Toward the end of Monte Hellman's 1971 classic Two-Lane
Blacktop, the GTO driver played by Warren Oates finishes a story by telling his
audience, "That'll give you a set of emotions that'll stay with you."
The same can be said about Oates himself, an actor who was poetic and sensitive
and macho and brutal and forceful and restrained all at once - it's no wonder
he was one of director Sam Peckinpah's favorite collaborators. Oates was Cary
Grant and Clint Eastwood in the same package - charming, witty, and warm as
well as minimalist, dark, and self-destructive. It's not just that he was
capable of playing any note on the emotional scale; it's that he could play
them all at the same time, not only in the same movie but sometimes in the same
scene. There's never been another actor
quite like him, and no filmmaker brought out more of his unique qualities than
Monte Hellman.
Oates did great work for other directors, of course: Peckinpah
used him repeatedly to great effect (particularly in Bring Me the Head of
Alfredo Garcia), and his comic turn in Ivan Reitman's Stripes is a singular and
hilarious portrait of a man made up of equal parts bravado and exasperation.
Yet Hellman was the first to see Oates not just as a supporting player but as a
leading man with uncommon range and depth. He discovered Oates in a stage
production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which Oates blew the director
away; another audience member was Jack Nicholson, who would win an Oscar for
his own performance in the same role over ten years later. Hellman cast Oates
as a weary bounty hunter opposite Nicholson in his 1966 Western The Shooting,
establishing the kind of tough soulfulness that would eventually become the
actor’s trademark.
It’s a great, understated performance in a great,
understated movie – a kind of riff on Antonioni in the American West – but
Oates and Hellman would top themselves (and just about everybody else) a few
years later with Two-Lane Blacktop. Like The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop is a
movie stripped bare of cinematic conventions – a film with a traditional
premise that becomes avant-garde by virtue of what it leaves out. The most
relaxed chase picture ever made, it follows a group of characters known not by
name but by type (The Driver, The Mechanic, The Girl, etc.) as they race from
Los Angeles to Washington, DC. Oates is a character known only as “GTO,” after
the car that he drives; it’s his pride and joy, and he gambles its pink slip
against that of the Driver (James Taylor) and Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), who
compete against GTO’s store-bought Pontiac in their own hand-modified ’55
Chevy. “Compete” is a somewhat misleading term for what actually happens though
(as is “race”), as the characters often let each other catch up and stop along
the road for various episodic encounters; Hellman and screenwriter Rudy
Wurlitzer are less concerned with action than with the tension between
individual freedom and the desire to belong that afflicts all of the movie’s
characters.
It’s a similar tension to the one inherent in Oates and
Hellman’s beloved Western genre, the tension between civilization and the
wilderness. In Blacktop, Oates embodies this tension in all of its
contradictions and complexities, playing a man who wants to thumb his nose at
polite society while also partaking of its rewards. The miracle of Oates’s
performance is that he makes GTO’s essence evident when the character spends
most of the movie lying; each time GTO picks up a new passenger he tells a
different story about who he is and what he’s doing, and by the end of the
movie we realize he may have borrowed all of these stories from other people
he’s met on the road. We can’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth,
yet Oates plays the lies in a way that reveals the inner truth: that this guy
is a sort of lovely dreamer who longs for a certain kind of America while he
lives in another. There are countless scenes in which other characters poke
holes in the fabric of tall tales that GTO has woven, and Oates responds with
the subtlest, most poignant gestures – small expressions or line readings in
which he tries to hide the hurt but doesn’t quite succeed.
Oates is so good in the film that he deserves credit not
only for his own performance but also for those of his cast mates. Hellman gets
a lot of mileage out of matching the ultra-professional Oates up with amateurs
like Taylor and Wilson, musicians with no acting experience who give exquisite
performances under Hellman's direction. Oates is the filmmaker's secret weapon
in this regard; it's as impossible for Taylor and Wilson to deny his
authenticity and eccentricities as it is for the audience, and the result is
that they don't have to act at all - they just have to react, and in their
reactions to Oates lie the keys to their characters. The honest reactions of
these non-professionals, in turn, seem to bring out something in Oates, who
never seems to be “acting” in the film even though he’s playing a character who
does nothing but act. It’s a remarkable character made all the more remarkable
by Oates’s approach, which seems to draw somewhat from Hellman himself. Hellman
freely admits that he’s always been a spinner of wild yarns – his nickname in
high school was “Bullslinger” – and in GTO he creates a kind of cinematic
surrogate for himself.
The casting of Oates in this regard is spot-on, because
Oates was one of the cinema's great talkers; his roots in Kentucky and its
tradition of oral storytelling are evident in many of his films. Yet for
evidence of his depth and versatility one need look no further than his
subsequent film for Hellman, Cockfighter, in which he plays a mute and is just
as powerful, complex, and empathetic as he is when playing a motor-mouth in
Blacktop. Indeed, Oates was capable of virtually any kind of acting in any type
of film; his career encompassed a wide range of budgets, genres, and styles,
and he was as comfortable in escapist TV fare as he was in arty philosophical
inquiries. He was at his best, however, when working with a director like
Hellman or Peckinpah who could fuse it all; aside from Two-Lane Blacktop, his
greatest performance is probably in Alfredo Garcia, a film comprised of large
doses of both pulpy exploitation violence and meditation. Oates had mixed
feelings about the term “character actor” and alternately embraced and rejected
the classification throughout his life. But like his colleague Jack Nicholson,
he was that rare character actor with the blinding charisma of a movie star. At
the end of the story referenced at the beginning of this essay, GTO tells his
passengers, "Those satisfactions are permanent." Indeed they are.
Warren Oates is the subject of a retrospective of some of
his film work, July 7 – 10, 2016 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The
tribute includes a new restoration of Private Property (1960), a double feature
of two Monte Hellman directed films, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter
(1974), plus The Wild Bunch (1969) in 70mm and a Western double feature of Sam
Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and Dillinger (1973).
Jim Hemphill is an award-winning screenwriter and
director whose latest film is The Trouble with the Truth. His writings on
cinema have appeared in Film Comment, American Cinematographer, and Film
Quarterly, and he is the author of a regular column on directing for Filmmaker
Magazine.