WARREN OATES, 1928 - 1982

by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Sometimes Warren Oates got lost. You knew he was in the movie you were about to see, but twenty minutes into it you were still looking for him. Scanning a quick five-shot of men with similar ragged beards and legs like grasshoppers' and eyebrows burned out under a big white sun, you felt certain he was one, but which? He'd changed himself since his last role, and it wasn't until a close-up -- the slightly puffy face that registered no specific age, the marked overbite, the shooting glance that rode the line between determined and downright unhinged -- did you say, Ah, there he is. But once he got you, he wouldn't let you go.

It's that Oates could change his shape and color to perfectly suit any environment; maybe there wasn't enough there there in him until the camera forced him open and then he bloomed in its fluid, like the Japanese paper flowers that burst forth, slowly, in a glass of water. This was one mark of his genius, though there are others. Directors who worked with him would comment in interviews mainly about his consummate professionalism. What they meant was that they didn't know who the hell he really was, but that there wasn't a role he didn't try to inhabit fully using a whole new being created just for the occasion. But it worked only given the proper growing culture -- enough emotional space in the script, a good dose of ambiguity in the direction. Warren Oates made his share of dogs.

Let me pause here to be honest. Reparations are no doubt due a master artist like Oates who never got all the praise he deserved. Noble enough cause, but not sufficient to explain my deep attachment to a dead actor.

A dead actor who looks very much like a living ex-boyfriend.

There. In my experience, anyway, every global passion starts out embarrassingly personal. In this case, I couldn't believe the similarities: how for both, one moment could mean looking wonderfully handsome, the next sort of unremarkable at best (unpleasantly dissipated at worst). Which made them both attractive to me all the time, given those sudden changes that signaled -- so I believed -- depths upon depths.

Chameleonic Oates never made a more startling appearance than in Cockfighter (1974), third of four movies directed by the regretfully unsung Monte Hellman in which Oates would star. It is unthinkable with anyone else in the title role. He is the cockfighter named Frank Mansfield, the anti-hero of Charles Willeford's novel, a stubborn, sad case of a human who doesn't know how badly he's losing at life, and because he refuses to see it in the face of all the evidence, retains an oddly echoing nobility. Without knowing anything about the truly terrible blood game of cockfighting, it is possible to credit Oates with a natural instinct and ability for it. Perhaps it came out of the ether that informed his birth, the air around Depoy, Kentucky, the kind of chronically impoverished and tattered coal-mining town we can easily imagine now that we're steeped in WPA photographs. It's more than possible that Oates took to cockfighting so smoothly on-screen because he had seen it often enough in childhood haunts.

Nothing you read about him -- fairly short stuff, since he never inspired the fandom of true leading-man types -- really explains how a man comes out of a place like that, by way of Louisville, an unhappy school life, the Marines, and numerous brawls, and, while further wasting time in college, makes the acquaintance of Mourning Becomes Electra and throws himself headfirst into acting. It's a mystery along the same lines as how a fairly taciturn man who evinces little understanding of his own tendency to trouble can so thoroughly embody and express a character who walks the fine line between inner blindness and sight that it can make your flesh crawl.

The first role that gained him any real attention for his abilities was another Hellman picture, 1971's Two-Lane Blacktop. The movie is so good and so little known today that it stands as the perfect analogue to Oates himself. Until recently it was not available on video, due to the amount of groovy tunes on the soundtrack requiring too many costly permissions, but that may not be a factor in the movie's lack of popularity. After all, Cockfighter is readily available at video stores, and how many people can you find who know about it?

