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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nA true cult novelist\u2019s cult novelist, Charles Willeford drew upon a lifetime of hardscrabble experience for inspiration. Born in Little Rock Arkansas in 1919 and orphaned at the tender age of 8, he spent his teenage years tramping through America during the Great Depression, riding the rails and pitching camp with his fellow hobos. At 16, he lied about his age and joined the army, eventually serving as a tank commander during World War II where he earned a bevy of medals and commendations, including a Bronze Star, Silver Star, Purple Heart and Luxembourg War Cross. After the war, he tried his luck as a painter, boxer, book critic and college instructor, all the while turning out dozens of stories for pulp magazine and paperback book publishers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Willeford\u2019s fiction contains all the two-fisted violence, seedy sexual depravity and punchy prose demanded by denizens of the dimestore, but they were also far more complex and intelligent (as well as much weirder) than you\u2019d guess just from looking at their lurid\u2014and often misleading\u2014covers. Willeford had a keen ability to tear through the smiling fa\u00e7ade of midcentury America in order to expose the depraved soul and black heart that lay below. Free of any trace of pedantry or pretension, his utterly unsentimental prose painted a realistic (yet often absurdly hilarious) portrait of societal order on the brink of collapse.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the pessimism that pervaded his work, Willeford maintained a deep adoration for art in all its forms, film included. Film especially; according to his widow, Betsy Willeford, he developed a serious interest in cinema after discovering the underground and experimental film movement of the 1950s. Willeford even taught a Film Appreciation course at Miami-Dade, introducing students to foundational works of the silent era and from around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given his love for the medium, it makes sense he jumped at the chance to write the screenplay for the adaptation of his 1962 novel Cockfighter<\/em> when it was optioned in the early \u201870s by Roger Corman. The legendary head of New World Pictures originally planned to direct the film himself, but he eventually handed the job over to Monte Hellman. Like so many members of the New Hollywood Generation\u2014including Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese\u2014Hellman cut his teeth directing B-pictures for Corman, although by the time he came to Cockfighter<\/em> he had established himself as an auteur of the American New Wave by way of his revisionist Westerns The Shooting<\/em> and Ride the Whirlwind<\/em> (both 1966) and existentialist road picture Two Lane Blacktop<\/em> (1971).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hellman brought several of the actors from the latter film along with him, including Laurie Bird, Harry Dean Stanton and most, importantly, Warren Oates, who went from playing an annoying motormouth in Blacktop<\/em> to playing a self-willed mute in Cockfighter<\/em>. Rounding out the cast was Willeford himself, who more than holds his own in a substantial supporting role. With his bald plate, bushy mustache and gravelly voice, he actually leaves quite the impression, not least of all because he bears a striking resemblance to Wilford Brimley. If he\u2019d wanted to, he probably could have made it as a character actor.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cockfighter<\/em> delivers exactly what its title promises, following ace trainer and gambler Frank Mansfield (Oates) through Georgia on his quest to be named Cockfighter of the Year. Mansfield is a classic Willeford anti-hero: a stubborn, violent, but uniquely principled man willing to sacrifice everything he has\u2014his money, his home, his true love, even his voice\u2014in pursuit of an ideal which will prove his self-worth, even if only to himself. Hellman\u2019s moody, contemplative style proves a good fit for Willeford\u2019s narrative, which many will be surprised to learn is not the piece of Southern-fried hixploitation its grisly premise and frank title seem to suggest, but rather a tragicomic picaresque, albeit one drenched in buckets of chicken blood. (The animal cruelty on display does make the film a hard sell, to say the least.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Willeford would later compare<\/a> the process of writing a screenplay to \u201chaving a second hemorrhoid operation,\u201d he found the overall experience a positive one, enjoying his time on set and admiring what Corman and Hellman were able to achieve with the finished film. But to the dismay of all involved, Cockfighter<\/em> was a commercial failure. Corman\u2014who rarely lost money on a film\u2014tried to recoup his investment by rereleasing it under a new title, Born to Kill<\/em>, but his efforts were all for naught.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Willeford had just begun to enjoy his first taste of mainstream success when he passed away at the age of 69 from a heart attack, having finally broken through to a wide audience with his popular detective series about the shambolic, but dogged Miami homicide detective Hoke Mosley. The first book in the series was 1984\u2019s Miami Blues,<\/em> an off-beat and exceedingly violent tale of a career criminal named Frederick J. Frenger, Jr., who accidently (and improbably) murders a Hare Krishna, before going on to steal Mosley\u2019s badge and gun (as well as prized dentures) and embarking upon a crime spree through the streets of Miami. Willeford was aware that Fred Ward\u2014the ruggedly handsome actor best known at that time for roles in Southern Comfort<\/em> (1981), The Right Stuff<\/em> (1983) and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins<\/em> (1985)\u2014had optioned the novel, but he died before pre-production could commence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ward initially planned to portray Frenger in the film, while Gene Hackman was slated to play Mosley. However, after Hackman dropped out, Ward took over that part and Alec Baldwin was cast as Frenger, while a fresh-faced Jennifer Jason Leigh rounded out the cast. Jonathan Demme was approached to direct, but he passed the job along to George Armitage, whom he knew from their days working for\u2014who else?\u2014Roger Corman. Each of these changes was for the best: all three leads turn in stellar work, particularly Baldwin, whose animalistic performance makes him alternately terrifying and tragic. The film also contains some of his best comedic work, including a random scene where he tries out his best Cuban accent, or one in which he attempts to stop a liquor store robbery while armed only with a jar of tomato sauce.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite solid reviews across the board, Miami Blues<\/em> suffered a similar fate to Cockfighter<\/em> upon release, failing to recoup its modest budget. Like Cockfighter<\/em>, it has since become a cult favorite, if not quite a full-fledged cult classic.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s still more than can be said for the third and least-seen film in the Willeford canon, The Woman Chaser <\/em>(2000). <\/em>Directed by the frustratingly reclusive Robinson Devor (Zoo<\/em>, Pow Wow<\/em>), this adaptation of the author\u2019s 1960 \u201cpsycho-pulp classic<\/a>\u201d centers around Richard Hudson (Patrick Warburton, giving the performance of a lifetime) a gleefully amoral and at times downright satanic used car salesman who decides the only thing that will give his life meaning is to turn his idea for a movie\u2014a bleak, existentialist road picture not entirely dissimilar to Easy Rider<\/em>, Two-Lane Blacktop<\/em> or any number of downbeat films to come out of the \u201870s (Willeford was nothing if not prescient)\u2014into the real thing, and he\u2019s willing to cross any and all moral and legal boundaries to bring his uncompressing vision to fruition. At its cynical core, the story is essentially a retelling of Ayn Rand\u2019s The Fountainhead<\/em>, but one which revels in its hero\u2019s sociopathic tendencies, rather than excuse them by presenting selfishness as some kind of guiding moral principle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/cockfighter-1024x575.jpg\")
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