



For roughly forty years, R.G. Armstrong’s burly, grizzled presence, mean eyes, and gruff, marble-mouthed Alabamian drawl were almost inescapable. Appearing in supporting roles in over eighty films and ninety TV shows, most of them Westerns, Robert Golden Armstrong usually found himself cast as sheriffs, clergymen, drunks or sharecroppers, most all of them extremely angry, and a good fistful crazy as jaybirds to boot. Armstrong was born in Birmingham in 1919, attended the Actor’s Studio, and first achieved wide acclaim for playing Big Daddy in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Then in the mid-’50s, after several years performing both on and off Broadway, he decided to make the move to Hollywood.

Everything was just fine there for a long stretch, he remained busy for some two decades with supporting roles playing the aforementioned sherrifs and angry preachers in a number of high-profile films and popular TV Westerns. He became friends and worked on several projects with Sam Peckinpah, Andy Griffith and Warren Beatty. Then an odd thing happened. In the latter half of his career, Armstrong seemed to develop a strange but comfortable relationship with the Prince of Darkness. Who knows? Maybe he pricked his finger and signed a contract that would at last allow him to appear in something that didn’t involv cattle rustlers. It’s interesting Armstrong would claim his primary inspiration, particularly for those crazy preacher roles, came from Walter Huston, who himself played innumerable characters on speaking terms or better with Lucifer—even giving a believable turn as Satan himself in 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

It’s not at all surprising to hear a genre actor like Boris Karloff played his share of Satanists or otherwise Satanic characters throughout his long career. It’s also not shocking to hear a character actor like, say, Strother Martin or Ernest Borgnine might take on the rare devilish role. Even Bogart himself played a vampire once, regret it as he did. But it is deeply strange to note that an actor like Armstrong, known almost exclusively for his redneck and Western roles, would become so closely associated—certainly far more than any other single actor of the era—with the Satanic cinema subgenre of the ’70s and ’80s. It makes you wonder, especially considering he was by all accounts such a charming, cordial and funny fellow off-screen. One hint may come from an interview in which Armstrong explained, “My mother wanted me to be a preacher so bad, it broke her heart when I didn’t. That wasn’t my cup of tea. I had repressed a lot of things in me from my father’s action and behavior towards his children. I didn’t want to be a man like that, I didn’t want to be violent, so I repressed it. When they started giving me these villains, I started drawing on that and I saw I had all the fury of hell and violence there, that I was really psychotic inside, because I could go into an instant rage or hostility. It was not acting, it was real.”

Perhaps it makes sense considering what was coming down the line that his first screen appearance would be in 1954’s Garden of Eden. Yes, it was just a light comedy about a nudist camp, but there was Armstrong lurking about, blissfully unaware how his and Satan’s paths would soon be intertwined. And while certain other tenuous Satanic connections could be made for other early films like Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd, and while there was an air of the unquestionably demonic in a number of his Western characters, Armstrong’s side career as a Satanic standby didn’t begin in earnest until 1975’s Race With the Devil.

Warren Oates and Peter Fonda star as a pair of old friends who, along with their wives, are taking a cross-country vacation in a motor home. After witnessing a woman murdered during a fire-lit Satanic ritual in a field near a small Southern town,they become the cult’s next target. Understandably upset by this, they report the murder to the local sheriff. As the half crazy good ol’ boy Sherrif Taylor, Armstrong is trodding on what was for him at that time some mighty familiar territory. He’s both helpful and dismissive, but on the surface anyway seems to be doing everything he should to investigate the supposed ritualistic murder. Soon enough, though, he’s revealed to be merely the first link in a mind bogglingly vast Satanic conspiracy.

Two years later he would appear as Amos, a drunken, wife-beating redneck who lives in a shack off a New Mexico highway in Elliot Silverstien’s The Car. Although the film is at heart another Jaws knockoff, this time with the shark replaced by a dark and malevolent automobile mowing down random townsfolk, it has an occult twist in that it’s strongly hinted the Devil himself is behind the wheel. Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey was even brought on to be the film’s technical advisor for that added air of unfathomable authenticity. Armstrong may not be playing a devil worshiper here, and it’s unclear if he had any dealings with LaVey on or off the set, but he does again share some screen time with Old Scratch, albeit in automotive form.

Things grew more interesting the following year with the redundantly titled TV movie Devil Dog, Hound of Hell. As the premise has it, a Satanic cult with a strange sense of humor summons Satan to appear and mate with a German Shepard (!). Armstrong plays Dunworth, a member of the Satanic beasiality cult who in daylight hours is a friendly local farmer who drives a vegetable truck around the suburbs. After the German Shepard gives birth to a litter of adorable devil puppies with evil psychic powers (!), Dunworth loads them onto his truck and, friendly as can be, drives around town distributing them for free among the children he meets on the street. The film co-starred Richard Crenna (who was in a number of doozies around that time) and former Disney child star Kim Richards, who had coincidentally also appeared with Armstrong in The Car.

