Man on the Border

Jesse Walker | August 19, 2009

Bill Kauffman has written a nice tribute to Warren Oates, the Kentucky-born actor and self-proclaimed "constitutional anarchist." Kauffman doesn't have anything to say about Oates' least anarchist performance -- a comic turn as the drill sergeant in Stripes -- but he nails the series of restless roles Oates played in the '60s and '70s. "Warren Oates had roots and he had the wanderlust," writes Kauffman, "and that tension is palpable in many of his characters, footloose men of the border states or the South who have lost home and can't quite seem to find it again."