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Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia
1974
A Mexican gang boss puts a $1,000,000 reward on the head of the young man responsible for his daughter's pregnancy, leading to a cross country pursuit. Read more
| Starring | Warren Oates, Isela Vega, Robert Webber, Kris Kristofferson |
|---|---|
| Director | Sam Peckinpah |
| Genres | Drama |
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Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia
A Mexican gang boss puts a $1,000,000 reward on the head of the young man responsible for his daughter's pregnancy, leading to a cross country pursuit.
| Starring | Warren Oates, Isela Vega, Robert Webber, Kris Kristofferson, Gig Young |
|---|---|
| Director | Sam Peckinpah |
| Studio | MGM ENTERTAINMENT |
| Run time | DVD: 1 hr 48 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Drama |
| Language | DVD: English |
| Dubbed | French, German, Italian, Spanish |
| Hearing-impaired | English, German |
| Subtitles | DVD: French, Greek, Italian, Spanish |
| Released | DVD: 20 Jun 2005 Production year: 1974 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (3)
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Sam Peckinpah's enormous talent was on the wane when he made this gruesome Mexican crime drama. But if you can bear to look beneath its gory exterior as piano player Warren Oates becomes caught up with bounty hunters pursuing that head for a wealthy landowner, there are still enough moments when Peckinpah's greatness shines through. Excitingly told, this is like The Wild Bunch, but even wilder.
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After the deathwish of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, it's logical that the spirit of a dead man should dominate its... read more on Time Out
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Most helpful member's review
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12 out of 12 people found this review helpful
Garcia...a study in depravity
This Peckinpah movie is based on a simple premise. Alfredo Garcia gets a young woman pregnant, her father orders his head on a plate.
What follows is a study of life at the lowest end of the scale. Warren Oates was never better in playing the role of Bennie, a lowfife, who happens to know where Garcia is.
The film has its faults, and Peckinpah does display some bad days on set, but overall this is a remarkably fine piece of filmmaking by any standard.
The movie is deliberately uncomfortable to watch at times, and Oates does take you on an amazing journey, not only through Peckinpah's head, but through a mexico that has never been captured better.
Not a bag of laughs, but an extraordinary work by an extraordinary director and an astonishing acting display by an actor fully believing in this project. -
Most recent members' review
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8 out of 9 people found this review helpful
A Flawed Classic
The films of Sam Peckinpah are often flawed, usually because of studio interference, but latterly by his overindulgence in alcohol and drugs, factors which combined with his psychological state to damage his considerable talent.
The Wild Bunch is undoubtedly a masterpiece, and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia might be considered a minor work with many faults, but it will be of interest to the aficionado with its use of genre conventions to allegorical effect.
The movie begins idyllically, as a young pregnant woman sits by a lake in an ahistorical Mexican landscape. It then explodes into the 20th century, as a wealthy landowner, finding that his daughter has been impregnated by Alfredo Garcia, unleashes a collection of modern day bounty hunters to bring him Alfredo’s head of for one million dollars, a considerable sum in 1974, the year the film was made.
However, the story really concerns Benny (Warren Oates), a down at heel bartender/piano player who serves up tequila and sings Guatalamera to tourists in Mexico City. A couple of cooly sadistic hitmen are touring the bars looking for Alfredo, who happens to be an ex-boyfriend of Elita (the beautiful Mexican actress Isela Vega) who is Benny’s lover.
“Wanted dead or alive!” jokes Benny, when told that they are willing to pay to find Garcia.
“Dead’ll do just fine.” comes the retort.
When Benny finds that Alfredo has died in a car crash, he thinks that the money on offer is ripe for the picking, so he and Elita set off across country to find Alfredo’s grave. The journey has tragic consequences, and once he comes into possession of the head, Benny carries it around in a sack, talking to it, his only companion as he descends into madness. He is impelled to follow the trail back up the chain of command to find out who has set the wheels in motion, and to exact revenge.
The movie has a raw feel, and an efficient, sparse narrative. The overuse of day for night filming is rather poor and erratic, although both Warren Oates and Isela Vega give excellent performances, and the dusty, battered world depicted has metaphorical resonance.
In essence, Alfredo Garcia is a pared down B-movie style revenge thriller come western, with nods to the Treasure of the Sierra Madre (one of the hitmen claims that his name is Fred C. Dobbs, Bogart’s character in Huston’s classic movie.) It can also be seen as a self portrait of Peckinpah, an evocation of a state of mind and a political allegory, which echoes some of the themes explicit in the director’s other works.
Benny is one of Peckinpah’s doomed heroes, and the film ends with the muzzle of a sub- machine gun pointing directly at the viewer, so entwining Benny’s fate with that of the audience. -
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