Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
One of my favorite actors is Warren Oates, whose crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, plays on TCM on December 6. This is a Sam Peckinpah film, one of those 1970s neo-noirs that was perfect for Oates. Oates plays a hard scrabble grasper, and you just know things are not going to go well for him.
Last week I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and last night’s Oatesathon on Turner Classic Movies. I even included the 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border. I hope that I’ve kindled (or rekindled) some interest in Oates, so here are two Warren Oates classics that TCM didn’t play last night.
They are both from cult director Monte Hellman: Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). There’s a Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop which is available from Netflix. You can stream Cockfighter on Amazon Instant Video. Hellman was making low-low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman, and both of these movies are fine specimens. In both, Oates plays a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck.
Two-lane Blacktop is a car chase/road trip movie that was a vehicle for two rock music stars, James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Taylor plays a guy drifting across America and challenging drivers of other souped-up cars to races (The Driver); Wilson plays his mechanic (The Mechanic). They pick up a comely hitchhiker played by Laurie Bird (The Girl) and challenge the Warren Oates character (G.T.O.) to a road race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C.
Two-lane Blacktop turned out to be the only feature film for both James Taylor and Dennis Wilson. Taylor is pretty good in a very laconic role.
Laurie Bird made only three films – Two-lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Annie Hall. Having worked as a model, she was cast by Hellman to co-star in Two-lane Blacktop, and soon a romance blossomed between the 41-year-old Hellman and the 18-year-old Bird. Bird also was the movie’s still photographer. After Cockfighter, she moved on from Hellman and became Art Garfunkle’s partner. Before she turned 26, Laurie Bird committed suicide in the NYC apartment that she shared with Garfunkle. In her very limited movie career, she proved to be an appealing and natural actress.
The only professional lead actor in Two-lane Blacktop was Oates. Of course, he was perfect for the role of G.T.O., a guy masking his insecurities with aggressive braggadocio.
In Cockfighter, Oates isn’t the foil, he’s the main guy. But he’s still a low-life, a guy with a cockfighting compulsion that threatens to consume everything he has – his money, his family, his home and his sanity – as he bets more and more on his fighting chickens. For those of us not intimately familiar with this pastime, Cockfighter is a soup-to-nuts procedural on cockfighting. Warning: Cockfighter contains the very definition of animal cruelty- lethal cockfights staged for the camera; (you couldn’t make this movie today).
But the whole reason to watch Cockfighter is Warren Oates’ performance as a guy with too much desperation and not enough luck. (And Harry Dean Stanton and Laurie Bird are in the movie, too.)
Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here’s the scene in Two-Lane Blacktop that sets up the car race.
Yesterday I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and the biodoc Warren Oates Across the Border. On Monday, August 24, Turner Classic Movies will show seven, count ’em, SEVEN Warren Oates films: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Wild Ones, Chandler, Badlands, There Was a Crooked Man, The Thief Who Came to Dinner and The Split. Of these, the best two movies are Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (Oates plays one of the treacherous but moronic Gorch brothers)and in Terence Malick’s Badlands (Oates plays Sissy Spacek’s father, blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen). But the iconic Warren Oates lead performance is in the Peckinpah neo-noir Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (TCM will not be screening Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter, Barquero or Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand – more about the first two on Tuesday). Set your DVR for Warren Oates.
In the movie theaters, we are in the dreaded Mid August Doldrums, but there are some good choices:
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the inventive, scary and non-gory It Follows – a rare horror movie choice from The Movie Gourmet. It Follows is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
I love the character actor Warren Oates for his idiosyncratic performances in the period 1969-74 – and this is Warren Oates Week at The Movie Gourmet. Friday, I’ll write about the upcoming Oatesathon on Monday night, when Turner Classic Movies will be presenting SEVEN Warren Oates movies. And next week’s DVD.Stream of the Week will feature two Oates cult classics that TCM will be missing.
Oates was one of those actors whose performances always make an impression. He could turn a stock Western Bad Guy into a memorable character by adding a touch of cowardice, dimwittedness or venality. In Barquero, he was formidable enough to go gun barrel-to-gun barrel with Lee Van Cleef for 115 minutes.
Oates had a special gift for portraying desperation, so he triumphed in neo-noirs like Chandler, Cockfighter, The Brinks Job and his crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. By early 1970s, the counter-culture was bringing lots of screenplay cynicism and anti-hero roles to the movies – both perfect for Oates.
Warren Oates died in 1982 at age 53. He has 123 acting credits on IMDb, mostly Westerns. He was a favorite of directors Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman. Indeed, he is most well-known for playing one of the Gorch brothers in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sissy Spacek’s father (blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen) in Terence Malick’s Badlands.
Some of Oates’ best work was in 1974 as the leads in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hellman’s Cockfighter. He was also unforgettable in the offbeat Barquero (1970), Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971).
The 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border includes clips of Oates’ work, along with commentary from his widow Teddy Oates, Hellman, and fellow actors Ned Beatty, Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Peter Fonda, Stacy Keach and Millie Perkins. Here it is.