David Thomson on Warren Oates

In 1981, without having met the man, or knowing much about him, I wrote of Oates in Film Comment:

Oates seems at first sight grubby, balding, and unshaven. You can smell whiskey and sweat on him, along with that mixture of bad beds and fallen women. He's toothy, he's small, he's 53 this year, and he has a face like prison bread, with eyes that have known too much solitary confinement. But the eyes bulge and shrink in a sweet game of fear and courage.... Sublimest thing with Oates is when he does nothing. Only Mitchum could do nothing so well, until you think a hole is opening up in the middle of the picture and everything is gonna fall down it. Then you see Oates starting that shy grin of his, and you shake yourself because he could've been dead. The greatest trick to writing about Oates is to catch the spirit of obituary.

The trick got easier, for Oates was dead within the year. Since then it has been pleasing to feel the swell of appreciation for Oates the actor. There is a cult, maybe, much helped by Tom Thurman's resourceful documentary film on Oates. It owes something also to the notion that the Oates world -- the Southwest, Mexico, the borderlands -- has passed on with Sam Peckinpah's death and our new squeamishness about rough men or films that celebrate them. Oates was narrow in range, until you got into those narrows, and then you felt depths of humor, ferocity, foolishness, and honor. Let Oates have a word. In an interview, he said this of Peckinpah, and it could be applied to himself: "I don't think he's a horrible maniac; it's just that he injures your innocence, and you get pissed off about it."

Carrying a modest fee, and being intrigued by the experimentalism of Monte Hellman, Oates took leading parts in two films outside the scope of his "industrial work": as Gashade and Coigne (twin brothers, the slowly converging faces of the existential coin) in The Shooting (66, Hellman); and as G.T.O., the fantasizing little man behind a large engine, solitary but craving sociability in Two-Lane Blacktop (70, Hellman). Both parts abandoned mannerism and showed that a plain, balding man with a toothy grin could carry a movie.

Oates had been a steady TV actor, and he accumulated a long list of films: Up Periscope (58, Gordon Douglas); Yellowstone Kelly (59, Douglas); the brother in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (60, Budd Boetticher); Private Property (60, Leslie Stevens); Ride the High Country (62, Sam Peckinpah); Hero's Island (62, Stevens); Mail Order Bride (63, Burt Kennedy), The Rounders (65, Kennedy); Major Dundee (65, Peckinpah); Return of the Seven (66, Kennedy); Welcome to Hard Times (67, Kennedy), In the Heat of the Night (67, Norman Jewison); The Split (68, Gordon Flemyng); Crooks and Coronets (69, James O'Connolly); magnificently stupid in The Wild Bunch (69, Peckinpah); Smith (69, Michael O'Herlihy); Barquero (70, Douglas); There Was a Crooked Man (70, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); The Hired Hand (71, Peter Fonda); The Thief Who Came to Dinner (73, Bud Yorkin); Tom Sawyer (73, Don Taylor); Kid Blue (73, James Frawley); very good as a subtler Dillinger (74, John Milius) than the cinema has ever shown before; as another of Monte Hellman's dour obsessives in Cockfighter (74); Badlands (74, Terrence Malick); effortlessly raising a scruffy little adventurer to the legend of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (74, Peckinpah) and coming close to a portrait of Peckinpah; The White Dawn (74, Philip Kaufman); Race with the Devil (75, Jack Starrett); 92 in the Shade (75, Thomas McGuane); Drum (76, Steve Carver); Dixie Dynamite (76, Lee Frost); and China 9, Liberty 37 (78, Hellman). He was superb as a style-mad thief in The Brink's Job (78, William Friedkin), and he went to New Zealand to make Sleeping Dogs (78, Roger Donaldson).

He did My Old Man (79, John Erman), for TV; 1941 (79, Steven Spielberg); a flat-out comedy role in Stripes (81, Ivan Reitman); The Border (82, Tony Richardson); Tough Enough (83, Richard Fleischer); and Blue Thunder (83, John Badham).