Joe Don Baker was one of the first to teach me what screen acting was. As a kid, I was a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” obsessive, wearing out our VHS collection, buying the DVDs, taking near the entirety of my life to work out what every joke meant. As any other diehard will tell you, one installment stands head and shoulders above the others: Andrew V. McLaglen’s ”Mitchell!”. McLaglen was the son of legendary John Ford repertory company member Victor, and no stylist, having traded his name to get where he did. But his no-frills approach allowed Baker to turn in one of his most memorable performances.
Baker fills the movie’s little silences (there are many) with the kind of tics a seasoned pro makes into pure instinct. He walks differently with every single other member of the cast. He checks out the maids when he walks into well-appointed drawing rooms. He eats messily during takes, wears loud, shabby clothes, sighs through briefings, looks perpetually hungover, and is stung by professional and personal slights besides all this. Yeah, he’s a slob, but he’s no slouch. He’s the beer-swilling blue-collar “Serpico,” and he’s riveting. He is Mitchell. And for all his enthusiasm and agreeable folksiness in other parts, he never once played another man the same way.
Joe Don Baker, like Mitchell, was the kind of man you underestimated at your peril. When push came to shove, he was all business.
Baker was born in East Texas in a place called Groesbeck, which was nicknamed The Friendly City, despite being famous mostly for a 19th-century race riot. “Friendly” suited Baker’s boisterous personality later in life, as he could project friendliness even when playing psychos. His Texan twang would always lurk in his voice no matter the part, but he made it work for him rather than against him. Even when assaying the same kinds of character, he found ways to make the distinctive voice, especially in a long sigh, his antennae, feeling the vibrations of the world, and announcing his presence in it. He was raised mostly by an aunt during his adolescence after his mother died far too young. His father, a gas station attendant, wasn’t close enough with his son for it to warrant a mention on his gravestone after his death in 1986. It simply reads “husband.” Baker would excel at playing kids missing the guidance and moral center that a more traditional family would have provided.
Groesbeck was no place for even a six-foot athlete to make his name. Baker, despite being the star of the basketball and football teams at the high school, found time to audition for a play in his senior year. He’d go to North Texas State College and get a business degree and join the army, telltale signs of a man with no plan, yet Baker never forgot what it felt like in front of an audience. When he’d taken care of the requirements of the service, he flew to New York and studied at the world-famous Actors Studio and worked at the ANTA Theatre on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, an institution that had once been home for workshopping plays by Arthur Miller and Robert Aldrich. Baker remained a card-carrying member of the Actors’ Studio until his death at 89 of Lung Cancer this month.
Baker took the route of many a handsome, unformed player with a love of Spencer Tracy and Robert Mitchum: bit parts in movies and TV, glorified cameos, and extra work. You can see him in bigger films like “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Valachi Papers” if you squint while he was taking increasingly large parts on “Gunsmoke,” “Mod Squad,” and “Lancer.” The first real movie he made and indeed the first proper Joe Don Baker performance was in Blake Edwards too often forgotten “Wild Rovers,” a beautiful Western tampered with by James Aubrey (Dave Kehr: “the madman of MGM…who was then doing his best to put the studio out of business”).
But Baker’s performance is intact; a thing of wounded pride. Like Arthur Kennedy in “The Man from Laramie,” he’s the reasonable son of a rich rancher family, the one who needs to hold his hair-trigger brother Tom Skerritt in check for father Karl Malden. He’s miserable, not having fit in anywhere in his father’s plans, but not wanting to disappoint the old man. He hides his bruised pride until the final showdown with old cowhand William Holden, when he can finally exhale, his job having been done to the best of his ability. Someone must have been paying attention because it’s that world weariness, that need to follow a path to its end, that defined his screen persona in the 1970s.
More supporting roles turned up, helping make the man indispensable to the American cinema of the 70s, then running on the method intensity of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman. He didn’t share the twitchy exteriority, but he could project internal conflict just as well. He’s the devil on brother Steve McQueen’s shoulder in the laconic “Junior Bonner,” a robust Sam Peckinpah b-side about personal integrity. In “Welcome Home, Soldier Boys,” perhaps the best forgotten American film of all time, he’s one of a quartet of Vietnam vets who show up ready to bring the war’s sadism back to their home turf. It starts out with grind house insanity, with the boys ganging up on a sex worker in the back of a car before throwing her out, and ends with them destroying a small town with M16s. Baker never blinks.
