Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

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  November 28, 2009

  DragonEyeMorrison

  Peckinpah's nihilistic trip is still fresh to this date, and still capable of split opinions as much as in it's time. It's in the vein of Corbucci's "The Great Silence", a bleak and dark story where there is no glory for anyone involved. It's a one way trip to doom and tragedy, a...( read more)nd you just can't help but watch it. It's my kind of story, and Peckinpah's direction, along with the whole cast, make it work. It's the kind of story that few directors dare to tell, it makes sense that so many people hated this. This is the exact opposite of the "feel-good" model of cinema that most embrace.

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  June 8, 2009

  FangsFirst

  Some have called it one of the worst films ever made, and a Pulitzer Prize winning writer called it a masterpiece. I couldn't remember why I had vague notions of dislike attached to the movie--dislike from others, I mean--until I started wandering around trying to find out why. I...( read more)t wasn't hard; a lot of people seem to think the movie is just irretrievably awful, though it's the only film Sam Peckinpah ever had final cut on, and the one he apparently called his most personal. It's to be expected--just look at the title!--that this is not a film that was going to do anything to shake his nickname of Bloody Sam. I have seen many Peckinpah films, actually, which is unusual when I'm reviewing something by a director whose name is so well known, but this time I can point to reviews of The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Ride the High Country, and say I've also seen The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Straw Dogs and The Getaway.
  
  Theresa (Janine Maldonado) is the young daughter of the clearly powerful El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), who summons her with tough guys who say her father is asking for her. She's pregnant and the way she clutches at her belly makes it clear that this child is relevant to her summons. Taken in hand by the two men, Theresa is held roughly and El Jefe demands to know who the father of her child is. Shrinking in no way from finding this out by any means necessary, he pries the name from his daughter--Alfredo Garcia. He offers a million dollars to whoever brings him the head of Garcia, a veritable caravan of eager, greedy bounty hunters leaving his estate to find the man. Spreading out, Quill (Gig Young) and Sappensly (Robert Webber, more on him later) wander into a bar after trying numerous other leads, and find a man behind a piano (Warren Oates), playing and chatting up the customers of the bar. They latch onto this man, Bennie, when no one else will give them any information. They offer him a miniscule chunk of cash for his services, and he accepts, following his own local contacts. He's told that Elita (Isela Vega) is most likely to know Garcia's whereabouts, which leads him to a swearing bout, because Elita is his girlfriend (albeit a prostitute). Elita tells him that Garcia is already dead because of an accident, and so Bennie decides to gamble for more money from the bounty hunters. He argues them up to ten thousand, and heads off. Unknowingly, he and Elita are followed by two of the other bounty hunters already on Garcia's trail.
  
  It's worth noting that the Pulitzer Prize winning writer is deserving of it for his writing skill, but it's also worth noting that he's a colossal moron. I'm speaking, of course, of Roger Ebert. The unfortunate fact of this is that he's not consistently wrong OR right. He hates movies for stupid reasons, or praises them for worse ones. So, that does not mean that I should have felt dread if I'd known he said this was a masterpiece, nor excitement. I don't know Michael Medved's opinions or qualities very well, so I have little to say about his claim that this is one of the worst movies ever made, except that I was pretty sure he'd seen enough movies to have actual bad ones on such a list. Shows what I know about him, I guess.
  
  This (as the "Peckinpah Scholars" commentary suggest repeatedly) is not an easy film. It's not a fun film--though it can be funny--and it's not a pleasant one. It's dark and it's violent (most people expect these things if they know Sam, though, at least) and it's thoroughly unrelenting in its cynical feeling about humanity and the world. Many people die (the trailer claims 25, I feel that's probably rounded, even if it's rounded up, but am not the type to go back and count), there are some unpleasant scenes of brief torture and assault and the like, and a pair of bikers (Kris Kristofferson and Donny Fritts) come upon Bennie and Elita in the wilderness only to take a liking to her--with an obvious end intention. Bennie and Elita are sympathetic characters, even if likable may or may not be the right word, to it's not a hollow or detached set of unpleasant events either. That isn't to say that the film is just crushingly depressing or hopeless in tone, but rather in its "message" about the world. It moves along and doesn't leave you with that feeling that you just want it to end because it's so horrifically awful, but you are still shaking your head and hoping something goes just a little better. There's a secret satisfaction that this hinges on, as we do have a protagonist to get through the whole movie with, after all. We know we've got Bennie to the end for sure, because this story can't continue without him.
  
  Oates is not an actor whose work I know very well. I've seen small roles from him in 1941 (and considering I've forgotten most of that movie, it's no surprise, I think, that I don't remember him in it), Badlands, Shenandoah, Ride the High Country, Stripes and In the Heat of the Night. I honestly couldn't tell you where in any of those, so I'm left primarily with The Wild Bunch, where I still don't have a role held down in my head. He's fantastic here, allegedly playing a version of Sam himself, an ex-pat in Mexico who thinks of himself as a tough guy but who stumbles when faced with actual tough men. He doesn't lack the actual skill (he's pretty good with a gun), but he is miserable at the attitude and the mannerism. Gig Young and Robert Webber show the opposite, both cold and calculating in their approach to the whole business, disinterested in anything else and willing to do anything to get what they want. This was a bit disorienting when Webber's face kept floating through my head as someone with glasses and an easy, friendly manner of speech. I couldn't identify the role until I looked back through his work and there it was: 12 Angry Men. He was the ad-exec with funny anecdotes who didn't pay attention at first. This is essentially a complete opposite role, as he is absolutely creepy and terrifying as a clearly psychopathic sadist. Vega has the right balance to match Oates, an outward vulnerability of sorts--playing on accepted social conditions for women--that hides a superior strength, unlike Oates' attempts to be a tough guy that make him look ridiculous.
  
