Warren Oates - The Brown-Dirt Cowboy

Celebrating the life and work of Sam Peckinpah's actor-of-choice.

The finest character actor of his or any other generation, Warren Oates looked like a cross between Emilio Zapata and the post-pilsz George Best. "I already had my bath!" he bellows when questioned about his hygiene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee. But to look at Oates in most of his 40-or-so movies, it's hard to believe he'd ever encountered water.

A surly, unsanitary mess of a man, Oates came to own outright the franchise on thugs, derelicts and degenerates. While his early career consisted of playing Western inbreds and bandits, he later successfully turned his hand to comedy, action pictures and social dramas. With a handsome face lurking behind the shaggy mane, he was literally a whisker away from being a leading man. Luckily for us, Warren Oates kept the stubble and became that which we can’t see often enough, a truly great character actor.

Director Alex Cox once wrote that, "If you talk to a really good American actor working today, like Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton or Ed Harris, and ask them who they think is the best American actor, living or dead, it's quite likely they're not going to say Marlon Brando. They'll tell you it's Warren Oates."

This being so, why do you so seldom hear Oates' name mentioned in the same breath as true Hollywood greats? The reason might have something to do with the times we live in. The 1990s were a time dominated by superstar performers and multi-million dollar movies. It's only very recently that, thanks to the weirdo independent pictures coming out of America, audiences have grown use to seeing genuine character actors again. But while his name mightn't be up there with Brando's or James Dean's, Warren Oates was every bit as good as all of them.

Born in 1928 in Depoy, Kentucky, Warren Mercer Oates worked as a manual labourer before he moved into screen acting. He got his earliest breaks in television appearing in episodes of The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, Lost In Space and The Rifleman. The creator of the last of these, one David Samuel Peckinpah, was so impressed with Oates that he promised to use him again, and sure enough, once Warren had made the move to the big screen with small roles in second-rate movies like Up Periscope, Sam hired him to play the diseased Henry Hammond in Ride The High Country.

In truth, any actor could have played the part of the inbred gold prospector, but few could have brought such sincerity to the role. In Warren's hands, Hammond isn't a caricature but a real person, as capable of fraternity as horrifying violence. For turning an underwritten character into a fully-rounded human being, Peckinpah rewarded Oates with a wonderful big-screen entrance - a tight close-up of Warren with a smile on his lips and a crow on his shoulder.

A string of performances in Burt Kennedy Westerns cemented Oates' reputation as a thug-for-hire by the time he saddled up with Peckinpah again to shoot Major Dundee. As Confederate deserter OW Hadley, Oates found himself cast alongside his fellow Hammonds LQ Jones and John Chandler. Yet again, the role didn't ask much of him - he simply had to stand around looking sweaty and surly. When it came to doing nothing on camera, few did it as well as Warren Oates. He mightn’t have had the grandstanding presence of certain Method performers but with his map-of-Mexico face and gap-toothed grin, Oates was equally capable of holding our attention.

For Oates, however, Major Dundee wasn't an exercise in screen presence but a chance to fashion another three-dimensional character from sleight material. During his only scene of any length, the actor displays as many aspects of Hadley's character as possible. Cowardice, loyalty, vivacity, boorishness - Oates puts it all on display in a bravura piece of acting, made all the more remarkable by the fact that i) the scene is relatively short, and ii) he has to share his screen time with the film's stars, Charlton Heston and Richard Harris.

After Dundee, wrapped Warren played the lead in Monte Hellman's existential Western The Shooting. A minor hit in the US, The Shooting enjoyed cult status in France. Indeed, Parisian film critics were among the first people to cotton on to the talent of Warren Oates. What the French knew instinctively, American moviegoers only became aware of subsequent to the release of Sam Peckinpah's genre reshaping Western The Wild Bunch.

After serving Warren a couple of lean roles in their earlier films together, Peckinpah gave Oates a whole bunch of stuff to sink his teeth into when he cast him in the role of the younger, dumber Gorch brother Lyle. In retrospect, it's possible to see the undernourished workouts Warren was put through in High County and Dundee as examinations to see whether he had what it took to play arguably The Wild Bunch's most complex role.

It has been suggested that, amidst the bloodshed and bullets, there is a love story fighting its way out of The Wild Bunch, a tender tale of Bunch-leader Pike's affection for his friend and ally Dutch. However, this subtle study of friendship is, in this writer's opinion, secondary to the camaraderie displayed by the Brothers Gorch. Tough without being heartless, sensitive without being sentimental, the relationship between Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle is characterised by the new-anderthal qualities these fine actors brought to all their roles.

Fraternal affection isn't the only thing that makes Lyle special. While the rest of the Bunch grow old over the course of the film, he actually grows up, transforming before our very eyes from a reckless, feckless loon into the responsible man whose endorsement Bishop seeks after deciding to rescue Angel ("Let's go," snarls Pike. "Why not?" Lyle concurs). And while William Holden might be doing a damn fine impersonation of Peckinpah's mannerisms, it's Lyle's behaviour (drinking, whoring, fighting) that most closely resembles the directors'. This isn't to say that Lyle Gorch is based on Sam. But when, five years later, Peckinpah would come to make a film about himself, it was no great surprise that Oates was the man he cast.

