Warren Oates
1928-1982

Yellowstone Kelly (1959); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960); Private Property (1960); Ride the High Country (1962); Hero's Island (1962); Mail Order Bride (1964); The Rounders (1965 uncred.); Major Dundee (1965); Shenandoah (1965 uncred.); Return of the Magnificent Seven (1966); The Shooting (1967); Welcome to Hard Times (1976); In the Heat of the Night (1967); The Split (1968); Lanton Mills (1968); Smith! (1969); Crooks and Coronets (1969); The Wild Bunch (1969); Barquero (1970); There Was a Crooked Man (1970); Two Lane Blacktop (1971); The Hired Hand (1971); Chandler (1971); The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973); Tom Sawyer (1973); Dillinger (1973); Kid Blue (1973); Badlands (1973); The White Dawn (1974); Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974); Cockfighter (1974); Rancho Deluxe (1975 uncred.); Race with the Devil (1975); 92 in the Shade (1975); Dixie Dynamite (1976); Drum (1976); American Raspberry (1977); Sleeping Dogs (1977); The African Queen (1977 TVM); True Grit (1978 TVM); China 9, Liberty 37 (1978); The Brink's Job (1978); 1941 (1979); Stripes (1981); The Border (1982); Tough Enough (1983); Blue Thunder (1983)

Born and raised in a Kentucky coal mining town Warren Oates enlisted in the Marine Corps before trying his hand at television acting, landing several film roles, notably as the gangster in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. 

He had appeared in several westerns before he met director Sam Peckinpah when the two of them worked on an episode of the western series The Rifleman, “The Marshall”.  Oates impressed Peckinpah enough for the maverick director (later to be dubbed the “master of violence”) to cast him on TV again in The Westerner and on film in Ride the High Country.  It was on The Westerner that Peckinpah would form a lasting working relationship with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who would shoot five films for the director.

Ride the High Country revealed to Oates his new friend Peckinpah at high fury.  Forever bullying the crew to assert himself, Peckinpah gradually alienated all but a devout, incipient stock company of actors.  Eventually Peckinpah’s alcoholism and ill tempered disdain for studio executive would make it difficult for him to find work in the latter 1970s, his comeback feature The Osterman Weekend being taken away against his wishes for editing.  But Oates was drawn to the self-destructive little tyrant.  On Ride the High Country Peckinpah made Oates and his fellow actors playing the gold prospecting Hammond Brothers room together, bunk together, eat together and socialize together.  The result was a seamless, natural ensemble performance.Thereafter Oates became a member of Peckinpah’s stock company, alongside Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, RG Armstrong, Emilio Fernandez and country rock singer Kris Kristofferson. 

For Peckinpah, Oates next did Major Dundee, playing a devout Confederate soldier enlisted to fight against marauding Apache under the command of Union officer Charlton Heston. 

On Major Dundee Oates joined his fellow actors in standing behind star Charlton Heston in threatening to walk off the picture before production finished if Peckinpah was fired – the studio being nervous over cost overruns and bad location shooting scheduling.  Though Dundee had proven an unwieldy monster of a shoot, when Oates was offered a choice of roles between an easygoing Burt Kennedy western to be shot in Los Angeles – Support Your Local Sheriff – Oates chose instead to return with Peckinpah to Mexico for The Wild Bunch.  Oates’ then wife Teddy was not impressed.  Major Dundee had left their marriage strained when Oates returned after the three and 1/2 month shooting schedule and Teddy felt that him leaving again for Mexico would be the end of their relationship.  But Oates could not resist Peckinpah’s lure for adventure and intoxication and joined him in Mexico.  By the time The Wild Bunch hit American theatres, Warren and Teddy had divorced.  Teddy later ruminated that “Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman were the two directors Warren would work with anytime, anywhere.”

Oates had met Hellman in the midst of his Peckinpah work.  Impressed with Hellman’s richly iconoclastic view of genre, Oates starred in The Shooting, playing twin brothers in an obscure existential vision of despair. 

But then Peckinpah claimed him for The Wild Bunch, his bullet strewn body clinging to a machine gun spraying fire into the Mexican Army before him: a vainglorious but none-too-bright anarchist shrieking in the realization of a death wish that would lead Peckinpah to cast Oates as his alter ego Bennie in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Oates said of Peckinpah on The Wild Bunch “when it came time for my part in the action, Sam really let me do what I wanted because by then I really knew my character.”  Shortly after filming The Wild Bunch, Oates was enamoured by a Western script and brought it to Peckinpah – The Ballad of Cable Hogue did not, however, star Oates who was venturing away from Peckinpah.  First it was back to Hellman for Two Lane Blacktop, his role as GTO (named after his car) being a bleak assessment of an America that lived on the road – the icon of the short-lived “youth films” of the late 1960s and early 1970s that had commenced with Easy Rider and Vanishing Point, bleak, existential and sparse.  
  