As a veteran and a man watching the Nixon administration ruin Southeast Asia with disgust, he had no trouble playing anti-heroes back when that term had bite. In the infamous TV movie “That Certain Summer,” he’s Martin Sheen’s boorish brother-in-law, trying and failing to tell him he has no trouble with Sheen’s homosexuality. He fumbles the gesture, and Sheen snaps at him before apologizing. He’s heard liberal platitudes once too often and is in no mood for more. He leaves the kitchen, and Baker turns away from his wife, Jan Shepard, and spits, “Some people wouldn’t let him in the house.”
Most outwardly villainous was his turn as Molly in Don Siegel’s “Charley Varrick,” a man who you simply cannot and do not want to cross. His incredible height was never more pronounced, thanks in part to a ten-gallon hat and deliberate stride through cramped rooms. He moves through the movie like a breeze, a one-man disease killing silently, the man Jon Voight in “Midnight Cowboy” so clearly wants to be. He opens every locked door in front of him, claiming whatever he wants and doling out violence to whomsoever and whenever he pleases between puffs on his pipe. “I’m Molly” is not a declaration any viewer will forget.
Baker was just as adept at playing down-home semi-heroes, too. The role that made him a household name was as real-life crime fighter Buford Pusser, the man who cleaned up McNairy County, Tennessee. His battle against gambling and moonshining and his hunt for the murderer of his wife were the stuff of contemporary legend, making headlines across the country with a big stick as his weapon of choice. In Phil Karlson’s “Walking Tall,” Baker plays him like the last honest man, completely unafraid of the childlike character the script called for him to play. His first entry into a gambling hall, eyeing sex workers with consternation and a boyish confusion, is a soliloquy without words. “Lookin’s free,” says a hostess in a see-through top.
“Lookin” is what Baker specialized in. His eyes, set deep in his handsomely weathered face, still looking every bit the star athlete, an everyman ever so slightly touched by providence. Too handsome for anonymity, if not handsome enough to be a pin-up. The wiry, nervous New Yorkers making new Hollywood classics would have been dwarfed by the gentle giant, and as he later proved, he wasn’t afraid of their more famous talent. Indeed, when opposite De Niro’s Max Cady in Scorsese’s ill-starred “Cape Fear” remake, he seems the more natural player, pouring Pepto-Bismol in his Jim Beam and issuing warnings to corruptible Nick Nolte. He all but cries in “Walking Tall” when a knife wound, robbery, and barroom brawl aren’t enough to land local hoods in jail. “The system!” he sulks, allowing himself to become the hurt, lonely boy again.
After playing Robert Duvall’s sidekick in the wonderful Donald Westlake adaptation “The Outfit,” he graduated to leading man. “Golden Needles,” a loopy Robert Clouse kung-fu movie with Jim Kelly before the pair’s better-known work on “Enter The Dragon.” Baker is the perfect host to port city intrigue right out of “Macao,” dodging gangsters and martial artists in his quest for acupuncture needles capable of giving the user sexual powers. And yes, you read that right: a hundred-thousand-dollar movie about the quest for a magic erection.
Baker is enticed to find the titular needles by old flame Elizabeth Ashley in the kind of scene Baker relished playing. He starts waxing nostalgic about his mother during their negotiations. “She used to hold my hand, say, ‘Don’t worry, darling, mama’s here.” Every time he elaborates on the story, Ashley knows his price is going up. “Used to hug me a lot, too.” Baker’s prowess on the football field became an asset in depicting physical combat. Whether administering beatdowns in “Walking Tall” or his and Karlson’s follow-up “Framed,” (the go-for-broke opening tussle in “Framed” is astonishing, as is a later car-train stunt. You worry for your own safety when watching) the studio veteran’s final film, or running from explosions or gunfire in “Mitchell!” he projected both the linebacker’s speed and the alcoholic’s stamina. As when Oliver Reed used to sword fight in the “Musketeers” movies, there’s a physical danger to the motion. This is really happening. Baker means it.
