Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), directed by Sam Peckinpah.
El Jefe, outraged at his daughter's pregnancy, brutalizes her until she names the father. He then puts a bounty on the missing man. Or at least on just his head.
Not until after this setup do we see modern cars and jets and realize we are not in the nineteenth century, but rather in contemporary if still medieval Mexico.
Bennie -- somewhere between a wannabe and real tough guy, and all loser -- is friendly with a prostitute who knows how to find Alfredo. Already dead? Perfect, we just need a shovel and a big knife. How grotesque can this get?
Well, little villages in Mexico are actually medieval, and terrible, wrenching things happen. Men go mad. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. All the revenge in the world can't make up for lost love.
Warren Oates is phenomenally fine as a desperate, semi-crazed man with one last chance. He sleeps wearing sunglasses, has a clip-on tie and crabs. He's out of his league and everyone suffers for it.
Isela Vega is the prostitute who loves our hero who doesn't know if he can love her back. She is powerful in her frequent, uninhibited nudity.
In the commentary track on the Blu-ray the critics become most excited about a "rape without rape" scene, trying to interpret exactly what happens. I'll give just an outline of events:
Dirty biker Kris Kristofferson takes Elita off into the weeds with raping intent.
She does not resist, figuring it is the only way to save Bennie's life.
But once alone with him, she refuses to be humiliated or degraded.
That apparently spoils the experience for him, and he wanders off disconsolate, unable to perform.
She follows him, and it is unclear why. Is she feeling actual desire now, or is it just to be sure he is not a threat?
When Bennie gets a gun and comes to rescue her, Elita and the dirty biker are found in what looks like a consensual embrace.
Robert Webber and Gig Young are the last people I would expect to show up in this film: a sarcastic, sadistic bounty hunting couple.
This is another film widely hated at the time, a box office failure, but which is now a "masterpiece". How does that happen? The lesson: disregard film critics and reviewers. Particularly when they move with the herd. (Yes! Disregard me too! Although I haven't heard from the herd for awhile...)
Misc notes:
Bennie is jealous of Alfredo -- who spent "three days and three nights" with Elita, apparently busy hours -- even after he is dead. He blames Alfredo for everything that goes wrong, but they become pals after Bennie cracks up, though the conversation is a little one-sided.
"Bennie" was written to be Peckinpah and that's how Oates played him, but no one knows if the director actually realized this.
The body count is somewhere around 25.
Oates thought he needed a little "extra" for the scene where he comes out of the grave, so he did it while ripped on magic mushrooms. Took him days to come down.
I remember a comment by actor/author Jim Beaver: when he came to Hollywood he told his agent, "I want the sort of roles Warren Oates would be getting today."
All the stories about Peckinpah describe him as abusive and self-abusive, out of control and inappropriate. And yet people wanted to work with him and he had loyal friends, for as long as they could stand it.
Helmut Dantine, one of the office bad guys, was also a producer for the film.
All say that Emilio Fernández (El Jefe) was as crazy and violent as his roles.
Jerry Fielding score. Filmed within a day's drive of Mexico City, all real locations with many local people.
Twilight Time Blu-ray with two valuable, uncensored commentary tracks and isolated score.
