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Make no mistake. Warren Oates was one of the best actors in all of cinema. A true original who always spoke his mind.
Warren Oates had big personality with a wide grin that made him look anything but sophisticated, though he never really looked genuinely threatening (thankfully keeping him from only playing bad guys.) But he did look like a man who’d seen a hell of a lot and lived even more.
A self-described “total hick with a mountain accent,” Warren Oates was a native of Depoy, Kentucky and was proud to be a Kentuckian (as is my father) and would frequently criticize Hollywood’s anti-Southern bigotry.
Carving out memorable work in TV Westerns, Oates met Sam Peckinpah on the director’s show The Westerner and became a member of the Peckinpah “stock company” in the films Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Peckinpah’s controversial masterpiece Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
The two men had a lasting friendship and respect for one another. Both lived hard and partied harder but brought out the best in one another on set.
Oates was partial to Ride the High Country, as he felt it was “pure Cowboy” in every moment and eventually came to realize he was part of cinema history with The Wild Bunch, a film that the actor once said, “blew my Southern Boy mind” with its brilliance.
His response to the priggish backlash toward The Wild Bunch gives us a taste of Oates the good ol’ boy from Depoy: “It shocked the hell out of a lot of moralistic weirdo pinko liberals.” Yet he sympathized with the critics who felt the Mexicans were stereotyped by saying that “some of the protest by Mexican-American groups may be a bit justified. … I feel it is the fault of the semi-intellectual community that writes about or makes films about Mexico, or hillbillies, or any specific group of people that does not belong to their semi-intellectual community. The clichéd Mexican or the clichéd southerner or the clichéd anyone is not a full man.”
The grit and realism Oates exuded in the Peckinpah films fit the director’s own grit and hardness. In Alfredo Garcia, the actor was the cinematic manifestation of Peckinpah, right down to the director’s own sunglasses and gave what many feel to be his finest performance.
In the early and mid Seventies, in between jobs for his dear friend Peckinpah, came a string of extraordinary work in little seen films in which Oates’ performances were often heartbreaking and always truthful.
He was the mute trainer of chickens bred for fighting in Monte Hellman’s unique and masterful 1974 film Cockfighter and, as the nomadic fabulist GTO in Hellman’s mesmerizing 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop. Oates delivers one of the film’s best lines, “If I’m not grounded pretty soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.”
During this time the actor also did fine work in some off beat and interesting Westerns.
Gordon Douglas’ 1970 film Barquero isn’t perfect but it puts Warren Oates and Lee Van Cleef against one another, bringing out great work in both of the legendary actors. The same year, Oates held his own against Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s There Was a Crooked Man.
One of his best performances and films was for his good friend Peter Fonda in Fonda’s excellent 1971 film The Hired Hand. A dreamlike Western and a lovely meditation on friendship and responsibility , the film stands as one of the least-known and best of the Seventies. He would act with his good friend in two more great films, the Grindhouse classic Race With the Devil and Thomas McGuane’s hard to find (but EXCELLENT) 92 in the Shade. Seek this film out!
In 1978, the actor did his last Western, the oddity that is Monte Hellman’s China 9, Liberty 37, a highly recommended film if one can find it.
Oates did stand out work in films such as Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Phil Kaufman’s The White Dawn, Tony Richardson’s The Border, John Badham’s Blue Thunder, and William Friedkin’s The Brink’s Job (where he nearly stole the show in one scene).
He also proved to be very funny in comedies such as Spielberg’s 1941 and Ivan Reitman’s Stripes.
His final film, Richard Fliescher’s cliched boxing fable Tough Enough is a secret treasure made quite wonderful by the actor’s natural and easy going performance and his great chemistry with the film’s star Dennis Quaid.
Lest we forget, as we rewind to 1967, his great supporting turn in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. He played a southern deputy that wasn’t a good man (yet not inherently bad) but not on purpose. His character was the victim of a bigoted upbringing in a bigoted town during a bigoted time. He knew nothing else and had no moral guide and falls victim to the trappings of his home and the people that inhabit it. It’s another standout performance that is every bit as good as Rod Steiger or Sidney Poitier.
Warren Oates onscreen is enough to make you think that as bad and insulting as today’s films can be, once in a while, in the hands of an actor such as he, a film can really get to the heart of this country and it’s people.
Unfortunately, there will never be another like him. There simply couldn’t be.
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