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Pick a Peck of Poses
A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah
Actor
By Phil Nugent
 Warren
Oates (1928–1982) — When Oates was alive,
people valued him yet hinted that he was mighty lucky to manage
to stay employed in movies. Oates himself, trying to nail down
what set him apart from more traditional Western movie actors
like John Wayne, offered the helpful analysis, “I’m just
a little shit.” Yet it may have been a clue to the strength
and strangeness of Oates’ rapport with audiences that it was
if every fan he had in the world just assumed that he was the
only person on Earth who could see just how good this guy was.
Since Oates died, his admirers have gotten a lot more vocal,
and a full-blown, mighty cult has sprouted around him. Elmore
Leonard’s Stick, locked up in prison when Oates died and subsequently
paroled, expresses mixed feelings about being a free man in
a world without Warren.
 He
made four films with Peckinpah and died spectacularly in every one.
Maybe because he didn’t usually have time for last words,
his farewell scene in Major Dundee stands out: condemned
to death as a deserter, his rebel conscript, O.W. Hadley, tells
Dundee that he understands the reason he has to die, “but
God damn you for it anyway, and God bless Robert E. Lee!”
Oates’ second film — he later said that he wished it
had been his first — was Ride the High Country, in
which he responded to delicate hints about his personal hygeine
on the eve of his brother’s wedding by yelling that he didn’t
need no bath. It was a bold claim that he’d made in three
consecutive Peckinpah movies without convincing anyone. (The fourth
was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, where he probably
needed a bath more than ever, but by then he was the star of the
movie, and turning into a scary ringer for the director besides,
so the entire country of Mexicopretty much gave him a pass.)
Oates also provides a handy linkbetween Peckinpah
and that other maverick director, Monte Hellman, for whom Oates
also made four films. Aside from his work with Peckinpah, his finest
performances may be in Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop
and The Hired Hand, directed by his friend Peter Fonda, and
which Oates pretty much single-handedly makes worth seeing sometime.
Essential viewing: Tom Thurman’s documentary Warren Oates:
Across the Border, included in the Anchor Bay DVD and VHS editions
of Hellman’s Cockfighter.
 Strother
Martin (1919–1980) — In his doubles acts
with L.Q. Jones (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue),
Martin did scruffy and semi-human, though the same summer that The
Wild Bunch was released, he turned up briefly in True Grit,
the one that got John Wayne an Oscar, and managed to be the only
person in that film capable of delivering the pixilated, contraction-free
dialogue as if he’d been talking like that all his life. Cleaned
up, Martin looked and sounded like a Tennessee Williams that had
shrunk in the wash. He was busy in movies and TV for decades and
always gave value for money.
 L.Q.
Jones (1927–) — Yogi Berra was a clumsy-looking,
simian-shaped fellow to the untrained eye, but Casey Stengel could
see the rushing, graceful athlete within. In many movies, from Lone
Wolf McQuade to Casino, Jones, with his trim build and
bearing and salt-and-pepper hair, has the respectable manner of
an aging Texas Ranger, but Peckinpah saw the dirty, sniveling desert
rat within. In Cable Hogue, his partner, Strother Martin,
proves too lovable to kill at the end, and it probably helps Martin’s
cause in this that he has Jones to stand next to him for purposes
of comparison. Jones’s glory moment is his shootout with James
Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is somehow
both comic and touching. “Us old boys oughtn’t be doin’
this to each other,” he complains, just before going out in
an attempt at a heroic last charge so half-assed and pitiful-looking
that your heart goes out to him.
 R.G.
Armstrong (1919–) — Mariette Hartley’s
father in Ride theHigh Country (my God, what did her mother
look like, and what was she drinking that night?), the spectacularly
murdered Deputy Ollinger in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Huge and glowering and with a voice that comes in like thunder filtered
through the mountains, Armstrong had a likable side that he got
to indulge sometimes with other directors (notably when he played
the mountain man Clell Miller in Phil Kaufman’s The Great
Northfield, Minnesota Raid), but for Peckinpah he was the got-to
guy for hateful self-righteousness.
