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.
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.