  There's a lot to be said about the film in terms of its expressions of love lost or unrecognized, the possible costs of greed, the nature of revenge and trying to achieve it (and I mean this in the Chan-Wook Park sense, incidentally). This is most of what makes it unhappy as a film, because we see a certain madness encroach on Bennie, as well as the circling whirlwind of violence that surrounds the search for Alfredo Garcia's head. Not everyone harmed is even involved, some are completely innocent, but the greed and vengeance drive violence into their vicinity and bring violence into their lives anyway. Bennie manages to maintain his "innocence" in the audience's eyes not by avoiding moral transgressions, but by justifying them. Not justifying in a way that makes them acceptable, but in a way that tells us both that he is trying to convince himself and believes what he says after a fashion, and that he is really not completely sure, but has devoted himself to this and to trying to get this, this last chance to escape his dead-end job.
  
  So, was Ebert wrong? Not this time, not at all. The film is clearly doing exactly what it intends to, with all of its violence and darkness, and it does it very, very well.

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  November 9, 2008

  rubystevens

  bloody fantastic 70's grindhouse style thriller. it doesn't get any grittier. warren oates goes from loser to total badass! great atmosphere. this is the kinda stuff tarantino and rodriguez try to manufacture with varying results. see the real deal

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  January 14, 2008

  kenstachnik

  Pure Peruvian Pekinpah...this shit will make you loco!

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  January 5, 2008

  organgrinder136

  rated somewhere else before being a member of flixster. one of peckinpah's not so amazing but still good efforts

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  November 27, 2009

  mayorcrunch

  Hay un elemento de justicia poetica al final de "Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia"; creo que todo mundo obtiene lo que merece.
  La cinta es muy violenta, sin embargo la historia nos atrapa aun sin sentir simpatia por ninguno de sus personajes (hasta el mismo Alfredo Garcia er...( read more)a un hombre despreciable). El director, Sam Peckinpah, dirige con mucho estilo y captura perfectamente la crudeza de los pueblos mexicanos y los criminales y bandidos que la habitan. Aun cuando no sea una historia facil de digerir, vale mucho la pena ya que pertenece a ese genero titulado "Grindhouse", donde la violencia es el elemento principal.
  "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" es una pelicula muy entretenida que con los años se ha convertido en una cinta de culto. Recomendable.

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  September 3, 2009

  ctblood

  A modern-day Western; by far the most off-beat and disturbing film of Sam Peckinpah's career.

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  August 17, 2009

  hossein13

  Unbelievable how personally you can be touched after such a strange movie and characters. The duo of the headhunter and the detached head makes one of the best road movies ever.

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  July 16, 2009

  willerror1

  Reviled by many, considered by some to be San Peckinpah's masterpiece, this existential modern-day western Mexican manhunt features the always-welcome Warren Oates. It revels in cruelty, grunginess, misogyny--indeed, misanthropy--slow-motion death, and some terrific lines. Shovin...( read more)g off goons hanging around a cemetery: "Don't look at me with your goddamn fuckin' eyes!" To an already-dead body as he shoots it: "Why? Because it feels so damn good!" And to his prostitute girlfriend who objects to gathering up the head of a man dead and buried: "The church cuts off the feet, fingers, any other goddamn thing from the saints, don't they? Well, what the hell? Alfredo's our saint. He's the saint of our money, and I'm gonna borrow a piece of him." Also contains the classic bit, perhaps a cinematic anomaly, of trying to kill crabs with tequila. Yes, those kinds of crabs. There is nothing Warren Oates cannot do.

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  June 5, 2009

  rickrudge

  Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
  
  This Sam Peckinpah film isn't a feel-good date movie. It's actually dark, brutal, and hard to look at, but it's a very personal expression of Peckinpah, which tells you where he was coming from. Although it was a box office failure, i...( read more)t has grown to become a cult classic, especially among Peckinpah fans.
  
  The movie is about a rich landowner padron, El Jefe (Emilio Fernández) whose daughter was knocked up by Alfredo Garcia. El Jefe puts a million dollar price, literally on his head as proof that he's dead. A whole entourage of private detectives and bounty hunters begin combing several countries looking for this guy.
  
  Benjamin (Warren Oates) is a luckless, low-life wonderer, now playing in a piano bar in Mexico, hustling the tourists. He meets two of these detectives and finds out that his prostitute girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega) knows Al Garcia in the biblical sense, and also knows that he died in an accident and is buried in his village. He's offered $5,000 to bring the detectives Al's head. However, he's being followed by sinister men for a double-cross.
  
  Bennie takes Elita on a road trip with the idea of cashing in on digging this guy up, to the disgust of Elita. Bennie and Elita's relationship is an unusual one, filled with love, desire, disgust, and anger, but at the same time you know that they love and care for each other. Bennie is obsessively driven, in part for the need for money, then for vengeance, and retribution. It's erie watching Bennie talk to Al's ever-ripening and fly-covered sack that his head is in, while driving his beat-up Impala down the road.
  
  I'm not necessarily a big Peckinpah fan, so I have mixed feelings about this movie. I was very disappointed when I first saw this film in the theaters, but have slowly grown to like it on DVD, but I realize that it's not for everyone.

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