The Wild Bunch (1969), his third film role, he played Crazy Lee, left behind by the gang with their hostages as they escape an ambush.
His glee as he marches the terrified captives around at gunpoint singing We Shall Gather at the River highlighted the violent absurdity of the director Sam Peckinpah’s opening scene.
In American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas, he played the leader of a greaser gang, the Pharoahs, who frightens Richard Dreyfuss’s strait-laced Curt into pulling off a spectacular prank on the police.
His reward, Hopkins tells him with a wily grin, will be membership of the Pharoahs, complete with “car coat and blood initiation”.
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