More Westerns followed as Oates made a name for himself as a reliable character actor, rarely headlining but always magnificently grizzled in support.  Gordon Douglas cast him opposite spaghetti western icon Lee Van Cleef in Barquero and he displayed a marvellously comical stupidity in There Was a Crooked Man opposite Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda before starring in Henry’s son Peter’s directorial debut The Hired Hand.  His sense of self-parody featured in James Frawley’s iconoclastic western Kid Blue in which he convinces failed outlaw Dennis Hopper (who jumps on a moving train intending to rob it only to promptly fall off) to share a bath with him, the underlying suppressed homo-eroticism being something Oates would never again deal with in a series of increasingly complex roles beginning with a surprisingly humanist portrait of gangster John Dillinger for a debuting John Milius in Dillinger, the best of the gangster films that proliferated in the wake of Bonnie & Clyde.  Yet, he befriended many he worked with, thus re-teaming with Hellman for the obscure Cockfighter (a film which even legendary exploitation producer Roger Corman could not market so as to turn a profit) and with Peckinpah for perhaps their finest work – Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Oates was Garcia!  Oozing indignant smarm and world-weary grizzle Oates was an unstoppable force.  But Peckinpah himself was an immovable object and he and Oates were boozy quarrellers off the set.  Whiskey and broads were a shared passion, or as Peckinpah once put it – “there’s women, and then there’s pussy.” 

Alfredo Garcia slowly developed a cult reputation amongst American film critics who succinctly historicized it in American film as an enigma, “an unholy blend of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thomson afflicted by delirium tremens” (Friedman 2007, American Cinema of the 1970s, Rutgers Uni Press, p.131).  Critic David Thompson writing for Film Comment would later reflect on the Oates of the mid-70s thusly:

“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 in.  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.”  (David Thomson 1994, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Andre Deutsch, p. 553)

After Garcia, Oates worked alongside Peter Fonda this time as an actor on the offbeat Satanist road movie Race with the Devil, scripted by motorcycle enthusiast Lee Frost who would cast Oates in the drive-in crowd-pleaser Dixie Dynamite.  Oates was increasingly a man with responsibilities – for a wife in Race with the Devil and for a slave plantation in Drum, a sequel to the surprise hit Mandingo.  Drum was fluff for Oates and he went through the motions in a spin on a role originated by James Mason.  Yet, his reputation and formidably gruff demeanour endeared him to a number of alternative American filmmakers and Oates found himself working for Phil Kaufman on White Dawn and former scriptwriter Thomas McGuane on 92 in the Shade wherein he was self-employed and competitive.  The films never did big business but they were noted by the critics and Kaufman in particular went on to become one of American cinema’s most highly praised directors after helming The Right Stuff.  Just as Peckinpah was facing difficulties witb Convoy by decade’s end, Oates took to a 700 acre lot outside of Livingston, LA.  Drunk one night Peckinpah and Oates sculpted a deal – Peckinpah would own 25 acres and the two of them would share 600 acres.  Peckinpah immediately had a cabin built at the highest point, below the Absaroka Mountains in Yellowstone National Park.

Oates was re-united with Hellman and Peckinpah (in a starring role this time) in China 9, Liberty 37 although his most high-profile role towards the end of the decade was as the ambitious thief turned snitch in French Connection director William Friedkin’s The Brink’s Job, a recreation of the infamous robbery wherein Oates demonstrated his talent for men on a psychological edge without necessarily comprehending why they act they way they do. 

By the end of the 1970s, Oates’ grizzled Americana was attracting international attention – New Zealander Roger Donaldson cast him in Sleeping Dogs and Britisher Tony Richardson cast him opposite Jack Nicholson in The Border.  But it was American film comedy that made Oates close to being a household name when, after starring for Steven Spielberg in the ill-fated 1941 he did his first outright comedic role since There Was a Crooked Man opposite Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in Stripes.  His final film, Blue Thunder, was dedicated to his memory: he passed away in 1982 shortly after its completion – he was 54.  Peckinpah followed him in death in 1984. 

 

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Copyright (C) Robert Cettl All Rights Reserved Last modified: June 24, 2009