“Race with the Devil” (1975)
Easily one of the weirdest wide-release movies of the 1970s, which is really saying something, “Race with the Devil” is a wild combination of road race action movie beats and horror set pieces. In the film, Oates plays the owner of a motorcycle repair shop who sets off with his buddy, motorcycle racer Peter Fonda, and their two foxy wives (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker), on a road trip to Aspen, Colorado. Somewhere in the deep and dirty south (the movie was shot in various locations in south Texas) they run afoul of Satanic cultists. Fonda and Oates witness a ritual murder and then are stalked, with escalating severity, by the cult members themselves (in a great aside the wives do a little detective work, consulting the local library for books on the occult). “Race with the Devil” is compellingly strange, starting off more comical before giving way to sequences of genuine suspense and terror and, later, high-octane action. But it’s Oates’ performance that leaves the biggest impact. His mere presence adds an element of grumpy unpredictability to a film already ripe with it. Like his character, Oates seems like he genuinely does not want to be there, and instead of being off-putting it enriches his character like a kind of shopworn realism. When a local sheriff of the largely untrustworthy town (note the creepy woman at the motor inn swimming pool!) recounts how they caught some “hippies” executing a cat, Oates, laying on the gravely, five-pack-a-day drawl, growls, “Well this time they ran out of cats.” Later he’s given a rare opportunity for an actor: to stab a live rattlesnake with a ski pole. Released by Fox in the summer of 1975, “Race with the Devil” was largely overlooked (a year before the studio’s Satanic smash “The Omen”), but has proved itself surprisingly influential on everything from Quentin Tarantino’s similarly schizophrenic “Death Proof” to the 3D Nic Cage action movie “Drive Angry.” It’s a movie perfectly calibrated for the drive-in and Oates’ performance is large enough to make out from the concession stand.
“The Hired Hand” (1971)
One of Oates’ finest and most frequently overlooked performances appears in Peter Fonda’s impressionistic western “The Hired Hand.” As Arch Harris, a traveling companion and partner of Fonda’s Harry Collings, Oates’ hardscrabble charm is allowed to really flourish, acting as Fonda’s steadfast friend and moral compass (and in a larger sense the movie’s beating, dirt-smeared heart). While on their way back to Harris’ wife, after years of estrangement, Oates asks Fonda to describe her. “If I’ve had a horse for more than a year I’d be able to tell you if it has three teeth,” Oates wryly remarks. “She has three teeth,” Fonda shoots back. While the movie’s chief concern is the rebuilding of the relationship between Fonda’s Collings and Hannah (a flawless Verna Bloom), the more memorable, emotional relationship is between the two men, particularly towards the final act, when Oates’ Harris takes off for the west, feeling there’s not much room for him anymore (especially after a wonderfully flirtatious scene between him and Bloom). Fonda retained complete creative control over the project, following the smash success of “Easy Rider,” but “The Hired Hand” was critically lambasted (for what many felt were impenetrably self-indulgent flourishes), creatively compromised (until a restored version debuted in 2001) and commercially ignored (it was seen by most after NBC aired the film in 1973). Watching it now, however, the film is uniquely powerful, with an abstract opening that brings to mind the beginning of “Drive, He Said” (directed by Fonda’s bud Jack Nicholson and released the same year), lush cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and an unforgettable score by frequent Bob Dylan collaborator Bruce Langhorne. This is one of those obscure gems that really does deserve to be dug up and reevaluated (it seems to be a kind of spiritual precursor to Andrew Dominik’s similarly received “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”), all the more for Oates’ fine performance
Also Worth Watching: Any of Oates’ pictures with Peckinpah are worth looking at, “The Wild Bunch” in particular, obviously, as are his films with Hellman, in particular the Jack Nicholson-produced “The Shooting,” which Oates toplined. “In the Heat of the Night” and Terrence Malick‘s “Badlands” are obviously both must-sees — the latter was something of a consolation prize for the actor, as the director had originally wanted him to star in a 12-hour movie set in the jazz age that he couldn’t get made. Finally, he’s terrific in Philip Kaufman‘s Eskimo western “The White Dawn.”
– with GT