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.
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