It was in the wake of The Wild Bunch that Warren Oates came closes to achieving genuine stardom. In 1974, our man landed his first out-and-out lead in a studio picture, playing the title character in John Milius' Dillinger. A supporting actor for almost a decade, Oates must have been anxious to make the most of the opportunity afforded him. He did not disappoint. Oates's Dillinger was more subtle, complex and compelling than any of the gangster's previous screen incarnations. With old friend Ben Johnson outstanding as G-Man Melvyn Purvis and fine support coming from Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Dean Stanton, Dillinger ought to have been a bigger success than it wound up being.

As for failing to turn his kudos into major success, you get the distinct impression that film, or more precisely fame, was never particularly important to Warren Oates. Weirdo, peripheral pictures seemed to have much greater appeal to him than the big-budget action films he could easily have found parts in. So it was that after an effective cameo as Sissy Spacek's sign-painter father in Terrence Malick's Badlands, Warren reunited with his compadre Peckinpah to make Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Warped, brilliant, bizarre, horrifying: practically all the terms applied to Peckinpah's heavily autobiographical picture could be used to sum up the breathtaking, to-the-edge performance Warren Oates gives as the burnt-out, beaten-down Bennie. Such was his gift for playing everymen, Oates was even able to make a pathetic loser like this bounty-obsessed barfly seem pretty noble.

In Warren's hands, Bennie isn't just a washed-up piano player. He is a man of contradictions; violent sure, but also tender and compassionate. You can certainly understand why Peckinpah hired Oates to play his alter ego. For while ‘Bloody Sam’s’ masochism might have driven him to make a film about his personal dysfunction, his vanity led him to cast an actor whose talent would guarantee that he retained at least a shred of nobility. Warren's performance is even more incredible when you consider that Bennie spends almost the entire film wearing sunglasses, thus depriving the actor of any opportunity to use his eyes as a means of expression.

Soon after Alfredo Garcia wrapped, Oates signed up for Monte Hellman's Cockfighter and another demanding assignment. As Bennie, Warren had his eyes taken away from him. As Frank Mansfield, a disgraced cockfighter who's taken a vow of silence, he lost his voice. In successive films, Oates found himself stripped of the tools of his trade. Handicapped as he was, this second, more debilitating restriction didn't prevent the actor from delivering some of his finest screen work.

After the bonanza of 1974, Oates returned to the Westerns and B-movies in which he'd made his name. He was one of the few people who could name two of the films Peter Fonda made after Easy Rider on the grounds that he was actually in a couple of them: the acid western The Hired Hand, and the holidaymakers vs. Satan worshippers action horror Race With The Devil. Solid performances as a well-dressed robber in William Friedkin's The Brinks Job and a weary gunslinger in Hellman's China 9, Liberty 37 further proved that even when the pictures he appeared in were so-so, Warren Oates was always very watchable.

By the late 1970s, health issues and a shortage of good roles meant the actor rationed out his film appearances. Towards the end of his life, his screen work was restricted to supporting roles in comedies like Stripes and Spielberg's 1941 and action movies such as Blue Thunder and Tough Enough. He also played leading roles in TV remakes of True Grit and The African Queen. Then in 1982, just when Hollywood seemed to have no further need for either character actors nor the Western, Warren Oates died of a heart attack. He was 54.

It's easy to look impressive opposite really great actors. For Warren Oates, there were few opportunities to bask in the light given off by his co-stars. As the critic Joanne Walker said of his superb performance as GTO in Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, “His is a thankless task, sharing scenes with the lead singer of The James Taylor Quartet and the only Beach Boy who could surf." Whatever Warren's secret was, he took it to his grave.

Monte Hellman's highly original take on Warren Oates was that he looked like "a battered, saggy-eyed, hard-drinking Henry Fonda." Compare Oates as Bennie to the moustachioed Fonda of My Darling Clementine and you can see what Hellman was getting at. The actors' physical similarities are, however, at odds with the symbolic importance of these artists.

In his prime, Henry Fonda was the identikit ideal American: wealthy, clean, well-to-do, law-abiding, God-fearing. Come the 1970s, Watergate, Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys had left America and John Q Citizen forever changed. The effects of this corruption and double-cross were writ large in the leer, filthy mane and craven eyes of Warren Oates.

In Dillinger, John Milius would played up these contrasting images by having Oates re-enact the barn dance sequence from Ford's My Darling Clementine. Of course, when Fonda squared danced, it was as legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. Oates, on the other hand, hoofs it up while playing Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger.

In an interview, Warren Oates defended Sam Peckinpah stating that, "I don't think he's a horrible maniac. It's just that he injures your innocence and you get pissed off about it." As the critic David Thomson has noted, the actor could have been talking about himself. As great a talent as he was, Warren Oates' appeal and importance can't be measured simply in terms of acting. As a thug or a bully, a cowhand or hired gun, a bank robber or a cockfighter, Warren Oates gave the American movie-going public a chance to look at itself, to see what it had become in the years between Korea and Grenada. Tragically, introspection has never been one of America's nor Hollywood's finest qualities and so Oates' significance wasn't fully appreciated until after his death.

While he’s no longer with us, Warren's spirit lives on through his impressive body of work and the performances of Steve Buscemi, Tracey Walter, Tim Roth, Michael Wincott and the 101 other actors who have breached the copyright on his blend of harm, scruffiness and psychosis.

Warren Oates is dead. Viva the Brown-Dirt Cowboy!