DVD/Stream of the Week: COCKFIGHTER and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP – two more unforgettable performances byWarren Oates

Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER
Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER

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.

DVD of the Week: Road to Nowhere

Road to Nowhere could be subtitled Monte Hellman’s Jigsaw Puzzle.  It’s the first film in twenty years from 79-year-old cult director Hellman, and he has delivered a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience.  There is the story of a crime as it was originally understood, the story of what really happened and the story of a film being made about the crime.  The same actors play the characters in all three stories.  One of the actors in the movie may actually be one of the participants in the original crime.

It’s not a film for everyone.  You must be willing to accept that the story is not going to make sense for a while, and some issues are never going to be resolved.  If you can engage in the puzzle, there’s enough of a payoff.

My guilty pleasures include Hellman’s 1974 Cockfighter with Warrren Oates and his 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop with Oates and James Taylor (yes, the singer-songwriter James Taylor).  Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than those films, but far more baffling.

In Road to Nowhere, the director of the film within the film discovers and becomes besotted, even obsessed, with his leading lady – and things do not turn out happily.  I had to think of the female lead in Two Lane Blacktop, Laurie Bird;  Hellman had a relationship with Bird, who later became Art Garfunkle’s companion and committed suicide in Garfunkle’s apartment.

 

Other recent DVD picks have been Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.