With Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Sam Peckinpah Gave Hollywood (and Himself) the Middle Finger
It’s 1974, and Sam Peckinpah has fully gone rogue.
The guy they called Bloody Sam went through every bit of hell making his last film, 1973’s revisionist acid Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The studio ultimately took the film away from him, releasing a hella truncated theatrical version that was predictably slammed by critics. (Peckinpah did manage to literally steal away his preview cut from a test screening, which would eventually get a home-video release many years later.)
Even though he was pushing 50, the years of alcoholism, cocaine and butting heads with studio heads practically turned Peckinpah into the sort of tired, aging hellraiser he literally made movies about. The same man who bloodied up the Western with the revolutionary 1969 oater The Wild Bunch was fed up with Hollywood. He went to the only place he felt comfortable making his latest bullet opera: Mexico.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a neo-Western set in Mexico, made with a Mexican crew, mostly starring Mexicans. “For me, Hollywood no longer exists,” Peckinpah told Variety. “It’s past history. I’ve decided to stay in Mexico because I believe I can make my pictures with greater freedom from here.”
While some folks in the biz were perturbed by his words (the Motion Picture and Television Unions threatened to boycott the film upon its release, forcing Peckinpah to say he was misquoted), Peckinpah nevertheless made a down-and-dirty B-movie that could fall into both exploitation and Mexploitation genres.
The Wild Bunch alum Warren Oates stars as Bennie, a two-bit barroom piano player who takes on the job of finding Alfredo Garcia, who impregnated a Mexican crime lord’s daughter. Everybody knows who Garcia is, including Bennie’s girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega), who was with Garcia before he died in a drunken car crash.
Bennie takes Elita on a romantic road trip, eventually revealing to her that it’s a journey to find Garcia and get “proof” of his death. Bennie half-heartedly assures Elita that Alfredo’s severed dome is their ticket out of the gutter. But it’s obvious this trip is doomed from the get-go.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is one weird hit of cinematic rotgut. The whole movie reeks of sleaze and squalor; even the cinematography looks defiantly shitty. (Peckinpah and cinematographer Alex Phillips Jr. both disliked wide-angle lenses and adored zooms & multiple camera setups.) Equal parts melancholy and sinister, it’s the kind of twisted ‘70s actioner where men are violent, misogynistic, desperate and ultimately pathetic creatures. Oates is all embittered pitifulness as Bennie, an ornery fella who is tacky in every sense of the word. (His wardrobe, complete with a clip-on tie and sunglasses provided by the director, can be best described as “washed-up chic.”) Sure, he can be tender and sensitive with his girl—that is, when he’s not getting rid of the crabs in his pubes with alcohol.
Oates isn’t the only gringo Peckinpah brings in to play sensitive brutes. Veteran actors (billed as “guest stars”) Robert Webber and Gig Young show up as whore-punching bounty hunters who may or may not be lovers. And, in the movie’s most tense and odd sequence, Kris Kristofferson appears outta nowhere as a gun-wielding biker who attempts to rape Elita, only to recoil after he rips off her top. (A sympathetic Elita makes out with him anyway.)
As expected, both critics and audiences didn’t know what the hell to make of this. In his New York review, Michael Sragow said the film “has the air of a frantic last stand” and “is a catastrophe so huge that those who once ranked Peckinpah with Hemingway may now invoke Mickey Spillane.” Although made on a $1.5 million budget, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia only grossed $700,000.
Yet, for all its unrepentant skeeviness, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia has built up a beloved legacy. The movie’s title alone has been referenced in everything from Fletch to British panel shows to an episode of Gilmore Girls. Cinematographer Roger Deakins has said Garcia visually influenced No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s most Peckinpah-like flick. In a 1991 Vanity Fair essay on Peckinpah, James Wolcott marveled at its bleak, appalling, utterly hopeless pulp: “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the most unreconstructed chunk of slow-death ever committed on and against film.” (He also said it’s “as funky as a disco funeral.”)
Film critic Charles Taylor ended his 2017 book Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s praising Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, saying it’s “the greatest of the films I’ve tried to make a case for.” For Taylor, Garcia is Peckinpah purging himself of both antiquated ideas of masculinity (“Peckinpah’s reckoning with macho,” Taylor wrote) and contempt for the film industry. “[Garcia is] a vision of a man who can see rehabilitation only in self-annihilation,” says Taylor, “who has come to see professionalism as a way of playing the game of the moneymen he despises.”
As far as cinematic fuck-yous go, Garcia is one nasty, nihilistic, self-immolating trip to the edge. It’s nearly two hours of Peckinpah giving the middle finger to Hollywood and himself. As my friend Sean Burns once put it, “It’s a movie about a not-so talented artist selling out to very bad men who happen to have all the money, and it’s impossible not to trace the autobiographical pangs of Peckinpah’s self-loathing as Oates wears his director’s signature sunglasses and mustache throughout.”
Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.