Joe Don Baker, beloved character actor who populated classic films from “Walking Tall” to “Cape Fear” with his unique spin on the brawny Texan persona, is dead at 89, his family announced. He is survived by a circle of friends and extended relations in his hometown of Groesbeck, Texas.
Standing six-foot, two inches and built like a brick wall, he was a natural athlete, playing basketball and football in high school, and attending North Texas State College on an athletic scholarship. Graduating in 1958, and after spending two years in the army, he moved to New York City to study at the Actors Studio, landing his debut in Manhattan theater in “Marathon ’33” in 1963. Small parts in Westerns on TV followed: “The Big Valley,” “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” and, notably, the pilot episode of “Lancer,” where he played the villain — a Tarantino-ized version of which was played by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
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Of course, he had to play “the heavy”: That square, broad face with slightly sunken eyes somehow made him both a natural bad guy onscreen and, sometimes, an avatar of aw-shucks Americana.
Years later, as a good guy on the trail of the evil Max Cady in Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear,” he and Robert De Niro attempt to out-cornpone each other in one particularly fantastic scene: “Well, gee golly gosh, I sure am sorry I offended you, you white trash piece of shit,” Baker tells De Niro’s Cady before adding, “Anytime you feel squirrelly, you just jump.”
Baker’s first movie role was as Steve McQueen’s younger brother in Sam Peckinpah’s “Junior Bonner.” His real breakout, though, was in Phil Karlson’s 1973 vigilante action hit “Walking Tall,” as a real-life ex-wrestling star who moves to small-town Tennessee, finds corruption there, and begins taking it on with nothing but a wooden club he made himself. A film very much in the mode of “Death Wish” or the later “First Blood,” it found an audience, and was later remade in 2004 starring Dwayne Johnson.
That same year, Baker played the sadistic hitman Molly in Don Siegel’s “Charlie Varrick.” Villains came naturally to Baker. And for Bond fans, his villain Brad Whitaker in 1987’s “The Living Daylights” really stands out. The arms dealer is really the first American Bond villain. Yes, nitpickers will suggest Christopher Walken’s Silicon Valley tech bro Max Zorin from the previous film, 1985’s “A View to a Kill” is the first — but that movie goes out of its way to say he’s a German immigrant and a product of Nazi genetic engineering, whose Nazi “father” is still very much in the picture.
Whitaker is an American villain, but also a repository of uniquely negative American traits: He’s not just an arms dealer (the twisted, black market side of the military-industrial complex), he’s outright obsessed with guns and military grandeur, insisting on wearing his own custom military uniform at all times even though he was kicked out of West Point for cheating. When he first greets the Soviet general, Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies), he’s standing still amid a waxworks selection of history’s worst military dictators — Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan — clearly admiring them and seeing himself figuratively among them.
The final showdown of “The Living Daylights” takes place at Whitaker’s villa in Morocco between him and Bond, who’s already foiled Whitaker’s plot to make tens of millions of dollars off a diamonds-for-drugs plot involving corrupt Soviet officials and unwitting mujahideen in Afghanistan. Timothy Dalton’s Bond stumbles upon the vainglorious Whitaker in his lair playing with an elaborate special-effects-assisted model full of toy soldiers recreating the Battle of Gettysburg. Bond immediately notices that Whitaker has it wrong: Pickett’s Charge was up Cemetery Ridge, not Little Round Top.
“I’m replaying the battle as I woulda fought it!,” Baker protests. “Meade was tenacious, but he was cautious. He missed his chances to crush Lee at Gettysburg. … You know, Meade should have taken another 35,000 casualties. He could have ended the rebellion right then and there. Hell, Grant would have done it.” And then he immediately springs into action with a trick move against 007. This is a villain who literally even uses a remote control to get the upper hand on Bond — that’s as American as it gets!
Supporting players in the 007 universe sometimes have a way of coming back for other parts, though, and Baker was one of the most notable examples. He later played a good ol’ boy CIA sidekick to Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in “GoldenEye” and “Tomorrow Never Dies,” and he was basically just the good guy version of Whitaker, the same exact persona just funneled in a different direction.
In a way, that’s the mark of a truly great character arc: They’re always recognizably the same in any part, but, like a virtuoso musician, can find endless riffs and variations on that persona and direct it toward different ends. In that regard, Baker was one of the greats.