He’d play a baseball player modeled on Babe Ruth in “The Natural” opposite Robert Redford and Duvall once more. By then, he’d grown heftier and pudgier, which made him look even more like a little kid, somehow the youngest he’d ever been at age 48. His petulance at being struck out by Redford’s “greenhorn” pitcher isn’t showy. As with every Baker performance, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just who he was.
Baker’s leading man phase progressed ignominiously. The forgotten “Shadow of Chikara,” a personal favorite, “The Pack,” “Speedtrap,” and “Checkered Flag or Crash” refused to cement his reputation as a heavyweight. He turned the two-part TV movie “To Kill a Cop” into a season of “Eischied” on NBC, in which he’s a fast-talking, no-nonsense detective. The show was watchable, but it was cancelled. Greydon Clark cast Baker in the lamentable “Final Justice,” another MST3K staple. The pitiful movie convinced him it was time to shift into character actor mode, at which he also excelled. He would play a Bond villain in “The Living Daylights” and a white hat CIA agent sidekick to Bond in “Goldeneye.” he was such a joy to work with.
His work as Jack Wade in the Bond films was a direct continuation of his magnificent and BAFTA-nominated turn in Martin Campbell’s extremely dark and weird “Edge of Darkness.” He swaggers into the picture like James Brown, shiny with late-night beer sweat. “You ever been to Dallas? That’s where we shoot our presidents. Jews got their cavalry, but we’ve got Dealey Plaza.” In minutes, he’s harmonizing with Bob Peck on Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” over scotch. Later, he’ll shave while driving, making Peck take the wheel. He is a rockstar in the performance, showy, cavalier, and fun. Fun was something he could reliably bring to parts in this third phase of his career.
In TV movies and blockbusters alike, Baker bared his teeth and laughed that hillbilly laugh and just took the movie for a test drive. Whether playing drunken disgrace Joseph McCarthy in “Citizen Cohn” or diamond hungry mogul R.B. Travis in the underrated “Congo”, he’s having the time of his life. Perhaps never more so than as Big Jim Folsom in John Frankenheimer’s five-star “George Wallace.” He enters the film like a one-man Orson Welles tracking shot, down a staircase with a child on his shoulders, screaming himself hoarse to a room full of eager constituents. You want to buy what he’s selling. And yet the parts were drying up and getting worse. His bit parts in Bond movies and Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” In which he is somehow heartbreaking as a bereaved father with his 3 minutes of screen time in this madcap comedy, turned to more TV, and the least-common-denominator southern comedies. Perhaps recognizing that “Joe Dirt” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” were no way to close a career as mighty as his, Baker allowed himself one final valedictory role in the aching and quiet “Mud” by Jeff Nichols.
If it’s not in summation the Arkansas director’s best work, it is whenever Baker is on screen as vengeful father King out to kill Matthew McConaughey’s modern-day Tom Sawyer. When we meet him, he projects the darkness of loss and a kind of terrible purpose. He sizes up the hired goons his son has hired to do the job and then forces them to kneel and pray on the floor of a motel with him before sending them to go kill a drifter. Baker plays the moment with ashen solemnity, yes, but it’s nevertheless an easy reflex. You see in the hiking of his pant legs before bending his knee, the way he reaches for the hands of strangers, that this is just how he lives.
Pre-“Righteous Gemstones,” whose star Danny McBride fitted his career into the space carved out by Baker, it was a rare glimpse into the form religion takes among a certain kind of old money gargoyle. Baker is mesmerizing, somehow the most dangerous man in a room full of guys who look like they were sculpted out of rusty metal. He seems to be channelling the stoic father who he left behind in Groesbeck. The man who could commit violence for his boy, but didn’t love him enough to straighten him out while he was alive.
Baker’s reputation was never exactly in need of rehabilitation, but it’s heartening to think he’ll be appreciated for decades of solid work after he faded from the zeitgeist. His kind of acting was never attention-grabbing, but it was always alive, vivacious, gripping. Baker never played a false note and never withheld any part of himself when the movie asked it of him. Like any great player, he left it all out on the field.