 Emilio Fernandez (1903–1986) — Some
directors, having assembled a crew as scurvy-looking as Peckinpah’s
Wild Bunch, might wonder how they were going to cast the role of
the fellow
who, standing next to these characters, was clearly identifiable
as the Bad Guy. This was not a problem likely to plague a director
who had Emilio Fernandez on speed-dial. A pioneering Mexican director
in his own right and something of a legend in “Did anyone
get the number of that whatever it was?” circles, “El
Indio” was a violent brawler and reputed sadist who’s
said to have served a similar function for Peckinpah in real life,
inspiring
people to look at Sam himself and think, “Well, I guess he’s
not that bad after all, at least as long as this guy’s running
around loose.” Hatefully effective as Mapache and as the
paterfamilias in Alfredo Garcia, though Peckinpah erred in casting him
as a likable guy in Pat Garrett. When Billy the Kid interrupts
some folks who are horsewhipping Fernandez to death, you sort of
wish he’d at least give them the chance to make their case.
 Ben
Johnson (1918–1996) — A veteran
rodeo cowboy who edged into movies and did a string of John Ford
Westerns, thus
making him the strongest physical link between that old master
and our Peckinpah. Gave the performance of his life as Tector Gorch,
brother to Warren Oates’s Lyle, in The Wild Bunch. Nothing
he’d
done before had the strength and fascination of that affable man-monster;
though he’d go on to win an Oscar for The Last Picture
Show,
nothing he did afterwards felt as loose and freely tossed off.
Peckinpah pretender
John Milius later reunited Oates and Johnson in the 1973 Dillinger,
apparently just to prove that lightning doesn’t strike twice.
 Slim
Pickens (1919–1983) — Dr. Strangelove’s
H-bomb rider was never mistaken for a wallflower, but Peckinpah really
brought out his uninhibited side anyway. Lovably boisterous and
oversized most of the time, though he had the most touching moment
of his career in Pat Garrett, sitting by the side of the
water, knockin’ on Heaven’s door. Worth seeing for Pickens:
Rancho Deluxe (1975), where he sums himself up by presenting
a bill for his services as a livestock detective and allows, “You
can pay it or you can wipe your ass with it. It don’t make
no never-mind to me, I’m in it for the sport.”
 Chill
Wills (1903–1978) — Slim Pickens with rabies.
It’s a commonplace regret that Peckinpah should have had
the chance to film Blood Meridian (which was published
the same year that Peckinpah died), but to see Wills — sweaty,
psychotic, and blustering — in Peckinpah’s first film, The
Deadly Companions, is to register how close he’d come
to having done it already. A slightly mellower Chill appears in Pat
Garrett and
Billy the Kid: he’s as
mean as ever but too tired now to do anything but park himself
in a corner of his store and pass judgment on Garrett, which he
does with relish. His eyes, Garrett complains, haven’t seen
anything but the bad-news side of things since he came to this
territory,
and a close-up of those eyes confirms that they’ve been in
the territory for a long, long time.
 David
Warner (1941–) — A wandering preacher in
The Ballad of Cable Hogue, a simpleton who learned how to
walk and dress from Frankenstein’s monster in Straw Dogs,
one of those Nazi officers so world-weary and cynical that he talks
with an English accent in Cross of Iron. He’s far from
the most memorable thing in any of these movies, but it tickles
me that whenever Peckinpah had to hire a European, he always seemed to
turn to the same guy first, as if he didn’t want to get to
know any more of the weird sumbitches than he had to. In his last
film, The Osterman Weekend, he (sensibly) seemed to be sizing
John Hurt up as a possible replacement.
 Dub
Taylor (1907–1994) — Some character actors,
it’s often said, are like strong spices; you want to use
just a pinch of them, to add flavor. Taylor was like cayenne pepper
administered
to the taste buds with a polo mallet. He was never onscreen for
long, but boy, did you notice him. John Beck in Pat Garrett probably
holds the world record for enduring his company onscreen, in a
scene that ends with him grabbing the cackling, mangy old lunatic
by the scruff of the hair and knocking him out, ostensibly as an
interrogation technique, though you wouldn’t fault him for
doing it on general principles. Peckinpah also cast Taylor as the anti-alcohol
minister who leads the temperance rally in The Wild Bunch, thus
making it clear once and for all just where Peckinpah stood on the subject
of Prohibition. Essential viewing: Bonnie and Clyde, where as C.
