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Apr 14, 2021 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin

Director Sam Peckinpah’s soul is splattered across the dusty Mexico desert in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, his most personal film and the only project that ever reached cinemas the way he intended.

Art as complicated as its creator is often misunderstood, and the film was ravaged by many critics and bombed at the box office in 1974 only to grow in reputation in the years since.

Its hero, Bennie (Warren Oates), is soaking wet in booze and ready to self-destruct. He even wears Peckinpah’s signature sunglasses.

We meet Bennie sitting behind a piano in a Mexico City bar, miserable and looking sideways at life’s big cosmic joke. Two square-jawed hitmen sit down across the piano. Bennie, unstirred, offers the men a free round. “What do you want to hear?” he asks. The men don’t name a song, they are looking for Alfredo Garcia on behalf of a crime boss, El Jefe.

The boss is out for blood because Garcia impregnated his young daughter. Bennie knew Garcia, and is hired, basically at gunpoint, to deliver the man’s head.

His first stop is to find Elita (Isela Vega), a former girlfriend who also dated Garcia. She discloses that Garcia died in an accident shortly after the tryst with the boss’s daughter, and she agrees to take Bennie to the grave under the pretenses of showing respect. He conceals his actual plan to excavate the body, cut off the head and deliver it for the $10,000 reward.

The severed head is Bennie’s ticket away from a lousy life playing piano for tourists. He equivocates, bargains and convinces himself that the grisly reward is what Garcia would have wanted for him and Elita. Garcia’s already dead, after all, Bennie tells himself.

His quest is Peckinpah’s love letter to Mexico, the country where he often lived. His camera finds its home in dented cars, rural villages, the rough bars and roadside motel rooms, the smell of gasoline and the feeling of sand and soot on every surface.

Bennie and Elita renew their romance on the road, sharing a tequila bottle, pausing for roadside picnics, and playing acoustic guitar until reality materializes in the form of two outlaw bikers. It instigates one of the first half’s uglier scenes, as one biker (Kris Kristofferson) attempts rape.

Misogyny in Peckinpah’s work is impossible to ignore, and it’s often unclear whether Elita’s rough treatment is representation or endorsement. Alfredo Garcia fairs better in this regard than The Getaway, which appears to justify abuse by Doc (Steve McQueen).

Bennie, conversely, defends women, but the male gaze plagues Alfredo Garcia’s first half.

The film earns its reputation as one of Peckinpah’s finest efforts in the second half, as Bennie’s journey to return Garcia’s head slyly morphs from material to existential, and eventually into a question of redemption or revenge, all tangled in ethical knots.

Peckinpah is credited as the inspiration for generations of violent filmmakers, often Quentin Tarantino, but his sense of humor and visual style is recognizable all over, notably in the Coen brothers’ films set in the southwest – No Country for Old Men, Blood Simple and even Raising Arizona. Those border-town films take cues from Peckinpah’s absurdist streak and recombination of noir and western – the dark comedy of incompetence, the cruelty of chance and unfairness of life.

The violence and its aftermath leaves us with indelible moments – Warren Oates in a filthy white suit, alone, talking to his friend’s severed head in a bloody sack. He’s not asking for forgiveness, he knows it’s too late for that, but he will make every futile effort to give all the bloodletting some kind of meaning. A head in a bag must be worth more than money.

The new Special Edition Blu-ray from Kino Lorber feature a fantastic 4K scan of the original film, two audio commentaries, an image gallery, a Trailers From Hell segment with Josh Olson, trailers and TV spots.

(www.kinolorber.com/product/bring-me-the-head-of-alfredo-garcia-special-edition-blu-ray)

Follow Ed McMenamin on twitter at @edmcmenamin.