Too much of everything

Sick Product of a Sick System

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Putting a bullet on the two corpses apiece, Benny asks himself: "Why?" He has the answer too: "Because it feels goddamn good!"Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia is a violent masterpiece. For once I thought Peckinpah wasn't so serious about really bringing the head of a man. Turned out, I was wrong.For a while, it would seem like a road movie, when Benny and his woman, Elita take off down the road, talking about their future and everything. As the film progresses, it begins to be about a man's desperation, you might say, to get rid of the poor life he's been leading so far. The plot is very much simple. A wealthy industrialist puts a million dollar bounty on the head of the man who made his daughter pregnant. Two of his men, in pursuit of the Head, come across Benny who happens to know the man and ask of him to deliver them the Head. Benny accepts the task for a fee and later discovers from Elita, the man is already dead. Now we would follow the pursuit of the Head with Benny and Elita.Consider the scene where the pair was apprehended by two bikers who try to borrow Elita for sometime. Benny initially retorts but was asked to stay put by Elita, for whom this is not unusual, says, "I have been here before, you don't know the way." The scene is so sad even in its surface, it just shows two people who are left with no choices and hence, they do what they have to.Another scene at the graveyard when Benny wakes up to find the Head is gone and his lover is dead, what follows that was, in its own right, outstanding. After catching up with the men who robbed the Head from him and claiming his prized possession, Benny sort of develops a relationship with the Head. He goes on about talking and arguing with it. It's sort of morbidly funny but more than anything, Warren Oates, who plays Benny, has lived in a performance that is about the total desperation of a man who is obsessed with and in need of finishing the task he's set himself out for.The ensuing shoot-out on the road is brilliantly orchestrated, as you would imagine, with Peckinpah directing it. As the film ends, you also realize that it is also about the man who asserts to go out his own way. Peckinpah once remarked this is the only film of his that came out the way he intended to. In other words, his most autobiographical film. I think, you can sense it in the film's anti-hero.I would like to end this with another quote from the film, which I think, that has profound depth."There ain't nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that's in it. Or you. Or me." – Benny

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA was a punch line from the day it was released in 1974; and for director Sam Peckinpah, a commercial and artistic disaster that did great damage to his reputation; a reputation built on his impressive earlier work like THE WILD BUNCH and STRAW DOGS, both milestones in the cinema of violence. But for many of his most ardent fans in the critical community, ALFREDO GARCIA, was an ultra- violent and self indulgent wallow in ugliness for its own sake, alternately homophobic and misogynistic in the extreme. What they didn't understand was that ALFREDO GARCIA may well have been one of the most truly personal films ever made, a full representation of how Sam Peckinpah saw himself and his place in a very nasty world-that world being Hollywood.Bennie the lounge lizard is clearly Peckinpah, and his odyssey to find and retrieve the head of the late Alfredo Garcia in return for a bounty that he believes will allow him to redeem a wasted life is an allegory for all his years of toil in the film business, while the parade of killers, rapists, henchmen, Mob toadies, and El Jefes Bennie encounters along the way are stand ins for the lowlifes (mainly producers and their flunkies) who bedeviled Peckinpah throughout his career and thwarted his ambitions while stifling his talent. ALFREDO GARCIA is by Peckinpah's own account his one film that was most fully realized and free from outside tampering. And what does it say for Peckinpah that his own stand in is a sleazy, alcoholic failure, getting by down in Mexico on the wrong side of 40 by playing the piano in dive bars after years in the Army? A man willing to hunt down a corpse and decapitate it for money-said money being a reward posted by a back country Mexican crime lord, a man so ruthless he'd break his pregnant daughter's arm to learn the name of the man who knocked her up. By all recollections, the real Sam Peckinpah was a remarkably sensitive man, but one who hid it all behind a well crafted veneer of hard drinking, foul tempered, sarcastic, macho BS. He was also deeply paranoid, alcoholic and possibly Bi-polar. That he would lay it all out on film for all the world to see says much about this supremely "difficult" man.But ALFREDO GARCIA is far from Peckinpah's best work, especially looking back from the vantage point of four decades. The pacing is clearly off and the strong narrative drive of THE WILD BUNCH, STRAW DOGS,and THE GETAWAY is sorely missing-the old energy just isn't there in many scenes. Even the shoot outs-a Peckinpah staple-often feel like retreads from earlier work. One does have to allow for the passing of time when seeing ALFREDO GARCIA now and realize that movies in the 1970's-made in the pre MTV and video game era-simply told their stories at a much slower speed. When Bennie and his whore with a heart of gold girlfriend, Elita, are traveling through Mexico to find the graveyard where Alfredo Garcia is buried, the movie seems to just amble.Yet the brilliance of the old Peckinpah still shows up, especially in the opening scene, where El Jefe's pregnant daughter sits beside a quiet pond amid rural beauty. She is then summoned to the hacienda of her father and brutally forced to give up the name of the man who impregnated her-a former underling who got frisky with the boss's daughter. Only after we hear the title sentence and there is a quick cut to men racing away on motorcycles and in corvettes do we realize the film is set in modern times-a great fake out. And there is the scene where Bennie and Elita have a picnic and talk about the future; she gets him to propose and for a moment these two luckless characters actually seem to have a chance at turning their lives around. Peckinpah's love of Mexico and its way of life was never more vivid and self evident. As in all of Peckinpah's films, there is some great dialog.ALFREDO GARCIA is a great showcase for Warren Oates, one of the few movies this wonderful and gifted actor ever carried on his own. Oates spent most of his career making a lot of mediocre films and TV shows a hundred times better than they would have been otherwise if he hadn't been in the supporting cast. A Peckinpah regular from RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, MAJOR DUNDEE, and THE WILD BUNCH, his Bennie is Oates's finest hour. Who else could have pulled off those scenes where Bennie rides along in his car talking to a rotting head in the passenger seat? His sudden death in 1982 robbed us of years of great work; I've always felt that if he'd had another two decades, there would have been a Best Supporting Oscar with his name on it sooner of later, just like with Jack Palance and James Coburn.Emilio Fernandez just had to show up and not smile in order to convey El Jefe's cruelty and hatefulness. Isela Vega, who played Elita, was no great actress, but she didn't have to be, I well remember her lay out in Playboy. By all accounts, Gig Young was a degenerate alcoholic by this point in his career and the violent murder- suicide that ended his life a few years later sadly underscores his scenes, especially the bloody shootout he and his partner/lover, Robert Webber, have late in the film. Kris Kristofferson shows up as a biker who rapes Elita and briefly lives to regret it. After the debacle that was the making of PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, Peckinpah probably should have tried to make a more commercial film like THE GETAWAY, instead of something so close to his heart, but unlike his alter ego, Bennie, the man wasn't always after the big bucks.