W. Moss’s daddy he gives you new sympathy for what it must
be like to be Michael J. Pollard. It’s also fun to see him,
briefly, play a scene with his heir and successor, M. Emmett Walsh,
in The Best
of Times, an underseen comedy that was directed by Roger Spottiswoode,
once upon a time Peckinpah’s invaluable editor.
 James
Coburn (1928–2002) — Quite a sight
as the tracker in Major Dundee, from back when he was a supporting
player in testosterone-heavy ensemble pictures (The Magnificent
Seven, The Great Escape). The next time he and Peckinpah met, Coburn
had passed through his brief fling as a name-above-the-title star
and was giving the performance of his life as Pat Garrett. Solid,
too, as the lead in Cross of Iron.
 Bo
Hopkins (1942–) — Peckinpah liked characters
(and actors) who’d lived long enough to acquire a past; he
had little use for juveniles. The kid in The Deadly Companions
is dispatched at the climax with a brutal efficiency that suggests
that both the director and his hero wish that they’d done
it a couple of reels back; the pretty boys in Ride the High Country
both have a lot of learning to do from the older men they’re
with, and the best the older men can do for the prettier one is
to kill his worthless ass; Peckinpah’s Billy the Kid was played
by an actor on the wrong side of 35. But when Crazy Lee, the psycho-in-training
with the Wild Bunch, played by a young actor making his movie debut,
looked up at the men who’d fatally shot him and bid farewell
to this senseless world with the sentiment, “Say, how’d
you like to kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass?”
you could practically see the director falling in love. Peckinpah
brought him back as James Caan’s sidekick in The Killer
Elite — not much of a part, but at least he got to dress
better than Crazy Lee.
 Jason
Robards (1922–2000) — They seem more and
more like a dream pair the more you think about it. Robards starred
in the famous TV production of Noon Wine that resurrected Peckinpah’s
career in the late ’60s, then starred in The Ballad of
Cable Hogue, which is unthinkable without him. Cameoed as Governor Lew
Wallace
in Pat Garrett and came across as surprisingly smart for a guy
who wrote Ben-Hur.
 Robert
Preston (1918–1987) — Magnificent in Junior
Bonner, one of the greatest of all of Peckinpah’s father
figures. Announces that times really are a-changing by declaring
his lust to explore the unconquered frontiers of — not Mexico,
but Australia.
 Gig
Young (1913–1978) — A fine actor who, by
the time he incarnated Peckinpah’s ugliest fantasies about
corporate America (in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The
Killer
Elite) had a face that could break your heart — the face
of a sensitive, gifted man who’d spent so much time wasting
his talents that he’d forgotten what the point was supposed
to be. Essential viewing: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
 Ernest
Borgnine (1917–) — As unsightly a jumbo-sized
order of popping eyes and poorly assembled teeth as ever lumbered
onto a soundstage. That Peckinpah got Willard’s original
victim to come across as halfway human in The Wild Bunch is
the greatest
testament I know to the man’s way with actors. (Borgnine’s
performance in Fred Zinneman’s From Here to Eternity may
be even better, though I have it on reliable authority that Zinneman
employed stun guns
and large-animal tranquilizers.) Peckinpah later performed a similar
miracle with Burt Young in The Killer Elite, though his decision
to use both Borgnine and Young — sometimes in the same
scene!
— in Convoy only proves that anyone with an already healthy
ego and a capacity for hubris just needs to leave that cocaine
alone.
