Hello In There: Cockfighter
By Zayne Reeves

Cult movies are like secrets. When I was thirteen years old, I discovered Film Threat magazine and a little movie called Reservoir Dogs and it turned my life inside out. It was my first exposure to anything outside of the mainstream and I can still remember the excitement I felt knowing that none of my friends or classmates had any idea this strange world even existed. From that moment on, the films being marketed to my demographic were as bland as cold oatmeal compared to The King of Marvin Gardens, Burn! or A Face In The Crowd. These films all had strong, defined viewpoints informed by writers, directors and actors who wanted to make you think and rewarded your intelligence and patience by giving you a moviegoing experience that could completely change how you looked at the world around you. Although I am no Chris Gore, I hope that I am able to use Hello In There to introduce at least some of you to the delightfully offbeat films that have enriched my life beyond measure and I can think of no better way to kick things off than with Monte Hellman's one-of-a-kind, Cockfighter

It terrifies me to think that Hollywood might try to remake this film someday. I envision the development/greenlight process as this ghoulish carnival of souls where Vin Diesel takes a meeting with Robert Evans, whose number Diesel got off Mickey Rourke, in the roped off balcony of some particularly garish nightclub. Vin's got his eight man entourage, who have the collective humanity of a gutted lamprey eel, while Evans is accompanied by a bright, ambitious and talented young PA who sees the job as a stepping stone to becoming the next Jane Campion and regards Evans' frequent attempts to "put wood" to her as something to be laughed off with friends over coffee. "Vin, doll, I've got your next blockbuster vehicle right here in my leathery, coke-flecked hands." Evans croaks. Vin grunts and high fives his buddies which means that he's in. Somebody makes a call to Bruckheimer and the money is now in place for Vin Diesel's Cockfighter, which Variety jokingly dubs an unofficial sequel to XXX.

But the molestation of Hellman's small masterpiece isn't over yet. Bruckheimer hires McG to helm and right away it is decided that they need to make the story a little more contemporary. No longer an atmospheric glimpse of rural America, we now get an amped-up faux reality show storyline where the cockfights take place in huge arenas filled with thousands and thousands of screaming fans. Will Patton signs on to play the smarmy show host while Rob Schneider and Kathy Griffin are brought on board as the wacky color commentators.  Oh, and something has to be done about Vin's love interest.  A genuinely interesting glimpse of a failed, dysfunctional romance ain't gonna play in Peoria, you know. So now we get Rosario Dawson or Gretchen Mol or Diane Kruger or some other talented starlet who has bad luck with scripts that constantly force them to play the lead's redeeming girlfriend. There is a faint glimmer of hope as someone involved with this travesty, perhaps Evans' PA, suggests using Tom Russell's brilliant cockfighter ballad "Guillo Del Cielo" over the opening credits. But, instead of using Joe Ely's wonderful version or hiring Dave Alvin or Los Lobos to take a shot at it, they go with Toby Keith and pipe in a couple of phoned in Santana solos for that "ethnic" flavor. You are now privy to my own personal notion of Hell, gentle readers.

Truth be told, I really have nothing to worry about here. As brilliant as Hellman's film was, it also has the dubious distinction of being one of the very few produced by Roger Corman that lost money for the B-movie maven. It was an extremely difficult film to market, even for the geniuses at American International Pictures who were past masters at helping Corman turn a profit with the help of sexed-up poster art, violent trailers and witty tag lines. The story goes that one AIP rep jokingly suggested as a tag line; "He came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states." It was certainly better than what they actually came up with, which was recutting the film to add a nonsensical dream sequence complete with nudity and a car crash so they'd have something to put in the trailer and then retitled it Born To Kill. 

Cockfighter certainly has a lot of violence, but its violence is both lyrical and deeply unsettling. It's also real, and if you are thinking about seeing this film you should know that the chickens in it actually fight and kill each other. It was an art house film for the exploitation set that wasn't able to reach either audience. If you were a twenty year old steel worker and treated it as just another drive thru double bill then you would find yourself caught off guard by this weird little movie that asks you to pay attention to it. If you were a professor of anthropology in Wisconsin you would probably find it difficult to persuade the English professor you were dating to go see a movie about strange hillbillies who train roosters to fight to the death. In Warren Oates and Monte Hellman you had an actor/director relationship that deserves mention alongside Brando & Kazan, DeNiro & Scorcese and Denzel & Spike. Unfortunately, Oates and Hellman worked for the grindhouse circuit and it took smart audiences several years to recognize the merit of what these two were doing at the time. Corman's factory, for all the good that it did during its heyday, was never interested in making deadpan, tragicomic sleepers that require patience and a slow rollout across select cities that might get what was going on in a film like Cockfighter. So, instead of getting to see Warren Oates charm Carson on “The Tonight Show” and joke about his Oscar chances, the film was quickly pulled from the second run theaters and slid into absolute obscurity back in 1974.

