Badass Intensity and Holy Cool: A Warren Oates Retrospective | Features
From July 1-7, that god will walk once again, as the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York presents “Warren Oates: Hired Hand,” a week-long retrospective consisting of 13 of the most distinctive films of his career. Anchoring the series is a restored presentation of “Private Property,” a 1960 film featuring his first major big-screen performance and for years has thought to be lost. In addition, this retrospective will offer up a cross-section of titles, many of which will be presented in 35mm, which show him as one of the great character actors of his time, as well as one of the more intriguing leading men in the rare occasions he anchored a project. It's a retrospective that also serves as an alternative history of American cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to his good fortune to work with some of the most intriguing directors of that time. Sure, one could quibble about the absence of a title or two, but the movies that did make the cut are a strong sampler. There isn’t one film being shown that I would not gladly choose to see over virtually anything currently playing at the local multiplex.
Oates was born on July 5, 1928 and raised in a small town in Kentucky. After leaving a Louisville high school in 1945, he enlisted in the Marines and served as an aircraft mechanic for two years. He then attended the University of Louisville, where he first developed an interest in acting, appearing in a bunch of plays with the Little Theatre Company beginning in 1953. In 1957, he got his first big break when he went to New York City to appear in a live production for the television anthology series “Studio One.” From there, he went to Los Angeles and over the next few years, he made appearances in a number of the Western television shows that were proliferating on the airwaves at the time—“Wagon Train,” “Rawhide,” “Have Gun - Will Travel,” “The Big Valley” and “Gunsmoke,” to name just a few. While working on another popular Western of the time, “The Rifleman,” he made the acquaintance of one of the show’s creators, Sam Peckinpah, and when Peckinpah moved on to create another series, he hired Oates as one of the supporting players, beginning a collaboration that would prove to be significant to Oates’ career.
During this time, Oates made brief appearances in a couple of feature films, such as “Yellowstone Kelly” (1959) and “Up Periscope” (1959) but his first significant big-screen role would come in 1960 when Leslie Stevens—still a couple of years away from creating “The Outer Limits”—hired him to co-star in “Private Property" (pictured above), a strange, psycho-sexual neo-noir riff on, of all things, “Of Mice and Men.” In it, he and Corey Allen (another familiar supporting player getting a rare lead role) play a couple of creepy drifters who decide to focus their lascivious intentions on Ann (Kate Manx, who was married to Stevens at the time), a beautiful but neglected housewife who spends her days lounging around her isolate Beverly Hills home while her businessman husband more or less ignores her. The two guys—who change names at several points—take up residence in an empty house overlooking Ann’s yard and pool and Allen, the more worldly of the two, promises his inexperienced and somewhat slow companion that he will arrange for him to have her. He insinuates himself into Ann’s life by posing as a gardener and she is so flattered to actually be receiving some attention that she fails to pick up the obvious signals that he is trouble. The sexual tension and intrigue between the three continues to grow and when it becomes apparent that the one guy has no intention of sharing Ann with his friend, it all culminates in an explosion of violence.