A fine Sam Peckinpah film. Ever since I saw "The Getaway", with Steve McQueen, Warren Oates, (1928-82), does a spectacular job playing Bennie, a former Army soldier, now bar piano player who is given the opportunity to bring a man named Alfredo Garcia. This man has been known for being the ultimate playboy known. He gets his boss's daughter pregnant. He would later fall for Elita (Isela Vega), the local prostitute, and later, Bennie's girlfriend. Wanted by the boss know as El Jefe, others wanted him too. For less. Bennie is willing to go find his as well. The bad news is, he's dead. He lost his life in a drunk driving accident. The only proof there is getting his head. So Bennie and Elita go all the to the church, and grab his head. But, it doesn't go smoothly. Bennie gets attacked, and Elita loses her life. Now it's an all out war. The guys in the green car, the Garcia family, the hired hand, and the boss. And Bennie who is armed only with a .45 auto, can really come out on top. Bloodshed after bloodshed, no wonder the price was so high. This mission to Bennie was proved to be very worthless. He didn't really care about the family, but he did have a future with Elita. And the daughter wanted revenge on her father for torturing her earlier. It's another Peckinpah great that really got firepower to it. 3 out of 5 stars

From director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner), this was a film that I hoped would not only deserve its place in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but I hoped it would live up to its cool title. Basically El Jefe, i.e. The Boss (Emilio Fernández) is angered to find out his teenage daughter Theresa (Janine Maldonado) is pregnant, and he tortures her until she gives the name of the father, Alfredo Garcia, and he is offering $1 million to whoever brings his head. The search has gone on for two months, and in Mexico City henchmen Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young) enter a saloon and think talking to a fellow American like Garcia might lead them somewhere. They encounter retired Army officer Bennie (Warren Oates) who makes hardly any money playing piano and running a bar, and when they ask him about Garcia he plays dumb, and after they leave he decides to set out and find the man himself for the reward. He first goes to get his prostitute girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega), who admitted to cheating on him with Garcia, and when she tells him that the man he is looking for is dead he is excited to go and dig up his body, and after making a deal with the two henchmen he starts his road trip to find the grave. On the trip Bennie proposes to Elita, she is raped by the leader of a biker gang (Kris Kristofferson), he murders as many of the bikers as he can before they get away, and she is disgusted finding out his plan to decapitate the corpse of Garcia. After presumably getting married they manage to find the grave of Alfredo Garcia, but after the coffin is opened Bennie is knocked unconscious, and he wakes to find the head missing and Elita is dead. He manages to catch up with the men who killed her and stole the head, and he shoots them dead, and to preserve the head he gets hold of some ice, he even starts talking to it as if Garcia was alive. Next he is held up by members of Garcia's family who take the head again, and Sappensly and Quill show up as well, they are killed along with a couple of people, and Bennie reclaims the head again. With all that has happened he no longer urges for the money, he is blaming the head for all that has happened on his journey, especially for the death of Elita, but he soldiers on to find The Boss. In the end the gangster greets Bennie with the suitcase of money, and he feels satisfied to let him take it and go, but infuriated Bennie decides to take his anger out on the man who made this situation in the first place, he kills some bodyguards and of course The Boss, by the request of the pregnant daughter, and escaping he is gunned down. Also starring Helmut Dantine as Max and Chano Urueta as Manchot the bartender. Oates gives a terrific performance as the man tortured by bad events along a journey to make a big amount of money, the story is simple enough to follow, and your eyes will be engaged by the occasional bloody violence, the title almost lives up to my expectations, it is a watchable crime drama. Good!