Warren Oates: Across the Border (1993)

Warren Oates: Across The Border (USA, 1993) 53 min color DIR-PROD: Tom Thurman. SCR: Tom Marksbury. MUSIC: Frank Schaap. DOP: Walter Brock, Arthur Rouse. CAST: Ned Beatty (also narrator), Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Peter Fonda, David Thomson, Millie Perkins, Monte Hellman, Harry Dean Stanton. (Tom Thurman-Fly By Noir Productions)

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July 5th is Warren Oates Day. At Lloyd’s Cinema Club today, my amigos and I are honouring what would be the great actor’s 85th birthday, by separately watching at least one of his films, and then reporting back later to share what we experienced.

I decided to commence my festivities with this hour-long documentary, produced ten years after Oates’ sudden death at the too-young age of 53. Warren Oates: Across The Border was perhaps the first step in a well-deserved reappraisal of his work: this film is featured as an extra on the long out-of-print Anchor Bay DVD of Cockfighter, one of the few films in which Oates was a lead. (For now you can view this documentary on Youtube.) And until Susan Compo’s massive, richly detailed book, Warren Oates: A Wild Life was published in 2009, this film served as a satisfying, if slight, primer of Oates’s life and career.

“Warren Oates seemed at first sight, grubby, balding and unshaven. You could smell whiskey and sweat on him, along with a mixture of bad beds and fallen women. He’s toothy and he’s small, and he has a face like prison bread, with eyes that have known too much solitary confinement. But the eyes bulge and shrink in the sweet game of fear and courage. And for some of us, Oates is the only human being in pictures.” 

This opening passage, narrated by actor Ned Beatty (who co-starred with Oates in The Thief Who Came To Dinner and 1941), is a succinct portrayal of Warren Oates’ screen presence. The actor spent over twenty years playing unkempt, uninhibited, violent men (often in sinister or villainous roles). But it is to his credit as a performer that Warren Oates often made us care about these people: he often found the humour and compassion beneath his characters’ irascible demeanours. Although he was 5’11”, he often appeared smaller onscreen – perhaps due to his introverted body language. He was no larger-than-life matinee idol, he was nakedly human: warts and all with a “take me as I am or not all” honesty.

Because he didn’t have conventional movie star looks, his pensive, squinty, world-weary, weather-beaten visage relegated him largely into supporting character parts, especially in westerns. Oates’ famous quote about himself (not heard here) sums up his roles: “I feel most uncomfortable in a western role, because my image of the western man is John Wayne and I’m just a little shit.” (Only four times in his prolific career was he top-billed.) In those two decades before his untimely death in 1982, he was a very busy actor, and his performances were never less than good. He was also a favourite of directors Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman, appearing in some of their key films. It is to his credit that we often cared about this characters, even when he played reprehensible men. He was always so unpredictable, so exciting to watch.

It is a delight to view the interviews in this documentary, with co-stars like Robert Culp, Ben Johnson and Peter Fonda, who speak of him with obvious affection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, by general consensus, offscreen Oates was a lot more gentle than his movie roles. Even though it features family and friends, some amusing anecdotes and sprinkles of home movie footage, one leaves the film still wanting to know more about him.

Films like this are seldom cinematic per se, as they adhere to the basic structure of talking heads and movie clips. In short, since there is no footage of people actually doing anything, they feel more like filmed reports than actual movies on their own. In this film however, even within these limited paramaters, there is much to enjoy. There are thoughtful analogies by Monte Hellman and critic David Thomson, and a bristling commentary by Robert Culp about Sam Peckinpah’s virtue as an artist and failure as a human being. Additionally, this project triumphs where many documentaries about movies fail, by allowing the movie clips to play a little longer in order to present some kind of context, to let you take the time to see his craft. (There are generous clips of the films: 92 in the Shade, Cockfighter, Dillinger, Chandler, Barquero, In the Heat of the Night, and several others.)

Warren Oates: Across the Border is essential: a reverent piece about a superb talent. For the novice, it is a good starting point to see his work. For the fan (and how can one not be?), it acts as a permanent record acknowledging the measure of the man and his art.

Happy Warren Oates Day!