Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Sam Peckinpah’s favourite film he directed, us? not so much (Review)

 Acclaim and success are very different beasts when considering the director, sometimes neither matter and the films they made that chimed with them the most have been overlooked or lost in the shuffle. While he has gone down in cinematic legend with the Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, it was the more unassuming Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia that he had the fondest feelings for. In his own [paraphrased] words, … Alfredo Garcia was the one film that was exactly as he intended it with no producer or studio interference – it was undiluted Peckinpah. “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah’s film wasn’t lost only overlooked or lost in the wake of his big hitters, no, it featured in 1978 book “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” and some critics counted in among the worst of the 70s, yet, the film had a special place in its director’s heart.

That very same film joins Arrow Video in 2017 with a collection of interviews to make any ardent collector weak at the knees. In … Alfredo Garcia, Warren Oates stars as the down and out bartender Bennie who has been presented with an opportunity to make enough money to escape his dead-end lifestyle and start anew. All he needs to do is bring the head of Alfredo Garcia to a powerful crime syndicate as the ever-parodied title suggests. As bleak as that is it still goes awry when locals, his prostitute girlfriend’s conscious and competition get in the way. Distraught and defeated, Oates’s Benny – implied as being a Vietnam veteran – progressively loses his loose grip on his sanity with him eventually conversing with his former friend’s disembodied head.

Black comedy may be implied on paper but the actualisation of Peckinpah and Gordon Dawson’s script is far from the comic – on the contrary … Alfredo Garcia is a film of nihilism, unsympathetic souls and self-destruction. And it’s through those very same ideological and emotional beats that the film becomes a bit of a slog. A slow film in which unlikeable outsiders do bad things to each other and while that is far from uncommon in this realm of cinema, it has little of the style that marked out the better films peddled by Peckinpah and his peers.

With its grime and grain, the film opens in an impressive Mexican manor house as a daughter is questioned with furious intensity about whose child she is pregnant with. As far as communicating the status quo, there is little that comes as close and with a language barrier to contend with, no less. As the scene develops, it shows the lengths the gang boss and Father goes to for his answer – a single-mindedness and precursor to the violent descent into nihilism that Benny falls into. In this one scene, we see the DNA of the film laid bare.

The cult appeal of this film has to come from somewhere and that ‘somewhere’ is a towering performance from Warren Oates. We first see him wearing sunglasses indoors and a beaming grin with every new customer that enters his bar. With his usual patter of local girls and cheap beer he is the king of his small, insignificant domain and then an aloof, quiet duo that asks after their ‘old friend’, Alfredo Garcia. The pressure and upset painted upon his brow, while he simultaneously tries his best to keep up his sales patter, establishes Bennie from the off as a man of contrasts. Later, his relationship with his prostitute girlfriend has an openly abusive edge, making the scene with Kris Kristofferson’s biker a tricky quandary of a man grasping what little he has. That scene and the way he treats Elita (Isela Vega) dramatises his inner battle with his violent past. When Bennie breaks, there is an inevitability born from his performance and characterisation and it’s only in the absolute despair that he is consumed by his manic disposition. To recommend a film on the basis of one performance is not something I make a habit out of, but, in the case of Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Warren Oates earns all of it.

If I could sum up Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia in any way, it’d be like this. Using the language of the Neo-Western, Sam Peckinpah drops us into a sun-drenched world of nihilism, hate and down and outers and throughout the slow crawl of the film he inflicts punishments upon an already hateful man. Punishments upon punishments that see this hateful character break and upon this break he goes upon a murderous rampage, a blissfully ignorant rampage that sees him hurt anyone and everyone around him. This is not a pleasant film by any stretch, nor was it intended as one, what it is is a brilliantly acted character study of a broken soul as performed by a Warren Oates at the peak of his powers. You know if this is going to be for you, if it’s not, there’s nothing here that will endear you towards the movie.

Arrow Video are commended for many a reason, chief of which is bringing the obscure and cult back into the limelight with a selection of extras that the mainstream could only dream of. The other, more universal, the reason is the sleeve art. The newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain has to rank up there with the finest the label has ever produced, up there with Night of the Comet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the recent Bloodstained Butterfly. End of the day, though, this is one for the Peckinpah completist and all you fans of ugly 1970s nihilism.

Thanks for reading our review of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

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