Cockfighter was Hellman's official followup to Two Lane Blacktop (in between he ghost directed Stuart Whitman in Shatter) which has claimed exactly the sort of devoted audience that still eludes this film. Adapted from Charles Willeford's novel Cockfighter by the author himself (who also scores in a key supporting role), the film tells the story of Frank Mansfield and his quest to win the Cockfighter of The Year medal. Frank had been a sure thing to win the award a couple of years earlier but lost his key chicken in a stupid display of braggadocio. Mocked by his arch rival, Jack Burke (Harry Dean Stanton), for shooting his mouth off and being his own worst enemy, Frank takes a vow of silence that he will keep until he reclaims greatness as a cockfighter and captures the medal. Frank's vow is highly symbolic of his relationship to the cocks he trains as they battle to the death time and time again in almost complete silence. The film is a road movie of sorts where Frank encounters a variety of strange and sometimes dangerous people as he travels across the Deep South with his stable of fighting roosters. His single-mindedness pays off in a way as he finally wins the coveted medal after a climactic cockfight against Burke. Frank's fiancée, at his behest, watches this last fight and is repulsed not only by its brutality but by his complete lack of humanity in the face of such stomach churning violence. After she accuses him of having less heart (and less of a voice) than the dead game fowl he is toting around, Frank tears the head off his prize chicken and presses it into her hand just as his business partner, Omar, informs him that he won Cockfighter of The Year. Waiting till she drives off without him, he ends his vow by saying "She loves me, Omar." With no woman, no friends, no car, house, or even his best rooster, Frank walks into the sunset with Omar to collect his medal and ante up the prize money he will probably blow through that same week.

Warren Oates' performance is as tricky a highwire act as you will likely ever see in a film. Save for a brief flashback sequence, two lines of dialogue at the end and providing the voiceover narration, Oates is silent throughout the entire film. His performance is necessarily broad in places so that his character will register at all but he is also astonishingly naturalistic and unaffected in the same breath. Even more impressive are the circumstances in which Oates created this fully limned character. Actors toiling in b-movies are not afforded the same luxuries of preparation that their colleagues working for major studio productions enjoy. Hellman had all of four weeks to shoot his movie on a shoestring budget which would have been challenging enough even if he'd been allowed to pick his crew and have final cut. Corman, interested in cutting corners to keep costs down, gave Hellman an inexperienced bunch of film students who, unintentionally, ruined scene after scene by making beginner's mistakes and, because of the limited funds, there was no opportunity to re-shoot. And although Hellman praised Lewis Teague, the film's editor, as being a pro, it must have been incredibly frustrating to endure having his work taken from him like that. With so little time to create a three dimensional character and the knowledge that the inexperienced crew might completely bungle the shot, Oates delivers the goods and disappears into his role.

And what a role! Frank Mansfield is one of the most fascinating anti-heroes to ever come down the pike. An intelligent man who retains this existential cool even under the most bizarre of circumstances, Frank is nonetheless on the losing end more often than not. In the first ten minutes of the movie, Frank gambles away his car, trailer and a hundred bucks to Burke on a bet that he should have won (he cut the groove on his bird's beak too deep) before throwing in his girlfriend as well and rationalizing that a pretty girl like her will get by fine. Frank then visits his alcoholic brother, Randall (Troy Donahue!), and Randall's wife, Frances (Millie Perkins) who live in the house that Frank owns. In order to bankroll his bid for a solid stable of cocks, Frank sells it without telling them, letting them find out one morning when a series of trucks come to haul the entire house away. He is such a compulsive gambler that he repeatedly takes ill-advised bets against shifty stragglers who are clearly too unstable even for this awful bloodsport.

