Western inbreeds and bandits, he later successfully turned his hand to comedy, action pictures and social dramas. With a handsome face lurking behind the Zapata moustache and shaggy mane, he was literally a whisker away from being a leading man. Luckily for us, Warren Oates kept the stubble and became that which we seldom see any more, a truly great character actor.

Director Alex Cox once wrote that; "if you talk to a really good American actor working today, like Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton or Ed Harris, and ask who they think is the best American actor, living or dead, it is quite likely they're not going to say Marlon Brando. They'll tell you it's Warren Oates!" This being the case, why don't you ever hear Oates' name mentioed in the same breath as the Hollywood greats? The reason has a lot to do with the times we live in. The 1990s have been dominated by superstars and multi-million dollar movies. It's only very recently that, thanks to the wonderful, weirdo, independent pictures coming out of America, audiences have grown used to seeing genuine character actors again. But while his name might not be up there with Brando's, Dean's and Montgomery Clift's, Warren Oates was every bit as good as all of them.

Born in 1928 in Depoy, Kentucky, Warren Oates worked as a manual labourer before he moved into screen acting. He got his earliest breaks on television, appearing in episodes of The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, Lost In Space and The Rifleman. The director of the latter series, one David Samuel Peckinpah, was so impressed with Oates that he promised to use him again, and sure enough, once Warren had made the move to the big screen with small roles in second-rate movies (Up Periscope), Sam hired him to play the diseased Henry Hammond in Ride The High Country.

In truth, any actor could have played the part of the inbred gold prospector, but few could or would have brought such sincerity to the role. In Warren's hands, Hammond isn't a caricature but a real person, as capable of fraternity as of horrifying violence. For turning an underwritten character into a fully rounded human being, Peckinpah rewarded Oates with a wonderful big-screen entrance - a tight close-up of Warren with a smile on his lips and a crow on his shoulder.

A string of performances in Burt Kennedy Westerns had cemented Oates' reputation as a thug-for-hire by the time he saddled up with Peckinpah again to shoot Major Dundee. As Confederate deserter O W Hadley, Oates found himself cast alongside fellow Hammonds L Q Jones and John Davis Chandler. Once again, the role didn't make huge demands on his talents - he simply had to stand around and look surly. When it came to doing nothing on camera, few did it as well as Warren Oates. He might not have had the grandstanding screen presence of a De Niro or Pacino but, with his map-of-Mexico face and gap-toothed grin, Oates was equally capable of lighting up a screen.

For Oates, however, Major Dundee wasn't an exercise in screen presence but a chance to fashion another 3-dimentional character from minimal material. During his only scene of any length, Oates displays as many aspects of Hadley's character as possible. Cowardice, loyalty, vivacity, boorishness. Oates puts it all on display in a bravura piece of acting, made all the more remarkable by the fact that i) the scene is very short and ii) he has to share his screen time with the film's stars, Charlton Heston and Richard Harris.

After Dundee wrapped, Warren, ever keen to stretch himself, signed on for the role of gunslinger Willet Gashade in Monte Hellman's existential Western The Shooting. A minor hit in the US, The Shooting and its sister film Ride In The Whirlwind were hugely successful in France. Indeed, Parisian film critics were amongst the first people to cotton on to the talent of Warren Oates. What the French knew instinctively, the greater American public would only become aware of subsequent to the release of Sam Peckinpah's genre reshaping Western, The Wild Bunch.

After serving Warren a couple of lean roles in their earlier films together, Peckinpah gave Oates a whole bunch of stuff to sink his teeth into when he cast him in the role of the younger, dumber Gorch brother, Lyle. Indeed, with retrospect, it's possible to see the undernourished workouts Warren had to go through on High Country and Major Dundee as examinations to see whether he had what it took to play what is arguably The Wild Bunch 's most complex role.

