Warren Oates: Across the Border

'Nobody loses all the time,' mused Warren Oates in his greatest role, Benny, in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. But if anyone was born to play losers it was Oates. As Ned Beatty recalls, 'You could smell whisky and bad breath on him; he was toothy and small, with eyes that have seen too much solitary confinement - but for some of us, he was the only human being in motion pictures.' Although he never made it as a star, you only have to look at the friends and collaborators Thurman has assembled here to know the ragged glory of the man: novelist Thomas McGuane; directors Hellman and Peckinpah; Harry Dean Stanton and Peter Fonda. He was a 'constitutional anarchist', says Harry Dean, and the movies bear him out.