Oates deserved all the accolades he got and then some for his portrayal of Two-Lane's GTO, a man who slowly but surely reveals his buried desperation. He ill-advisedly challenges two obsessive car freaks (James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, as Driver and Mechanic) in a '57 Chevy with some serious power under the hood to a cross-country race against his Pontiac. He neatly shows his bottomless loneliness by picking up any hitchhiker and, regardless of his passengers' ability to listen or understand, regaling them with stories from a completely invented past. Since the details change with every telling, we are cut adrift in a sea of uncertainty -- a slow dawning of irony that Oates takes right to the bank. GTO's proudly displayed self-importance, in Oates's playing, is most pathetic in contrast to his obvious desire to believe in it himself. Every time he appears wearing his painfully neat chinos and V-neck sweaters (against the cool and slovenly naturalism of Driver's and Mechanic's jeans and long hair), stiffly slipping around to the trunk to retrieve his flask and take a few pulls -- drinking from it, refilling it from the bottle in his other hand, and drinking again from it, adding another step to the process because that's how deeply ingrained the desire for acceptable propriety is in this eternal wanna-be -- he is pointing wordlessly at the faint mark in the sand that separates sad from sickening.

To the serious and attractive Driver and Mechanic, GTO is just "another squirrel on the run." He is that, a geek ridiculously overestimating his prowess via that of his car. He can also be a mean geek, with his own brand of negative power, anger, and bitterness burning under the skin of his grotesque attempts to impress. And he is just this side of tragic, trying to lure a pretty young thing less than half his age, making grand plans and professions even as she is halfway to the door marked "forever gone."

How does he do it? How does he do that all at once, or show us so often the frighteningly vast sweep of moral ground through which we each must choose one path, forsaking all others?

He is so good, really, it is nearly impossible to tell. In his best performances, he makes a totality encased in fired-on enamel, leaving no chink through which to watch the clank of acting mechanisms.

But his best performances were relatively few, because he required a lot of space through which to weave. Hellman nearly always got one from him (minus the confused character he gave him to play in China 9, Liberty 37, an unsuccessful western), starting with The Shooting in 1967, a low-budget, minimalist No Exit -style western. (Oates made a lot of westerns, because he was a convincing frontiersman, and because that was the kind of work an actor like him got in those years.) He could do a swell tough guy, his eyes narrowed to slits in the desert light, his stick legs looking like they might snap and his shoulders trying to compensate, to will away the weight.

That's one reason Sam Peckinpah used him so often, too, as much as Hellman. In Major Dundee he's mainly set dressing, another scruffy Confederate POW in a swarm of others just like him, until his five minutes in the forefront. Then he does a professional job, which meant for him reaching toward whatever's human in the action and eschewing anything that smacked of acting. He had a bit part in Ride the High Country, and a more sizable role in The Wild Bunch, but Peckinpah didn't give him his kind of character until Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In the midst of this gloriously perverse anti-romance, Oates pulls off a tour de force. Acting much of the film hidden behind oversize square sunglasses (the sort of handicap Oates seemed to love to run with, as in Cockfighter, where for half the film his character refuses to talk and uses only a sort of jury-rigged sign language of gestures and looks), he slowly builds a window in the middle of his being and then parts the curtain. Once again he excels as an honorable man who does dishonorable things; Peckinpah couldn't have picked anyone better, or perhaps anyone else at all, to carry his usual and otherwise problematically tautological message that blood begets blood. If an actor had tried to nail this role, it would have been insufferable. But Oates feels his way gently, inexorably, among the the potential riches: as the bounty hunter who loses everything and still doesn't know when to stop, he has to convince you he's not simply contrary by hanging on through the avalanche that a mere wanton act of cruely sets in motion. He does it through an accretion of small moments, as when he musters false pride upon having his fingers smashed in a door. He also does not fall into the easy temptation of acting nobly Christlike because the woman he loves is a whore scorned by others.

Watching Oates now fills me with sadness. When they're gone, the great ones, they of course take their peculiar brilliance with them and then it's gone from the earth. There is an extra layer of weight on me, too, in those moments, but is it really only the sadness of having also to leave my own lost world of possibility forever in the past, as one must with every love affair that's quits? I think not. In the way of everything, one loss conflates with another until you can no longer separate them. I also miss the movies that made Oates what he became, the kind that are painted with a million shades of gray. We could wander in them forever, surprising ourselves.

It is the kind of loss you never quite get over.

This essay is by Melissa Holbrook Pierson and appears in the book, O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors; Edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson, published by Vintage, 1999. This book is available in paperback, and out of print hardcover at Amazon.com. But if you go to Amazon.co.uk you can get the paperback version with Warren Oates on the cover!