 Cassie
Yates (1951–) — Peckinpah’s movies
did too have some memorable women; There’s Mariette Hartley
in Ride the High Country for damn sure. And though you could
object to their roles, which do tend to be defined in relation to
their men (and worse, by their sexual relationships with their men),
Stella Stevens (Cable Hogue), Isela Vega (Alfredo Garcia),
Katy Jurado (Pat Garrett), and Susan George (Straw Dogs)
all make a contribution to the movies they’re in. Let Cassie
Yates stand in for all of them, as she can do double duty standing
in for all the fine, underappreciated performers who made a little
ripple in Peckinpah’s world. Offering herself as a birthday
surprise to Kris Kristofferson in Convoy, she’s eager
to give herself over for the pleasure of the man she’s with
but not such a pushover as to stand for Kristofferson’s slighting
reference to her “sorry husband.” “He’s
not sorry,” she insists, “he’s just had some bad
luck.” Hard to say whether she’s part of his bad luck
or all that keeps the poor guy going. She’s soft and enticing
and her offer is uncomplicated on the surface, but those sad eyes
have a suggestion of mystery to them that makes you think that Peckinpah
would have to be crazy to leave the truck stop and drop her from
the movie. (Movies based on novelty songs about the CB fad being
what they are, he soon leaves the truck stop and drops her from
the movie.) In Peckinpah’s last film, The Osterman Weekend,
she’s almost unrecognizable as a yuppie who looks as if she
wishes to God that somebody would call her husband sorry so that
she can spend the rest of the evening expanding on the theme, and
her pampered prickliness is vivid and tantalizing. And that, pretty
much, was that.
 Sam
Peckinpah (1925–1984) — Turns up out of nowhere
at the climax of Pat Garrett and looks up from the coffin
he’s building (“I’m gonna put everything I own
in here, bury it, and then get out of this territory”) to
advise Garrett, “So, you finally figured it out, huh?”
The guy has presence, but I’d hate to think that his direction
was ever this cryptic.
 Robert
Ryan (1909–1973) — It may say something about
how much people are inclined to hate traitors that people don’t
talk that much about Ryan’s Deke Thornton when The Wild
Bunch comes up. A more sympathetic picture of a divided man
who fell off on the wrong side you might never see. Essential Viewing:
Billy Budd, The Set-Up, and Caught.
 William
Holden (1918–1981) — As the leader of
the Bunch, he has the look of a man who could move mountains but
has wasted too much time doing terrible and petty things. He had:
you ever see Sabrina? Twenty years earlier, in Sunset
Boulevard and Stalag 17, Holden seemed like a new kind of smart, cynical,
yet humane star, a college-man Bogart, and in those performances
he seemed to be saying to audiences, “I’m smart and
I know you are too. I won’t lie to you.” Having hit
the big time, he specialized in glossy garbage until Peckinpah
offered him a
shot at redemption, and Holden came through with the full power
of a man who direly needed to scale back some of his self-disgust.
Tip your hat.
 Brian
Keith (1921–1997) — The great lost Peckinpah
actor. He starred as Dave Blassingame — illiterate, rootless,
not overly bright and capable of violent anger but a good man at
heart — in Peckinpah’s short-lived TV series “The Westerner,”
then carried that over into the director’s first feature,
The Deadly Companions. He and Peckinpah established themselves
as a dream team. But they never worked together again.
Joel McCrea (1905–1990) — Just
wants to enter his house justified. If that strikes you as a flimsy
notion to
hang your life on, would you let me know when you plan on telling
him, so I can watch?
 As
Steve Judd in Ride the High Country, McCrea
is simple, righteous, unpretentious, honest because he wants to
be able to go on living with himself. He’s a totally good
man who doesn’t make goodness seem like a drag. He likes
the way his feet feel right after he’s washed them in the
river after a long ride. Except maybe for the thing about his feet,
all this could be said
to apply about equally to the character and the actor; McCrea played
leads in Hollywood for decades (including a couple of Preston Sturges’
finest comedies), always delivered, was resolutely unflashy, and
today is remembered a lot less well than a lot of guys who didn’t
do half as much for the movies they were in or the imagination
of the world at large. Steve Judd dies magnificently, alone, with
no one but the camera’s eye for company. McCrea’s death
in 1990 didn’t make much of a ripple itself. But I guess
not everybody deserves a National Day of Mourning, the way, say,
Richard Nixon
did.
I’m writing this on the subway. A lady has leaned
over to ask me why I’m crying. I was not aware that I was crying,
but it appears that I am.
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