Bo Hopkins played the friendly Southerner you were right not to trust: a drawl, a grin and something waiting behind both. Sam Peckinpah found the best use for it; the rest of the business used it until it wore thin.
Fi1m perspective
The drawl arrives first. Bo Hopkins's men are pleasant to meet, they call you friend, and the friendliness never quite settles, because he lets you see that hurting you would cost them nothing. It was one trick, done well, and he spent five decades finding lawmen, psychopaths and oily villains to hang it on.
Sam Peckinpah saw the use in it early. Hopkins made three films with him: The Wild Bunch (1969), where Clarence "Crazy" Lee was the part that got him noticed, The Getaway (1972), as Frank Jackson, a bank robber who is double-crossed, and The Killer Elite (1975). Peckinpah's films needed men who could go off at any moment and would not be mourned when they did, and Hopkins could do that without asking for more of the frame than he was given.
The two films of his we have reviewed are both ensemble pictures, and in both he is on the margin. In American Graffiti (1973), which we scored 84, he is Joe Young, leader of the Pharaohs, the greaser gang who take an interest in Curt's evening. We laughed at him and did not entirely trust the laugh; the Pharaohs are the one part of that long night that might actually go wrong, and it is Hopkins's easy manner, not any threat he makes, that tells you so. In Midnight Express (1978), which we found gripping and unfair in roughly equal measure and scored 61, he is Tex, a smaller part in a film with harsher business on its mind, and our review, like the film, kept its eye elsewhere.
The trouble with a trick that reliable is that the trade keeps asking for it. After the mid-1970s the bigger parts came in lesser films and television films, and the hundred-odd credits that followed include Dynasty and The Rockford Files. The films that remembered how to use him were the ones that gave him a room full of people to be agreeable to and a reason to stop. Ron Howard, a friend of long standing, directed his last, Hillbilly Elegy (2020), in which he played Papaw.
He was clear-eyed about where his audience was. "I go to car shows because American Graffiti is the national anthem of car shows," he said, and he went. Start there, since he did not mind you starting there. Then find The Wild Bunch, where the grin came with a gun.
Biography
Bo Hopkins was an American actor. He appeared in more than 100 film and television roles across a career spanning more than four decades.
Hopkins made his feature film debut as Clarence 'Crazy' Lee in The Wild Bunch (1969). He gained wider recognition for his role as Joe Young in American Graffiti (1973) and appeared in other notable films including The Getaway (1972), Midnight Express (1978) and Hillbilly Elegy (2020). He frequently collaborated with director Sam Peckinpah and had recurring television roles in series such as The Rockford Files and Dynasty.
