"Those satisfactions are permanent": Susan Compo traces the wild life and enduring work of Warren Oates

Tom McGuane said he had the all-time greatest squint in movies. David Thomson suggested that part of his singular appeal came from his being that rare actor willing to look genuinely dumb. (Thomson also fantasized a production of Waiting for Godot where he'd play opposite Harry Dean Stanton, an actor with whom he shared a distinct kinship and, often enough, screen time.) “At first, I played the neurotic hillbilly son or the third man on the horse,” Warren Oates once said, “then worked my way up with tremendous success to being the second heavy on a horse.”

He did countless hours of TV before finding a niche in the New Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, a memorable presence in whatever crazy project in whichever genre was being turned on its head, and was not infrequently the best thing in the movie. He received only a few shots at being something like a leading man—Dillinger (1973), Cockfighter (74), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (74)—but each time filled the screen with cockeyed charisma and a vulnerability that always caught you off guard, made you feel you knew him for real. You may or may not recognize Warren Oates from many films. You surely recognize he face. But if you do know him and his work well, there’s a 50/50 chance he’s one of your favourite actors.

Actress Lee Purcell had another, rather intriguing theory regarding Oates’ peculiar allure: “Warren always had what the best actors had: Warren always had a secret.” If Oates’ secrets were indeed key to his magnetism, then Susan Compo’s Warren Oates: A Wild Life (University Press of Kentucky, $34.95) is for the most careful to keep the allure intact. It’s not that Compo’s especially shy about detailing Oates’ considerable appetites for liquor, women, drugs and the company of Sam Peckinpah; on the contrary, it’s rather that A Wild Life remains largely a work of reportage without too much in the way of analysis, conjecture or reverie. The prose is on the pedestrian side, the use of quotations to verify simple points sometimes excessive, and, while contradictions are duly addressed—Oates the gentle country boy obsessed with the stock market, the Zen-loving pacifist by nature who also described himself as an anarchist—Oates the man is kept at a certain distance.

Still, it needs to be said that Compo has done admirers—and anyone with serious interest in films of the era—a great service. If solid research can be described as loving, Compo’s book deserves the tag. Taking us from Oates’ Kentucky roots through his early struggles in New York and ambling ascent to character actor stardom in Los Angeles, with many wives and many, many riotous and often famous drinking buddies along the way, A Wild Life compresses a life’s trajectory with a balance of tidiness and detours into some terrific anecdotes—after the first few rather stiff chapters are out of the way, Compo offers a very fun read. And if it feels like less than a fully realized portrait, maybe that’s okay. Oates spent his whole career letting us take long hard looks into his rumpled soul.

Something I hope A Wild Life will help remedy is the almost exclusive association of Oates with Peckinpah, who cast the actor so brilliantly in westerns like Ride the High Country (62) and The Wild Bunch (68), not to mention the sublimely demented Alfredo Garcia. As Compo makes clear, Oates’ collaborations with lesser-known Monte Hellman were just as important. Hellman arguably did more to allow the full breadth of Oates' persona to bloom onscreen, developing leading roles that, even when rendering Oates mute (!), would flush out a rich blend of endearing affectation, innocence, curiosity, orneriness, and desperation. Perhaps the increased availability of Hellman-Oates films like Cockfighter, The Shooting (67) and Two-Lane Blacktop (71) especially will also help generate greater interest in their legacy.

I knew how A Wild Life was going to end, obviously, but it still choked me up. No matter how many times Oates was killed in the movies, no one seemed prepared for his actual death, which occurred off-screen, one afternoon while his lunch was being prepared. He was 53. Despite vague concerns about his general health, there were few alarms preceding the event, though the day before the doctor-phobic Oates phoned up Hellman and told him he’d had a heart attack—before chuckling and saying it was actually just indigestion. No one could ever replace Oates, but there is one great little story in here that reminds us that at least one contemporary American performer has taken up the baton. Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in 1976, fumbling through an interview, erratically searching through his pockets for his lighter. as Compo writes, “Oates took one look at the disheveled singer’s predicament and pronounced, ‘That guy stole my act.’”

A thousand points of flickering light: David Thomson's Have You Seen...? is another colossal homage to that corrupting labyrinth of cinema

There is a threshold that divides the perfectly sound criticism of movies from another literary pursuit, foolishly ambitious, irredeemably obsessive, inevitably laced with something like memoir, a writing that makes pleas for its existence completely apart from the work, if not the whole labyrinthine medium, it addresses. I understand, you may or may not want to take on what’s delivered from the far side of that threshold, though I’ve always found that it’s precisely where things start to get genuinely interesting. There’ve been several writers who’ve blazed a trail through this thorny terrain, but I have a special admiration for the British-born David Thomson, whose one-man encyclopedia, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, remains a mind-boggling text, among the most compulsively perused books I own, full of aphoristic flights, brilliant observations, towering bullshit and enraging dismissals, not to mention ordinary old movie lust. (Enter Nicole Kidman.)

Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films (Knopf, $45) is a sort of companion to The Biographical Dictionary, another sprawling tome of filmic considerations that scale the medium’s century-plus trajectory—not Thomson’s thousand best, mind you, but perhaps his thousand most worth discussing? Honestly, my impression is that he’s not completely sure what these selections collectively constitute, but the number itself seems important: “going for a thousand is a gesture toward history… like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita.” It should be stressed that Have You Seen…? is not a compendium of previous published reviews, or even, most impressively, previously aired opinions, but a wholly realized project all its own. Every title here, from Paris, Texas (“I’m not sure that many films are as moving and as incoherent”) to Persona (“We are in performance: it is a religious condition”), from 2001 (“a lavish travesty”) to Stalker (“I am in awe of the power—yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker”), and every artist, from Mickey Rourke (“a poet, if someone could lay down the length of his lines”) to Ingmar Bergman (“the saint of lives that may think they are settled”), from Catherine Denueve (“she seemed dipped in liquid cocaine”) to James Spader (“a cul-de-sac of oddity”), is newly surveyed.

Thomson once wrote that there’s no effect more special than an actor changing his or her mind, and for those familiar with Thomson’s arguments, there’s pleasure to found in seeing how the writer, too, changes his mind. As evident in the irreverent compliment to Stalker above, it appears Thomson’s finally come around in a big way to Andrei Tarkovsky, who has no less than four films in the thousand, and he’s learned to love the morbid lyricism that underlies the films of Val Lewton, once derided for his “B-movie philosophy.” Thomson still has an annoying habit of pooh-poohing Akira Kurosawa however, largely because he wasn’t Kenji Mizoguchi—sometimes you wonder how much Japanese cinema Thomson’s actually seen. There are other filmmakers whose work Thomson seems to have appraised only recently and is still catching up with—how else to explain the inclusion of both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises but nothing else from David Cronenberg? At one point Thomson congratulates Poltergeist for giving us “TV as the threshold for the other world” but, bafflingly, makes no mention of Videodrome.

Weirder still, we get Thomson’s praise for To Die For and Happy Together, the former the book’s sole selection from Gus Van Sant, the latter it’s only Wong Kar-Wai. At least Van Sant and Wong get mentions—there isn’t a single film from Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Shohei Imamura or Jim Jarmusch entered in this book that nevertheless makes room for Mary Reilly, the original Thomas Crown Affair and Yentl. And it kind of disgusts me that we get an entry on the recent, widely celebrated rediscovery of Army of Shadows, a product of the French cinematic establishment, while no whisper of the equally celebrated rediscovery of Killer of Sheep, a product of South Central Los Angeles that hauntingly reveals the Third World alive and well in prosperous America.

Flamboyant subjectivity, incompleteness and even contrarianism is, of course, part of the point of Have You Seen…?, which is always, stridently, personal in approach, a look at movies, and perhaps even more so the experience of movies, through the prism of a single articulate obsessive. Thomson knows that opinion and analysis both need to be fluid and flexed to stay alive. He’s taken it upon himself, sometimes, mind you, to absurd and unpersuasive degrees (see his review of My Darling Clementine), to hold every classic up to the highest standard, deliberately sniffing out flaws in masterpieces, while he pounds his fists on a few occasions to make cases for the overlooked and under-loved. And when Thomson returns to work he’s examined previously and thoroughly, he often delivers his finest prose of all, breathtaking, penetrating the very heart of something, wrestling with reflections on the real life outside the frame, making you want to rush out and re-see the film in question. On The Mother and the Whore: “It is long because people will talk themselves into silence over sex and love, and the uncertain hope that they can be kept separate… they catch youth at that tyrannical moment when it can believe it will never have to yield.”

Something that really irks some readers—or, at least, many fellow critics—is Thomson’s perpetual mistrust of cinema as a genuine art. He does indeed have a niggling knee-jerk toward high and low artistic designations that can corrupt otherwise sound arguments, but I actually consider this aspect of the work on the whole enjoyable, intriguing and revealing, especially when you catch onto the fact that it’s the cinema’s very slipperiness that so obviously seduces Thomson, who uses Have You Seen…? to constantly weave film history, business and biography into his one-page reviews, a way of accounting for exactly that multi-tired phenomenon that gave its title to Thomson’s history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. “I came to a fork in the path and followed movies rather than Henry James,” he confesses near the book’s end—though, I suppose, such a reference book has no end—and we know exactly what he’s getting at, a choice to simply adore and revere literature, music and painting while aiming his critical faculties at a force more unruly, more corrupted, more ghostly, more exploited, more mysterious, more collaborative, seemingly infinite and in all it accumulates from the world and spits back into it. If that last part sounds a little too abstract and sweeping, well, spend a few hours with Have You Seen…? and you might just get swept up in the whirlwind yourself, a state of being in which the immensity of movies surrounds you and becomes at once slight, fractured, and dangerously endless in meaning.