Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Starring Warren Oates, Isela Vega
Music by Jerry Fielding
The beginning of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia starts off beautifully. There’s a pregnant girl sitting by a lake, touching herself. She seems young and pure as she’s in her own world, daydreaming away. The music is calming, a guitar strumming gently, voices humming.
This is disrupted by a servant who walks up to the girl and tells her her father wants to see her. She doesn’t seem to want to go in but eventually does. Inside, it seems as if we’re in a church but it’s just a large hallway. The girl is interrogated about who the father of the child is in front of a large group of people. She gives in after being tortured and it’s announced that there’s a $1,000,000 bounty on Alfredo Garcia.
Next we are shown various scenes of a couple of bounty hunters walking around whatever town/city, showing a picture of Alfredo Garcia to random. “He’s an old friend of ours,” they claim. Eventually they go to a bar with a man named Benny playing the piano.
Benny was in the army but now he’s a piano player making what seems to be a pretty meager living. At first he denies knowing anything about Alfredo...
After the hit men leave the bar, Benny asks someone in the bar about Alfredo’s whereabouts. He’s informed that Elita, a prostitute who Benny has fond feelings for, would know.
Benny confronts Elita, who had “relations” with Alfredo just recently, and finds out that Alfredo had died in a car accident a few days prior. This gives him the brilliant idea of chopping off the head of the corpse to sell to the gangsters for money.
Well, that’s the beginning of the story. It leads to a violent pursuit for cash... but in the end, is the money really that important to Benny?
I’ve seen most of Peckinpah’s movies and this one is full of flavour. The main character, Bennie, grows considerably in this movie. He’s put through all kind of terrible situations and by the end he realizes the craziness and wackiness of what he’s done.
Parts of this movie are great. Like the Wild Bunch there’s the theme of “scoring” big and living a wonderful life afterwards. Criminals are motivated by that “big score” and so are movie audiences.
The surroundings give this movie a very gritty feel. It really does feel like Mexico. A lot of the actors/actresses are real Mexicans and they don’t speak any English. There aren’t many subtitles in this film... the audience members that can’t understand a word of Spanish are outsiders.
The relationship between Billy and Elita is developed well. They have a certain chemistry and they seem to trust each other enough. The sound quality when they talk isn’t that hot... sometimes the sound of the background tends to be too quiet especially in some of the indoor scenes.
Warren Oates does a great job in Billie’s role. He smokes heavily, he drinks while driving, he wears his sunglasses at night... he really looks like shit for the seconds half of the movie. My only complaint about his acting is how naturally he speaks while playing the piano in the bar... I’ve never seen anyone in my life talk so casually while tinkling piano keys.
Peckinpah sure knows how to make a good movie. Every shot and every edit seems to be very well calculated. The movie uses a lot of slow motion in sequences when people are shot. This can be seen a lot in The Wild Bunch.
This is a very gritty and depressing movie. I don’t know if people would laugh towards the end when Billie has conversations with Alfredo (he’s dead, of course).
This is a tough movie to rate... while watching this movie, I felt it had many of the same qualities as The Wild Bunch. There’s a lot of desperation throughout this movie but in the end Alfredo becomes somewhat honorable. I’d give this movie four stars out of five.