It has been suggested that amidst all the bloodshed and bullets, there is a love story fighting its way out of The Wild Bunch, a tender tale of Bunch-leader Pike's affection for his friend Dutch. However, this subtle study of friendship is, in this writer's opinion secondary to the camaraderie diplayed by the brothers Gorch. Tough without being heartless, sensitive without being homoerotic, the relationship between Tector (Ben Johnson) and the younger, dumber Lyle (Warren Oates) is characterized by the new-anderthal qualities that these fine actors brought to all their roles.

Fraternal affection isn't the only thing that makes Lyle special, however. While the rest of the bunch grow old over the course of the film, he actually grows up, transforming before our very eyes from a reckless, feckless psychopath to the responsible man whom Bishop asks for endorsement when he decides to rescue Angel ("Let's go," snarls Bishop. "Why not?" Lyle concurs). And while William Holden might be doing a damn fine impersonation of Peckinpah's mannerisms, it's Lyle's behavior (drinking, whoring, fighting) that most closely resembles the director's. This isn't to say that Lyle Gorch is based upon Sam. When, 5 years later, Peckinpah did make a film about himself, it was no great surprise that Oates was the man he chose to play the lead.

It was in the wake of his top turn in The Wild Bunch that Warren Oates came closest to achieving genuine stardom. In 1974, he landed his first out-and-out lead in John Milius' remake of Dillinger. A supporting actor for almost a decade, Oates was anxious to make the most of the opportunity he had been afforded. He didn't disappoint. Oates' Dillinger was more sensitive, complex and compelling that [sic] any of the gangster's previous screen incarnations. With old friend Ben Johnson outstanding as star-struck G-Man Melvyn Purvis and great support from Richard Drewfuss and Harry Dean Stanton, Dillinger ought to have been a huge box-office hit. Indeed, if it had been handled correctly, it might even have outgunned the thematically similar Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. However, Milius overplayed his hand, the film sank without trace and Oates' career as an orthodox Hollywood leading man was over before anyone could say 'Andrew McCarthy.'

Not that this failure seems to have bothered Oates. Looking back at his career, you get the distinct impression that film, or more precisely fame, was never particularly important to Warren. Weirdo peripheral pictures seemed to have much greater appeal to him than the big-budget action films he could so easlily have found parts in. Indeed, after a nice, scene-stealing cameo as Sissy Spacek's sign-painter father in Terrence Malick's Badlands, Oates reunited with his compadre Peckinpah to make Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. Warped, brilliant, bizarre, horrifying; practically all the terms that have been used to describe Peckinpah's heavily autobiographical picture could be used to sum up the breathtaking, to-the-edge performance given by Oates. Such was his gift for playing everyman figures, Oates was even able to make a pathetic loser like the bounty-obsessed Bennie seem pretty noble. In Oates' hands Bennie isn't just a washed-up barfly. He is a man of contradiction; violent, sure, but also tender and compassionate. You can certainly understand why Sam hired Oates to play his alter ego. Peckinpah's masochism might have driven him to make a film about his personal dysfunction, but his vanity led him to cast an actor whose talent would guarantee that he retained a shred of nobility. Warren's performance is even more incredible when you consider that Bennie spends almost the entire film wearing shades, thus depriving the actor of any opportunity to use his eyes as a means of expression.

Soon after Alfredo Garcia wrapped, Oates signed up for Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (aka Born To Kill) and another demanding role. As Bennie, Warren had his eyes hidden. As Frank Mansfield, a disgraced cockfighter who takes a vow of silence, he lost his voice. In successive films, Oates found himself stripped of the tools that are the very essence of acting. Handicapped as he was, this second, more debilitating restriction did not prevernt the actor from turning in his finest screen work. Sadly, Cockfighter is seldom shown in the US and is banned in the UK, meaning that the work of both director and leading man has never received the credit it deserves. To get some idea of how remarkable Oates' performance is, read the Charles Willeford novel on which the film is based. That Hellman was able to turn the book into a film is incredible. That Oates managed to turn Mansfield into a layered, 3-dimensional character is as great an acting feat as any this writer cares to remember.

