Far
be it from me to advocate bad behavior but, as your humble critic, I advise you
to buy a bottle of tequila if you give this movie a chance or decide to watch
it again. The cheaper the better. Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is many things; surreal and
morbid travelogue, drunken road trip movie, hallucinatory take on its times,
and a character study of a man with nothing left to lose and spiraling into
darkness. Those searching for cheerful cinema should look elsewhere. Those
looking for family oriented fare should run and not look back.
Peckinpah’s
renegade credentials are beyond dispute at this point. His elegiac Ride the High Country, featuring western
stalwarts Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in the final major work onscreen,
feels like finishing school now for Peckinpah, a salutatory goodbye to
tradition spiked with Peckinpah’s auteur vision and rough-hewn personality. The Wild Bunch, his late 60’s tour de
force, featured William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates
in what still rates as one of the Western genre’s finest moments. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,
Oates’ second turn with Peckinpah, gives the perpetually bedraggled Oates one
of his key starring roles, but Oates is doomed to play second fiddle to his
cargo. A severed head in a sack.
Trailer:
Oates’
character, a dissolute American scraping by via any means necessary in late 20th
century Mexico, accepts a job transporting a rotting head to a Mexican crime
lord. Consequences, naturally, make this a much more complicated job. It’s a
woozy movie, filmed in overheated hues, and Oates’ character seems to move
through the movie’s narrative with a gradually gathering sense of desperation
and hysteria.
There’s
a sense of this movie being a sort of Easy
Rider tumbling into utter madness. This is particularly accentuated by the
cameo appearance of singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson in a violent scene
coming off as a dangerous take on the era’s ethos. Someone, in Peckinpah’s
world, is always ready to take advantage of peace and free love for their own
devices and desires. The movie’s ending is a little predictable, if you’re
familiar with Peckinpah’s work, but nonetheless conforms to the movie’s overall
mood. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
comes across like an extended, reality-distorting binge drunk and the smell of mescal
practically wafts off the screen.
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