Joe Don Baker, the tall, broad-shouldered character actor who found overnight fame when he starred as a crusading Southern sheriff in “Walking Tall,” a surprise hit both at the box office and with critics, and who went on to an impressive range of screen roles over the next four decades, died on May 7. He was 89.

The death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.

Released n the era of “Dirty Harry” and “Billy Jack,” “Walking Tall” (1973) was the story of a Tennessee man who moves back to his hometown and finds it hopelessly changed by illegal gambling, prostitution and careless moonshiners. The film was, as Dave Kehr described it almost 40 years later in The New York Times, “a wild-eyed fantasy about an incorruptible leader who finds it necessary to subvert the law in order to save it.”

A low-budget production, directed by the journeyman filmmaker Phil Karlson, it opened on Staten Island months before it arrived in Manhattan but proved to be a phenomenon. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, called it “relentlessly violent” but also “uncommonly well acted.”

It was soon noticed and praised by a wide array of prominent critics. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it “a volcano of a movie” and saw in Mr. Baker, a 37-year-old unknown with a decade of credits, mostly on television, “the mighty stature of a classic hero.”

“The picture’s crudeness and its crummy cinematography give it the illusion of honesty,” she wrote.

Vanity Fair wrote in 2000 that “Walking Tall” had “a major asset in Joe Don Baker,” whom it compared to Elvis Presley.Credit…MGM, via LMPC/Getty Images

The character Mr. Baker played — Sheriff Buford Pusser, whose weapon of choice was an oversize, homemade baseball bat — was a real person. According to Variety, “Walking Tall,” which was made for about $500,000, earned more than $40 million worldwide.