After the bonanza of 1974, Oates returned to the Westerns and B-movies in which he had first made his name. He was one of the few people who could name two of the films Peter Fonda made after Easy Rider on the grounds that he was actually in a couple: the weird acid Western The Hired Hand; and the holidaymakers versus Satan worshippers actioner Race With The Devil. Solid performances as a well-dressed bank robber in William Friedkin's The Brinks Job and a weary gunslinger in Hellman's post-pasta Western China 9, Liberty 37 further proved that, even when the pictures he appeared in weren't up to much, Warren Oates was always very watchable.

By the late 1970s, ill-health and a shortage of good roles had forced Oates to ration out his film appearances. Towards the end of his life, his screen work was restricted to cameos in the comedies Stripes and 1941, and action pictures like Blue Thunder and Tough Enough, and leads in TV remakes of True Grit and The African Queen (no prizes for guessing which part he played in that one). Then, in 1982, just when Hollywood seemed to have no further need for character actors, Warren Oates died of a heart attack. He was 54.

It's easy to look impressive opposite really great actors. For Warren Oates, there were few opportunities to bask in the talent of his co-stars. As the critic Joanne Walker said of his superb performance as 'G.T.O.' in Two-Lane Blacktop; "how do you manage to look good when your co-stars are the lead singer of the James Taylor quartet and one of the Beach Boys?" How indeed? Whatever Warren's secret was, he took it to the grave.

Monte Hellman's highly original take on Warren Oates was that he looked like "a battered, saggy-eyed, hard-drinking Henry Fonda." Compare Oates as Bennie to the moustachioed Fonda that appeared in My Darling Clementine and you can see what the director was getting at. The actors' physical similarites are, however, at odds with the symbolic importance of these two artists. In his prime, Henry Fonda was the identikit of the ideal American: wealthy, clean, well-to-do, law-abiding, God-fearing. Come the 1970s, Watergate, Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jnr and the Kennedys had left America and John Q Citizen very different creatures. The effects of corruption and double-cross were writ large in the leer, filthy mane and craven eyes of Warren Oates. In Dillinger, John Milius played upon these contrasting images by having Oates re-enact the barn dance sequence from My Darling Clementine. OF course, when Fonda square-danced it was as lawman Wyatt Earp. Oates, on the other hand, hoofs it up while playing public enemy number one, John Dillinger.

In an interview, Warren Oates defended Sam Peckinpah stating that; "I don't think he's a horrible maniac. It's just that he injures your innocence and you get pissed off about it." As the critic David Thomson has noted, the actor could have been talking about himself. As great a talent as he was, Warren Oates' appeal and importance cannot be measured simply in terms of acting. As a thug or a bully, cowhand or hired gun, bank robber or cockfighter, Warren Oates gave the American movie-going public a chance to look at itself, to see what it had become in the years between Korea and Grenada. Tragically, introspection has never been one of America's nor Hollywood's finest qualities and so Oates' importance wasn't fully appreciated until years after his death. While he might no longer be with us, Warren Oates' spirit lives on, both in his impressive body of work and in the performances of Steve Buscemi, Tracey Walter, Lance Henriksen, Tim Roth and the 101 other actors who have breached the copyright on his blend of charm, scruffiness and psychosis.

Warren Oates is dead. Viva the Brown-Dirt Cowboy!

From The Pocket Essential Sam Peckinpah by Richard Luck, 2000.

Richard Luck is currently living in Sydney, Australia, where he's writing for the Aussie version of the British film magazine Empire. He also contributes to magazines such as Jack, Hotdog, Inside Sport, Rolling Stone and Total Film; and has written for Premiere, Neon, and Crime Time and is the author of The Pocket Essential Steve McQueen, The Pocket Essential Beastie Boys, and The Pocket Essential Madchester Scene.