Woody Strode: The Sequel

Photo by Kenneth James Bryson 

I last wrote about Woody Strode, athlete and actor, on March 1, 2013. In a blog post referring to Strode as “Django Overlooked,” I mused about his forty-year career in Hollywood, which included featured roles in such classic films as John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Richard Brooks’ The Professionals, and of course as Kirk Douglas’s worthy opponent in the climax of Spartacus. My mother, a proud UCLA alumna, thrilled to Strode’s heroics on the football field circa 1940. A few years later, while former UCLA classmate Jackie Robinson was integrating professional baseball, Strode helped break color barriers in the National Football League. Ultimately, though, he was better known as an brawny African-American actor, one whose ethnicity limited him to exotic and sidekick roles.

Much of what I know about Woody Strode I learned from his son and namesake,  who was always proud of his father’s legacy. I met Woody Kalaeloa Strode (nicknamed Kalai) when both of us were chosen to represent our country.at  Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. To serve as guides at the U.S. Pavilion, under the auspices of the State Department, we had to demonstrate our ability to speak Japanese. Kalai, who had become a UCLA Asian Studies major despite his father’s hope that he’d focus on science, was well qualified for the post. Once on the job, though, he ran afoul of the pavilion’s top honcho, who was terrified – in that turbulent era – of the rebellious youth culture that was then roiling America. Whenever Kalai’s conservative Afro started growing a little full, he was ordered to travel to Tokyo for a haircut. Because the haircut obligation had started becoming onerous, Kalai had the bright idea of shaving his head. For his father, after all, a bald skull had been a dramatic trademark. Sans hair, Kalai looked remarkably like a Buddhist monk. His fellow guides loved it . . . but poor Kalai was quickly sent home.

Though this display of individuality cost him his job, it did encourage him to keep to his own path. Back in the U.S., Kalai followed his father into the film industry, though he mostly remained on the other side of the camera. Entering a Directors Guild training program, he emerged as a credentialed assistant director. An A.D.’s position on a movie or TV set is less glamorous than essential: he (or she) must keep track of actors and crew members, fill out essential paperwork, and see to everyone’s needs. Kalai served on films like The Lost Boys and on the long-running TV series Diagnosis Murder.  Eventually he moved to Honolulu, birthplace of his full-blooded Hawaiian mother, a descendant of Hawaii’s royal family. During his years in Hawaii, Kalai worked as a teamster on many island-based productions, including Tropic Thunder and Lost. In 2011, he appeared on-camera in an episode of Hawaii Five-O (see below). revealing the easy-going charm that I remember from Expo days.

A philosopher and a gentle soul, Kalai had many friends in and out of showbiz. Sadly, he never quite fulfilled his dream of chronicling his father’s life. He died of cancer over Thanksgiving, just before his 68^th birthday. Because his passing was sudden, he and his widow Pam were stranded in Texas, where they had gone to visit her ailing mother. Pam Larson Strode, an actress who first met Kalai on a TV shoot , has been devastated by his loss, financially as well as emotionally. That’s why pals have graciously created a burial fund to help return Kalai to the Hawaiian shores he loved so well.

A fond aloha to Woodrow Wilson Kalaeloa Strode, 1946-2014

Woody Strode: Django Overlooked

Before seeing Django Unchained, I had pasta for dinner. That seemed entirely fitting, because the Oscar-winning epic (best original screenplay) is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s salute to spaghetti westerns. His particular model is the original Django, the 1966 Italian horse opera in which a common man who’s suffered great loss is elevated into a hero bent on revenge.

One huge difference, of course, between the original Django and Tarantino’s version is that his is set in the Ante Bellum South, and his avenging angel is not Franco Nero but Jamie Foxx. It’s a black man, not a white one, who rises from near death and lays waste to everyone and everything around him. Casting off the shackles of slavery, Fox’s Django is empowered by righteous anger. Truly, he comes to embody the wrath of God.

It’s the sort of role that didn’t exist for a black man when Woody Strode broke into the movies. Strode had a major career, spanning more than forty years. He was a favorite of some of the greatest action directors in the business, notably John Ford, for whom he appeared in four films, including a key role in Sergeant Rutledge. But though Strode played the title character, a Buffalo soldier in the U.S. Cavalry in the late 1880s, his role is largely that of a victim. He’s been accused of the rape and murder of a white girl, then flees to avoid prosecution. Inevitably it’s that cinematic staple, the Good White Man, who saves him. Top-billed Jeffrey Hunter, as the counsel for the defense, finds the real killer in the courtroom, and Strode is freed.

Along with victims, Strode played the occasional bad guy, most dramatically as the gunslinger in the opening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a  Time in America. And, inevitably, he played sidekicks. In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals, he’s part of a four-man posse that includes Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Robert Ryan, but only Strode is omitted from the above-the-title credits. In his best-known part, he’s an African slave forced to fight fellow captives as a gladiator. Audiences have always thrilled to the moment when he sacrifices his life so that Spartacus can live on.

 Woody Strode never planned on being an actor.  He was a multi-sport phenom at UCLA, circa 1940. While former UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson was changing the face of baseball, Strode became one of the first African-Americans to play professional football. Then he moved into professional wrestling, where he discovered (according to his son Kalai) that he could be applauded by white Southerners for beating up a white opponent. It was all in the staging: “My dad could not pounce upon and hit and punish these white wrestlers without the audience’s approval. The white wrestler has to beat my dad up to a pulp. Then my dad has to turn to the audience and say, Shall I really give it to ‘em – shall I do it? They all scream, Yes, hit ‘em, hit ‘em! And then my dad can hit him, and win, and everyone’s cheering.” As Kalai explained to me, Southern fans would “start off white against black, but they’re really good against bad.” And Woody Strode, from the start, struck them as a good guy.

 From wrestling, it was just a short hop to an acting career. He shaved his head to play a native chief in TV’s Ramar of the Jungle, and never looked back. With his strong presence and exotic look (he was almost half Native American), Strode was always a contender. But not, in that era, the mythic hero he could have been. 

Here are some photos from Kalai Strode's collection, one of Woody in a Tarzan film and one taken late in life at his Glendora, California home. Maybe I'll have a chance to write more about Woody Strode (and his family) someday soon.