Tuesday marked thirty years since the untimely passing of Warren Oates. The great, grizzled actor’s work has fallen somewhat out of fashion these days — few, bar perhaps Quentin Tarantino, name Sam Peckinpah or Monte Hellman, Oates’ closest and most frequent collaborators, as influences. If you’re familiar with him at all, it’s likely from his parts as outlaw Lyle Gorch in “The Wild Bunch” or as Sgt. Hulka in Bill Murray comedy “Stripes.” But for a time in the 1970s, Oates was Hollywood’s go-to badass character actor, a man who everyone from Norman Jewison and William Friedkin to Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick wanted to work with.
Born in Depoy, Kentucky in 1928, Oates discovered acting at the University of Louisville, and soon headed west to L.A. where he swiftly became a regular face in the golden era of TV westerns, including parts on “Rawhide,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” “Have Gun – Will Travel” and “Gunsmoke.” Crucially, this was also where he met Peckinpah, having been cast in several roles on the director’s TV series “The Rifleman.” They became fast friends, and Peckinpah gave him some of his earliest big-screen roles in “Ride the High Country” and “Major Dundee.”
As the ’60s went on, the roles got more and more prominent: first he played Sam Wood, the cop who comes under suspicion for murder in Norman Jewison‘s “In the Heat of the Night,” and two years later, perhaps his most iconic role, as part of Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” Work remained steady, but his hard living took its toll (on the set of Dennis Hopper‘s “Kid Blue,” Oates would reportedly invite co-stars Ben Johnson and Peter Boyle to his trailer for a three-course meal made up of magic mushrooms on toast, Dexedrine in brandy and vanilla LSD), and he fell out with Peckinpah in the mid 1970s.
Things took a brief stumble late in the decade, with the actor reduced to starring in TV remakes of “The African Queen” and “True Grit” (although it’s a testament to him that he could take up the mantle of Bogart and John Wayne), but “Stripes” and “Blue Thunder” (which was released posthumously) seemed to suggest that things were looking up again, until he suffered a heart attack at the age of 53. With thirty years passing since he died, this week seemed like a good opportunity to highlight the much-missed actor, and to pick out five of his finest pictures for those who might not be familiar with him.
“Two Lane Blacktop” (1971)
The richest of an extraordinary era of road films, Monte Hellman’s asphalt classic spotlights James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two laconic youths drag-racing across the U.S. Of course, it’s about more than that, focusing instead on the sense of youth fading away from these two floppy-haired youngsters. They team with a pretty young girl, but neither have much interest in her, instead focusing on the silent serenity of the open road, creating symbiosis with Route 66. While the two share an appropriately dour thousand-mile stare, they’re paired against G.T.O. (Oates), a man completely out of time. G.T.O. stands to win this competition, though at his somewhat accelerated age compared to our two leads, it’s clear that it matters somewhat more to him than it does to them. With minimal dialogue, “Two Lane Blacktop” forces us to question our relationship with the open road, visually bending the definitions of “journey” and “destination,” as Hellman’s patient camera narrows in on the cinematic space separating a man and his vehicle. “Two Lane Blacktop” is as essential as it is ethereal, not so much a film as it is a vapor, one that lingers in subtle ways, through the concentrated sound design to the artful non-verbal improvisation of our two leads. There’s no end to their journey, and there might as well have never been a beginning. The road lives on forever.