Warren Oates

Living on the Edge

by Joe Neumaier, Razor Magazine, February 2004; Transcribed by me, Ted Strong, January 20, 2004.

In the latest edition of Razor magazine there is a brief article on Warren Oates. Last month (or the month before) there was a similar type of article on the great (and within today's context) similar James Coburn.

I will now transcribe the article.

It's late at night, and well, there're some other issues to deal with. So, please if anyone notices any grammatical errors or typos let me know at tedstrong@tedstrong.com before I put this article up at tedstrong.com.

Razor Magazine The Definitive Men's Lifestyle Magazine® February 2004; Pages 124-126:

Warren Oates

A man who's always trying to hide a grin is a man who knows something, and judging from the constant glint in his eye, Warren Oates knew a lot. A man who spent 20 years in character roles, Oates, true to his name, was full of Middle-American bite -- yet that didn't stop his cockeyed grin from escaping. Even in tough films like The Wild Bunch, Two-Lane Blacktop, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and China 9, Liberty 37, Oates' lanky, leering persona lent an air of (somewhat twisted) humanity. By age 50, when he put his gravel-road voice and highway-lined face to use in comedies like The Brink's Job, 1941 and Stripes, the opposite was true; Warren Oates was introducing himself to a new generation who barely got to know him before he died in 1982. And the fact that he was softening as he approached the grave would have struck the wiry tough guy as nothing except comical.

RIDING HIGH WITH PECKINPAH

While working with director Sam Peckinpah on TV's The Rifleman, Oates hit it off with the Mexico-loving, hard-living auteur. After Oates made his uncredited debut in Up Perisope, Peckinpah cast him in 1962's Ride the High Country, as Henry Hammond, a diseased inbred gold prospector who first walks into the film in extreme close-up with a crow sitting on his shoulder and a sneer on his lips.

The partnership continued with Major Dundee, and in 1969, Peckinpah gave him the role that got him noticed: simple but loyal Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch. As the (twisted) moral barometer of the gang, the younger Gorch is the mirror to aging gunslinger William Holden; homicidal and warped, but not bitter or angry, Lyle Gorch gave Oates a chance to use his dancing eyes and slow grin to creepy effect.

"I feel maybe most uncomfortable in a Western role, because my image of the Western man is John Wayne, and I'm just a little shit." -- Warren Oates.

KENTUCKY FRIED ACTOR

Born July 5, 1928, Oates knew poverty from his youth in the rural coal-mining town of Depoy, Kentucky. He worked as a manual laborer picking strawberries for two cents a quart before moving to Louisville at 13, where his grades weren't as important as street brawling with the kids who nicknamed him "hillbilly." He did a stint in the Marines at the end of World War II as a mechanic, and the in the midst of frittering away his days at the University of Louisville, became enamored by the theater when, on a whim, he decided to try out for a role as, ironically, a hillbilly moonshiner in a student play.

He moved to New York in 1954, and in-between odd jobs like checking hats at he 21 Club, landed roles in numerous TV shows (predominantly Westerns and cop dramas) and took over a job James Dean had also done: rehearsing bits for game shows like Beat the Clock. By the time he got into episodic television he was not yet 30, but already had a craggy character-actor's face and a wry delivery perfect for snarling villains or sniveling sidekicks. "I feel most uncomfortable in a Western role," Oates would later admit, "because my image of a Western man is John Wayne, and I'm just a little shit."

BRING THEM THE HEAD OF WARREN OATES

After becoming a counterculture touchstone as a desperate, over-the-hill hot-rodder who challenges two young punks to a cross-country race in 1971's Two-Lane Blacktop, and costarring in the seminal Badlands as Sissy Spacek's father who gets shot by Martin Sheen, Oates played the lead in Peckinpah's Bring Me the the Head of Alfredo Garcia, 1974's blast-'em-all meditation on nihilism in which Oates' sardonic grin said everything that needed to be said about the futility and inevitability of violence. It was a role that Oates felt comfortable in, as the product of a rough world. In the same year, he played Public Enemy Number One, betrayed by the woman in red and gunned down in front of Chicago's Biograph theater, in John Milius' Dillinger. A dry spell followed as both he and Peckinpah, for whom he made four movies, struggled to stand their ground in an increasingly block-buster-obsessed Hollywood.

"If you talk to a really good American actor working toay, like Dennis Hopper, harry Dean Stanton or Ed Harris, ask who they think is the best American actor, living or dead, it is quite likely they're not going to Marlon Brando. They'll tell you it's Warren Oates!" -- Alex Cox, director. [Repo Man (1984), Sid and Nancy (1986), Walker (1987), Straight to Hell (1987)].

SLEEPING DOG

Oates' hard-drinking and smoking lifestyle -- and the toll of three marriages -- was catching up to him, as his health kept him from diving into physically-demanding roles. In 1977, after marrying his third wife, Judith (almost 20 years his junior) in tiny Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, Oates went to New Zealand to play a right-wing colonel in Sleeping Dogs, then played one of a gang of bank robbers in the whimsical true tale, The Brink's Job, in 1979. He recreated roles made famous by Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, respectively, in TV remakes of The African Queen and True Grit. Then Steven Spielberg added him to the cast of 1941, and Oates began using his scruffy appeal for laughs.

To the Saturday Night Live generation, Oates made his biggest impression as the exasperated, gruff Sgt. Hulka, who puts slackers Bill Murray and Harold Ramis through their paces, in the 1981 military hit Stripes. After completing roles in the comedy Tough Enough and the thriller Blue Thunder, Oates died of a sudden, massive heart attack in his Hollywood Hills home on April 3, 1982, at the age of 54. It had been almost 10 years since Time magazine had named him "among the finest American actors" for his role in Two-Lane Blacktop, but while Oates couldn't go the distance, his race to the end was marked by the bemused smirk of a guy who knew it would all go by too fast.

WHO KNEW? Oates sang backup on the song Rocket to Stardom, from the 1975 Kris Kristofferson album Who's to Bless and Who's to Blame.

HIS FIVE MUST SEES

Ride the High Country (1962) -- The movie is about the sunset of the Old West, but Oates steals the show as the snarling face of changing times. And don't trust anyone who walks around with a bird on their shoulder.

The Wild Bunch (1969) -- Another elegiac Western, another chance for Oates to spit out a performance that's at once vulnerable and hell-bent on destruction.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) -- As G.T.O., the chronic liar trying to drive down his past in a Pontiac, Oates personified ever fear the hippie generation and every dream of mid-life males.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) -- Oates's pit-dog persona is the center of this revenge drama that spins on a misdirected hate. In Oates' eyes, confusion gives way to anger and then recedes again, and the blurring is magnetic.

Stripes (1981) -- Yep, it's Bill Murray's movie, but watch the old pro Oates as he does slow double takes in the barracks or grins through his threats. This isn't the drill sergeant as monster -- it's the giant monster who has come to accept the lunacy of the military.