All of this is presented before us completely without judgment. We are never told how we are supposed to feel about what we are seeing on screen. These are things that simply happen and whether they are good or bad isn't the point. Hellman also makes deft use of the wide shot in order to strengthen this style of storytelling. But without the right actor filling up the camera lense and keeping us interested in his every move by making clear character choices you wind up putting your audience to sleep. This happened for me with Two Lane Blacktop every time they took the focus off Oates' GTO and put it on James Taylor and Dennis Wilson. I found myself actively rooting against Taylor and Wilson's characters simply because Oates knew how to act and made them look like dull, sullen pretty boys by comparison. Here, Oates is in virtually every scene and he gives Cockfighter a sturdy frame to hang its themes of isolation and obsession on.

But Oates is hardly acting in a vacuum as Hellman surrounds him with an exceptional cast of character actors and surprisingly effective non-professionals who bring an added layer of authenticity to the film. Harry Dean Stanton matches Oates every step of the way as Jack Burke and his performance here stands as one of his finest and most underrated. In the liner notes for World Gone Wrong, Bob Dylan described Curtis, the jilted lover in the song “Delia,” as "a pimp in primary colors." It's an apt summation of Stanton's Burke as well. Throughout the film, Burke gets the better of Frank and even marries Dody (Laurie Bird), the girl Frank gave away after losing his car and trailer. Better dressed and groomed with an air about him that suggests he is accustomed to winning, Burke is the dandy fop to Frank's hard-bitten cowboy.

Stanton and Oates have such wonderful chemistry and it really is a shame that someone didn't finance a slew of buddy pictures for them back in the 70s. When Burke nervously confesses that he married Dody, the scene is absolutely riveting because Stanton's reactions to Oates' terse silence are so precisely observed that you can feel just how uneasy and uncertain his character is as he waits for some kind of response. Best of all is the flashback sequence in the beginning where Frank blows his chance by boorishly taunting Burke. There is a believable, lived-in testiness to the way they interact that can only come from two ace actors who know each other's styles in and out. First Frank goads Jack and then the tables are turned when an impromptu cockfight is set up and Oates loses his bird. The fight sequence between their birds is the film's centerpiece and it will haunt you long after the final credits roll. Their slow motion duel, a piece of visual poetry, is both horrifying and achingly beautiful and Michael Franks' moody score only adds to Oates' overwhelming sense of loss when he drops the fight and forfeits a slot in the big derby tournament.

As Frank's most bizarre opponents, Ed Begley, Jr. and, especially, Steve Railsback steal the handful of scenes they're in. Playing a young hustler with some pretty disgusting methods of motivating his birds, Railsback radiates the very same intensity of barely coiled violence and madness that made him such a perfect Charles Manson. Best known for his role on “St. Elsewhere” as well as his environmental activism, Begley goes completely against type here as Joe, a pathetic hillbilly who feebly attacks Frank after "Little Joe" (his pet cock) is quickly dispatched. Veteran character actor Richard B. Shull makes Omar, Frank's business partner, a character of considerable warmth and likeability which provides the film with a much needed break from its non-stop parade of spooky eccentrics. He also has the film's funniest and grossest moment when, during an armed robbery, Omar hides his wad of cash underneath a bathtub full of dead chickens. Laurie Bird's Dody is a flower child out of place among these hard men and it gives her character great poignancy as she is bounced from one to the other. Bird had a wonderful, open quality as an actress and it was a tragedy that she died so young. Patricia Pearcy, who also starred in the creepy/goofy Squirm, has a nice feistiness as Frank's fiancee, Mary Elizabeth, and her last scene where she lashes out has real sting.

But perhaps best of all is Charles Willeford as Ed Littleton. Ed is a cockfight judge and the closest thing Frank has to a genuine friend. Gruff but loveable. Willeford bears an astonishing resemblance both physically and in temperament to character actor James Gammon. Having written the novel and adapted it for the screen, certainly no one knew the interiors of these characters better and Willeford does a remarkable job of projecting a life outside of the frame, more than holding his own next to Warren Oates. By the way, should anyone reading this happen to have a spare copy of Willeford's book handy, please contact me via my staff email address.

Brilliantly shot by the late, great Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven and Sophie's Choice), Cockfighter shows us the gothic backdoor of a bygone America with such a cold eye for detail that you can practically smell the pit barbecue and taste the rotgut moonshine swishing around in your mouth. Thanks to Anchor Bay, the film is available on DVD complete with a bonus documentary on Warren Oates and a commentary track by director Hellman along with the film's production assistant, Stephen Gaydos. It's a little pricey for a single disc release but well worth it for a chance to see this funny, disturbing and ultimately thought provoking masterwork.

Zayne would just like to reiterate that he will be your best friend forever if you have a copy of Willeford's novel that you are willing to hook him up with.

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