In Leslie Stevens‘ 1960 picture “Private Property,” a skin-tightening psychosexual thriller shot on the cheap in just five days, two pervy male gazers named Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Warren Oates) have lunch with a beautiful, sexually-frustrated housewife named Ann (Kate Manx, the director’s wife). They have grilled cheese and lemonade, but they really want her.
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These are two of the creepiest guys of the 1960s, the decade that gave us Norman Bates, the various would-be suitors of Roman Polanski‘s “Repulsion,” and Richard M. Nixon. They’ve been squatting in the house next door and gawking at Ann from an upstairs window, watching her strip and swim in her pool, watching her cut through the sinuous, shimmering water as only a beautiful naked woman, or maybe a knife, can. They’re terrifying because real guys really do this kind of stuff, and their delusional self-justifications still resonate 50-plus years later, in the MRA era. Duke plans on seducing Ann so he/they can have sex with her — preferably alive, though there’s heavy insinuation that dead is fine, too. (Does the title refer to the house, or the pool, or Ann herself?) But there’s something deeply sad about the scene, too: When Duke and Ann leave to go inside, Boots says, meekly, “What about me?”
Yeah, what about Warren? Oh, he gets what’s coming to him, don’t worry. Warren Oates always does. But this is maybe the only time he doesn’t know that.
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Warren Oates had a sad, strange kind of grit. Even as one of the two would-be rapists here he’s emasculated, whiny, excited just to listen to some records and, when given a knife and a terrified woman splayed before him on a bed, too tame to follow through on his threats. “I just wanna look at you,” he says. He’s a pathetic creep, yet he never vies for sympathy. Oates was that rare actor who wasn’t afraid to be unlovable, a loser.
“Private Property,” a movie about watching, hasn’t been seen for decades. Deeply steeped in the male gaze (but by no means sympathetic towards it), it depicts its would-be rapist creeps as a bickering couple. They both seem inadequate, somehow coming up short — Duke’s pants are slightly too small, as is Boots’ jacket. The film print was only found a few years ago, and restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. The movie is a masterpiece, so upsetting and unflinching in its depiction of horrifying sexual aggression and deviant desires, it never received a rating. The restoration is playing as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center‘s Warren Oates retrospective, which every New York-dwelling cinephile owes to themselves to check out. Oates’ weathered mug looks best on the biggest screen possible.
Oates seemed like he was born defeated, a fatalist who specialized in losing and playing losers with faces dragged down by whiskey and everyday ennui. Save for “Private Property,” he always plays his parts as if he knows he’s doomed, a whiskey-sodden Sisyphus. He’s just a supporting player in Stevens’ film, but his turn hints at the startling profundities he’d extrapolate in subsequent roles. One of the few character actors who could rival Elijah Cook Jr. for the saddest fall-guy in American movies, Oates imbued every performance with an indelible malaise. He didn’t chew scenery, but he looked like life had chewed him up and let him dribble down its chin.
Oates amassed an incredible body of cult-ready work, including bit roles in “Ride the High Country,” “In the Heat of the Night,” and “Badlands,” and major parts in “The Shooting,” “Chandler” (“as in Raymond”), “Dillinger,” “Two-Lane Blacktop,” and “Race With the Devil.” In John Milius‘ “Dillinger,” Oates manipulates Milius’ saccharine, sentimental penchant for turning violent killers into violent supermen. (Milius could write terse, tough-guy dialogue that stings like a mouthful of nails, but he shot action scenes like a troubled child with a blood fetish and no rhythm.) Oates interprets the flashy, cock-swinging robber as a sort of folk character writing his own legacy — Dylan does Dillinger; he’s lanky and lean, the one time Oates got to play a hero instead of a zero. He doesn’t even die at the end.
Oates found his greatest consort in Sam Peckinpah, the notorious fringe filmmaker who used slow-motion and serrated editing to create jarring juxtapositions between violence and sex, violence and love, frontier justice and savagery. “The Wild Bunch” gave Oates his biggest platform, and a grand death as he gets mowed down by gunfire in the film’s final fleeting moments, but “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” a film as maligned as it is adored, gave him his most tragic character. We meet Oates’ Bennie as he’s slumped over a sleazy bar piano, bloodshot eyes guised by big black sunglasses. Time has carved up Bennie’s face and left a sad smudge of hair above his upper lip. (That mustache makes Bob Dylan‘s whiskers look like a shrubbery.) It’s a dingy hole in the dirt, inhabited by gadflies and barflies. Gossip flows like liquor. Bennie needs dough but isn’t tough enough to kill for it, so he embarks on a jaunt to retrieve the titular head from the titular Garcia, who is already dead, and collect a blood bounty. Bennie’s a vulture. He knows it, and he lives with it… until he doesn’t want to live anymore.
Milius said that he wrote his films with Warren Oates or John Wayne-types in mind because they had the same kind of idealistic sentimentality as his films. Milius, self-congratulatory as he may have been, gets it wrong. Wayne brought his own ideals and idealism to each role. Oates brought life. He was more akin to Lee Marvin, another actor who seemed to have actually lived. Of course, Oates wasn’t a six-foot fist like Marvin, but he didn’t need to be: He brought all that emotional baggage, that melancholy and cynicism, with him. Some guys were tough guys; Oates was the guy those guys were afraid to be.