It always struck me that Armstrong was also supposed to appear in that same year’s The Evil, Gus Trikonis’ low budget and derivative horror film about a demonically possessed house. It owes a great deal to all the earlier cinematic variations on Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, as well as 1977’s The Sentinel and a dozen other haunted house movies. Richard Crenna reappears as a man forced to confront Satan himself in the form of an obese and sharp-tongued Victor Buono swathed all in white. Sadly perhaps due to budgetary restrictions or scheduling conflicts, Sam the drunken and superstitious caretaker, a role clearly written with Armstrong specifically in mind, was instead played by Emilio Vargas.

Three years later Armstrong returned to the Devil’s embrace in 1981’s Evilspeak, this time playing Sarge, the angry drunken redneck who for some reason seems to live in the filthy basement of a military academy’s chapel. His exact role within the academy is unclear, but he always seems to be sleeping off a bender down there in the basement. He also tends to molest young cadets when afforded the opportunity. It’s an interesting picture for several reasons. It was a rare chance for underappreciated character actor Clint Howard to take a leading role, here as a bullied orphan at military school who at long last gets to exact a little otherworldly revenge on his many tormentors (with a little help from Satan). A decade and a half before the Internet and three years before the release of the first Mac, Evilspeak was also a prescient vision of the evil potentials of home computers. And it was almost singular within the subgenre as a film that deliberately and self-consciously manipulated audiences into cheering for Satan, who in the end isn’t nearly as creepy and scary as Armstrong’s child molesting drunk.

A distinct and curious pattern was certainly developing by that time, made all the more curious when you note so many of Armstrong’s devil movies seemed to appear three years apart. Perhaps that was written into the contract.

The often hilarious 1984 Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn is not exactly a Satan film in the traditional sense, but does focus on a cult of adult-slaughtering children led by a fanatical Puritanical teenage preacher whose isolated existence in a rural Nebraska town leaves them worshiping a mysterious demon who has something to do with corn. Well, that was apparently close enough for Armstrong, who shows up briefly here as Diehl, a preemptively unhelpful mechanic who lives just off the highway on the outskirts of the town. He and the young murderous cultists have come to a tenuous understanding—he agrees to steer any passing would-be visitors clear of the town, and so long as he does the cultists agree not to kill him. So in a way, he’s once again made a deal with the devil,

Another three years after that, Armstrong signed on as a semi-regular character named Lewis Vendredi on the short-lived TV horror series Friday’s Curse (originally called Friday the 13th: The Series until they realized how confused and upset people were that it had nothing to do with the slasher film franchise). The show concerned two young cousins who take over a dead uncle’s antique shop, only to learn the uncle in question had made a pact with the devil, leaving them the unpleasant task of trying to track down all the cursed antiques he’d sold to the unsuspecting. Armstrong appears in a number of episodes as, well, just look at the name. Perhaps this was his homage to The Devil and Daniel Webster, just as his earlier crazy preachers were an homage to Huston’s role in Duel in the Sun.

Three years later once again, he appeared in the music video for Metallica’s song “Enter Sandman,” which at that time only made sense given neither the band nor the song made any bones about their Satanic connections. Still another three years after that he had a small turn in Warlock: The Armageddon, a fantasy sequel about a group of Druids trying to prevent Satan’s return to earth, or facilitate it or something. It’s confusing. In 1998 he played a character known only as The Old Man on Millennium, created by The X Files’ Chris Carter. While originally the show, marked by darkly religious overtones, concerned a retired FBI serial killer profiler, it took a weird turn in the second season. That’s when Armstrong pops up as The Old Man, , a shadowy and powerful figure who pulls the strings behind a conspiratorial organization determined to hasten the Biblical Apocalypse. It’s never made clear if he’s supposed to be Satan per se here, though he certainly gives off that vibe, having by then had plenty of practice.

Armstrong’s final role before his retirement in 1999 at age 80 was in the made for TV movie Purgatory. Described as a kind of Western Twilight Zone, the story concerns a group of violent bank robbers on the lam who find themselves in Purgatory quite literally, though here it takes the form of a town in the Old West populated with the wandering spirits of famed gunslingers jockeying for their chance to be released to either heaven or hell. And Armstrong plays The Coachman, of course, who will take them where they’re going.

In and amongst all the deviltry, Armstrong remained busy elsewhere, still playing preachers and drunks and sheriffs, with a few judges and generals and characters known simply as “The Old Man” tossed in. But something kept drawing him back to the Satanic roles every few years, and I’m not exactly sure what, or what his mom would think of it. Certainly is curious though.

by Jim Knipfel