Warren Oates as "Nobody"

Warren Oates is my favorite actor, and there is nobody who stands even a close second. Equipped with the face of a loser and a wide, toothy smile, Oates thrived in supporting roles throughout the 1960s and 70s, usually playing Southerners, Westerners, or expatriates living (and dying) in Mexico. But, as Benny warns the mobsters in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, "nobody loses all the time." Oates' filmography is well known to his devoted fans, from his starring roles in Alfredo Garica (1974) or Dillinger (1973) to his astute charater pieces such as Sissy Spacek's father in Badlands by Terrence Mallick (1973) or the small-town deputy in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger (1967). He starred with Peter Fonda in a cheap horror movie called Race With the Devil (1975), which was also a kind of parody of Easy Rider, with the now-settled down Fonda and Oates driving across Texas in an RV (with their wives) when they encounter a group of Satanist hippies in the middle of an orgy/sacrifice, and he was masterful in Ivan Reitman's 1981 comedy Stripes, starring Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. But while Oates was great in all of these movies, the hard drinking, Kentucky-born, former Marine became something truly legendary in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman: Ride the High Country (1962 with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott), Major Dundee (1965 with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris), The Wild Bunch (1969 with William Holden, Robert Ryan, and Emilio Fernandez), and Alfredo Garcia (with Isela Vega and Fernandez) for Peckinpah, and The Shooting (1967 with Jack Nicholson), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971 with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson), Cockfighter (1974 with Harry Dean Stanton from a novel by Charles Willeford), and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978 with Jenny Agutter from Walkabout) for Hellman. The more you watch Oates on screen--in any role--the more you see in his sheepish grin certain things about loyalty, dignity, honor, and a kind of spiritual kinship that you don't find packaged in one place very often.

But prior to and during all of this Oates maintained a prolific television career, getting a break in the late 50s with supporting roles in the Peckinpah-created The Rifleman (with former pro athlete Chuck Connors) and other westerns. In 1967 he appeared in two episodes of the otherwise forgettable Cimarron Strip, set in the 1880s Indian Territory and starring Stuart Whitman as Marshall Jim Crown and Jill Townsend as Dulcey Coopersmith, a doe-eyed and demure English girl intent on civilizing the Old West. The 90-minute show was produced (at cut rate) by the makers of Gunsmoke and aired for one season on CBS. Oates appeared in the pilot episode (with Telly Savalas) called the "The Battleground" and guest starred in the fantastic "Nobody" as the half-Indian drifter Mobeetie, a kind of "lean hound for the long ride" and "half-wit saloon swamper." The plot invloves a boxcar full of dynamite, a secretly-hatched murder plot, and the chance for a loser's redemption. Oates was, as usual, the most brilliant and noble loser around.