[MacBlayne]

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

WARNING: This review will feature some mild spoilers. If you haven’t seen this, then please remedy that. If you have, and are strangely interested in the waffling of some random schmuck’s favourite film from one of his favourite directors, then read on!

Sam Peckinpah was no stranger to negative reviews, but the reaction to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was a whole new level. Only Siskel and Ebert seemed to be on the film’s wavelength. Other critics were repulsed, and some even boasted about walking out. It wasn’t just the worst film of the year, but the worst film ever. It even secured an entry into Harry Medved’s moronic scribe, The 50 Worst Films of All Time. “They HATED it,” producer Marty Baum recalled.

To this day, I will never understand what happened. This is not just Peckinpah’s finest hour, but one of the greatest achievements in all of cinema. You can hear Peckinpah pound his hear throughout the 116 minutes, pleading with an audience, or a world, that isn’t interested. And what makes it so heartbreaking is that Peckinpah knows already knows this, but doesn’t know what else to do but keep pounding his heart.

The plot of Bring Me… is very sparse. A ruthless man known simply as El Jefe demands the head of one Alfredo Garcia for the crime of impregnating his teenage daughter. So encompassed with rage, he offers a $1,000,000 reward for Garcia’s decapitation. His team of ruthless bounty hunters happily take up the task. But rather than do all the hard work themselves, they secure the services of down-on-his-luck Bennie (Warren Oates) to find Garcia, promising him $10,000. Bennie happens to know his lover was sweet on Garcia, and is more than delighted to learn Garcia is already dead.

Bennie sets off on what should be an easy road trip, dreaming of the life $10,000 can offer him and his lover, Elita (Isela Vega). By the end of the film, well… as the tagline stated, “Why is this man’s head worth $1,000,000 and the lives of 21 people?”

Some critics at the time slated the decision to have Garcia already dead, but they are missing the point. Bennie isn’t out to commit murder. Garcia is dead – he’s just taking the head. It’s not the worst thing imaginable, which he quickly reminds a doubtful Elita. “There's nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that's in it - or you, or me. The church cuts off the toes and fingers and every other damn thing - they're saints. Well, Alfredo is our saint.”

This is the start of Bennie’s downfall. As the saying goes, whether it be a rock or a grain of sand, they both sink to the bottom.” Despite the protests of Elita, Bennie is blinded by greed, and cannot see the abyss he’s careening towards. Peckinpah was a man troubled by greed within his own life. Peckinpah was famously confrontational, but usually stuck to the film until he was removed from edit suite. As much as he despised what MGM did to his Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, he was there to see it all. For at the end of the day, Peckinpah accepted their money. He hated them for chasing the box-office without a care for what they were offering, and he despised himself for going with it. In one interview with Playboy magazine, he called himself a whore (funnily enough, in that same interview, he recanted this by saying whores are wonderful, and should be treated favourably).

But for all Peckinpah’s self-loathing, he cannot hate Bennie. Bennie’s decision, as ethically indefensible as it may be, it requires courage. Bennie, and others like him, has to put himself out there. We all want wealth, but are unwilling to sacrifice ourselves to gain it. Bennie tries, damn it, and that demands respect.

And it’s not just Bennie who commands Peckinpah’s love and respect, but the females within the same world. Peckinpah is a filmmaker frequently accused of demonising women within his films, as well as beating them in reality, but Bring Me… shows a whole other perspective to him. In the opening scenes, El Jefe’s daughter stands defiant against her father, despite the suffering and humiliation she endures in front of her extended family (mostly female, and subjected to shame that they cannot help this girl). She breaks down after some horrific violence (that the camera does not show), but she will have her day later in one incredible line.

But it’s Elita who takes Peckinpah’s heart, and presumably the audience. Isela Vega gives one of the most beautiful, haunting performances in any film. Elita is a strong, hopeful, but never naïve character that doesn’t show courage in her physical prowess, but in what she is willing to give up. She doesn’t grab machine guns, nor does she drop a cynical speech to woo the Twitter crowd. In what must be one of the most devastating moments Peckinpah ever filmed (and this man built a career out of that), Bennie proposes to Elita. It is a moment of genuine sweetness and beauty, and wipes the floor with most romantic dramas. However, as much as we would love this moment of tranquillity to stretch forever, they are confronted by a pair of rapists armed with a gun.

Bennie also carries a gun, and wants nothing more than to use it. Elita knows this, but is frightened at the chance that her lover, her future husband, her chance at escaping a life of being a “whore” could easily slip away, and thus sacrifices her body to the rapist. As she leaves with her rapist, she says to an apoplectic Bennie, “I been here before and you don't know the way.” Hand on my heart, this delivery almost destroyed me, and proves that for all of Peckinpah’s issue with women, he DID NOT hate them.

Said scene also shows off the incredible range of Warren Oates. When Bennie finally catches the rapist, he shows rage, anguish, pain, jealously, and fear - all within the space of the five seconds it takes for him to pull the trigger. Oates was, and still is, one of the most incredible performers to grace the earth. We are lucky to just have had him. He was usually relegated to supporting roles, but Bring Me… provides him with a leading role to support his talents. However, he did have plenty of inspiration.

It was only after the film had been finished, and shown to the producers, that Peckinpah realised that he had made an autobiography. Peckinpah had a lot of trust in Oates, and give him a lot of freedom in his performance. Oates recognised Peckinpah in the script, and thus mimicked Peckinpah in his performance, right down to the white suit, and sleeping with sunglasses on. At this point in Peckinpah’s life, he was losing his battle with depression and alcoholism, and wore sunglasses to hide his haunted eyes. Knowing this makes it slightly easier as to why Bennie acts the way he does.

And like Peckinpah, although greed could cloud his intentions, he was a man of his word, bound by some old-school notion of honour. Bennie promised to bring the head of Alfredo Garcia, and he will deliver. But he also made a promise to Elita. He made a promise to himself. And those promises need to be fulfilled.

The final moments are Peckinpah breaking loose from the shackles of the studio system. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He doesn’t care. He has to take a chance. Like Bennie, he’s just going to risk it and hope for the best. However, unlike Bennie, Peckinpah suspects what will likely happen, and the final freeze frame tells us what that is.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a masterpiece. There is no other way to put it. It is haunting, cynical, hopeful, repugnant, contradictory, and beautiful. It sees the worst in us, and it still loves us like a disappointed father. It is Peckinpah at his purest. He was once asked if there was a film he felt that wasn’t brutalised by the studios, and he responded, “I did 'Alfredo Garcia' and I did it exactly the way I wanted to. Good or bad, like it or not, that was my film.”

He’s not wrong.