Flashback: Woody Strode

   I walked through the living room one night in February while my colleague Ms. Applebaum was watching TCM. The movie she had on was "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", John Ford's last great western, released in 1962. The scene I happened to catch was the one where John Wayne, drunk and despondent, sets fire to his house, apparently planning to burn up with it. His hired hand, played by Woody Strode, sees the flames, races into the house, and runs out again, carrying Wayne over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. 
    Think about that. Here's a guy who's running - not stepping or stumbling or staggering, but running - while toting John Wayne. I can't think of any other actor who ever did that. I'm not sure any other actor could. 
    Strode's athleticism was no fluke. He'd played professional football in the U.S. and Canada, and done some professional wrestling between early acting jobs. With a tall, lean, muscular frame and a shaved head that was distinctive at the time, he was physically imposing and a formidable presence on the screen. 
    Like most acting careers, Strode's was a product of luck and timing. Early on, there were escapist B pictures with titles like "Jungle Man-Eater" and "Bride of the Gorilla", along with more upscale productions like "Demetrius and the Gladiators", "The Ten Commandments" and "Pork Chop Hill". (If he'd come along a decade or two later, in the age of blaxploitation or commando-style action movies, he might've become a major star, but that wasn't the case.)
    The parts and the movies gradually got better - at least some of them did - and in 1960, he landed two of his most significant roles: the title character in Ford's "Sergeant Rutledge" and Draba, the gladiator who fights Kirk Douglas in the arena in "Spartacus". 
    A key scene in "Spartacus" shows what he could do when he got a real character to play and a decent script. Spartacus, who's new to the gladiator school, approaches Strode's character and asks him his name, just to get acquainted. Strode's response is matter-of-fact. "You don't want to know my name. I don't want to know your name. Gladiators don't make friends. If we're ever matched in the arena together, I have to kill you." Strode doesn't raise his voice when he says this. It's not a challenge or a threat, it's a simply stated matter of life and death, and Strode's unaffected delivery makes it convincing. 
    Strode rarely played leads, and his characters are realists who want to survive, which means they're deferential to the prejudice and stratification of the prevailing society. It's not always explicit, but it's always there, and, again, it's a matter of timing. What's interesting is to watch how he plays that. He was a black actor playing black characters not long removed from a time when blacks in the real world were being lynched and the standard role for a black supporting player in Hollywood was bug-eyed comic relief. Strode did not do bug-eyed comic relief. His characters, like the gladiator in "Spartacus", tend to be soft-spoken and self-contained. They concede as much as they have to, but no more. There's an inherent, defiant dignity about his work, even in roles and movies that don't amount to very much. 
    In "The Professionals", one of his best roles and one of his best films, Strode plays a bounty hunter who joins Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan on a dangerous mission in Mexico around the time of Pancho Villa. "Anybody object to working with a negro?" their employer (Ralph Bellamy) asks. Marvin dismisses the question with a withering look and says, "What's the job?" Strode doesn't even acknowledge the question. He doesn't say anything at all. 
    Sidney Poitier was the first black actor to make the A list, the first African-American star who could reliably carry a mainstream film at the box office. Strode's career and Poitier's coincided, but Strode was older and had a different set of skills. If Strode's range as an actor was more limited than Poitier's, so were his opportunities. Timing yet again. But try to imagine Sidney Poitier, or anybody else, running out of a burning building lugging a 200-pound John Wayne and making it look as easy as a trip to the corner store. Only one guy could do that. Woody Strode.