By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: actor and director Jack Starrett (pictured right in The A-Team), who helmed The Losers, Race With The Devil, Gravy Train, A Small Town In Texas and Hollywood Man.
Like so many directors who have featured in the Unsung Auteurs column, the late Jack Starrett is certainly loved and appreciated in certain – very cultish – circles, but to the general cinema crowd, he’s likely better known (if not by name) for his on-screen acting work, particularly as the parodic Gabby Johnson in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles, and as nasty Deputy Art Galt, the most brutal and sadistic of Brian Dennehy’s Rambo-baiting small-town constabulary in the 1982 action belter First Blood. Though a fine character actor with a long list of credits in film and television, Jack Starrett is, however, far more interesting for his output as a director of hard-hitting exploitation and action flicks.
Claude Ennis “Jack” Starrett Jr. was born in 1936 in Refugio, Texas, where he worked in the city’s oil fields before finally making his way to Hollywood. Tall, imposing and rigorously blue collar, Starrett was perfect tough guy material, and he scored his first screen role via actor, writer, director and Unsung Auteur Tom Laughlin, who cast him in his low budget 1965 youth drama The Young Sinner. Laughlin then became something of a fixture in exploitation biker films (often as cops), taking on roles in Richard Rush’s Hells Angels On Wheels (1967), Laughlin’s The Born Losers (1967), and Angels From Hell (1968).
A confident player in the world of low-budget, can-do exploitation filmmaking, Starrett slid easily into the director’s chair for 1969’s Run, Angel, Run, the first of several collaborations between Starrett and big, tough, muscled-up cult hero actor William Smith, who plays a biker who exposes his compadres and ends up a wanted man on the run. While also acting prolifically, Starrett forged forward as a director after his tough, fast-paced debut, helming the little-known 1969 thriller House Of Zodiac before taking the reins on what remains one of his key works.
High concept before the term was even coined, the topical 1970 exploitation biker film cult fave The Losers (aka Nam’s Angels) again stars the hard-as-nails William Smith, this time playing the leader of The Devil’s Advocates, a biker gang co-opted by the CIA to take the fight to the Viet Cong. Unleashed in the jungles of Vietnam and charged with rescuing a captured CIA agent, The Devil’s Advocates weaponise their motorcycles and highly inventive carnage follows. Cast with a ragged crew of exploitation faves (Adam Roarke, Paul Koslo, Bernie Hamilton), Starrett’s gift for action and mastery of hard-slamming stunts are perfectly showcased in this wild, freewheeling and slightly crazed mini-epic.
While working both as an actor and a prolific director of both telemovies and episodic television, Starrett continued at pace on the big screen, delivering a host of fascinating films in disparate genres, but all bound by a rippling sense of energy and hectic pacing. Starrett did impressive work in westerns (1970’s Cry Blood, Apache), psychological thriller (1972’s The Strange Vengeance Of Rosalie, with a very disturbing Bonnie Bedelia) and blaxploitation (1972’s Slaughter with Jim Brown, 1973’s Cleopatra Jones), proving himself adept with varied casts and subject matter.
Jack Starrett’s real hot streak came in the mid-seventies, when he directed a series of wondrously unconventional action-based genre-defiers. 1974’s Gravy Train (aka The Dion Brothers) was co-written by Terrence Malick and starred the compelling duo of Stacy Keach and Frederic Forest as West Virginia brothers who quit their jobs as coal miners and turn to armed robbery. Though largely unknown, this curious black comedy has major supporters in filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino (a noted fan of Jack Starrett, and especially of his regular leading man, William Smith) and David Gordon Green, and represents Starrett at his most unconventional.
More well-known is Starrett’s 1975 cult fave Race With The Devil, a terrifying, white-knuckle and wholly unlikely meld of the action and horror genres, which pits holiday makers Warren Oates, Peter Fonda, Loretta Swit and Lara Parker against a backwoods community of secretive, murderous Satanists. Built on a grim, blanketing mood of paranoia and desperation, but driven by utterly extraordinary stunt-laden on-road action sequences, Race With The Devil is an absolute powerhouse of a film, exciting and paralysing audiences at the same time.
After the failed black comedy The New Spartans (which would have starred Oliver Reed), Starrett revved it hard again with 1976’s excellent A Small Town In Texas, which sees the great Bo Hopkins at his laidback but nasty best as a corrupt smalltown sheriff who leans on smalltime rebel and just released ex-con Timothy Bottoms to leave town so he can hold on to his ex-girlfriend Susan George. Filled with Texan flavour, great performances and a host of eye-popping action set-pieces, A Small Town In Texas is another superior low-budget actioner from Jack Starrett.
Starrett reunited with William Smith (who also co-writes and produces) for the unusual 1976 action-drama Hollywood Man, which sees Smith’s actor/producer mixed up with bikers and mobsters. Starrett then closed out the popular drive-in franchise with 1977’s Final Chapter: Walking Tall, with Bo Svenson as real-life sheriff Buford Pusser, first played by Joe Don Baker in the 1973 classic Walking Tall. Starrett then closed out his career with 1982’s Kiss My Grits, a little-known action comedy with Bruce Davison, Bruno Kirby and a returning Susan George.
Very sadly, Jack Starrett passed away at the age of just 52, succumbing to liver failure after a long illness. As well as his propulsive, gleefully in-your-face big screen directorial efforts, Starrett helmed episodes of everything from Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes Of Hazzard through to Hill Street Blues, as well as a number of superior telemovies, including 1977’s Thaddeus Rose And Eddie (written by Unsung Auteur William D. Wittliff and starring Johnny Cash and Bo Hopkins) and 1979’s Mr. Horn, with David Carradine as notorious western gunman Tom Horn. And all the while, Starrett continued to act, lending his imposing frame to shows like The A-Team, Hunter and Knight Rider.
A hands-on, down-in-the-trenches director who could really make it happen, Jack Starrett was even instrumental in kick-starting the career of another exploitation legend in the late, great Larry Cohen. “One day I happened upon a group of people who were making a low-budget independent picture,” Larry Cohen told Film International in 2019. “There was a director named Jack Starrett who was a great big, gruff kind of a guy. He played the brutal sheriff in the original Rambo picture, First Blood. He was a heavy drinker but he was a goodhearted guy, a good actor who also directed a number of pictures such as Cleopatra Jones and Race With The Devil. He was making a horror picture in an old Hollywood house. I went over, spending the day watching him and his crew. Then all of a sudden it became evident that eight or ten crew people could actually make a picture. They were all really nice guys, too, helping each other out. There was a camaraderie about it. So I asked several of these guys whether they would be interested in helping me make a picture. They agreed. So I grabbed this crew after Jack was finished with them and started making my first film Bone on 16mm.”
Thank you, Jack Starrett…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
