Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Tráiganme la cabeza de Alfredo García) (1974) is an action-adventure film directed by Sam Peckinpah and featuring Warren Oates.
Made in Mexico on a low budget after the commercial failure of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Peckinpah claimed that, of all his films, Alfredo García was the only one released as he had intended. The film was a box-office and critical failure at the time, but has gained a new following and stature in the decades since.
Plot
Teresa, the pregnant teenage daughter of a powerful man known only as "El Jefe" (Spanish,"The Boss") (Emilio Fernandez), is summoned before her father and interrogated as to the identity of her unborn child's father. Under torture, she identifies the father as Alfredo Garcia, a lothario whom El Jefe had been grooming to be his successor. Infuriated, El Jefe offers a $1 million reward to whomever brings him Garcia's severed head. News of the bounty spreads quickly, and, in addition to El Jefe's own henchmen, dozens of freelance bounty hunters, bandits and gangsters set about scouring Mexico and the United States border for Garcia.
The search progresses for two months. In Mexico City, two of El Jefe's personal henchmen, a pair of business-suit clad dispassionate hitmen[1], Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young), enter a saloon and encounter Bennie (Warren Oates), a retired United States Army officer who makes a meager living as a piano player and bar manager. The two men ask about Garcia, believing that they will have more luck getting answers out of a fellow American. Bennie demurs, saying that the name is familiar but that he doesn't know who Garcia is.
It turns out everyone in Bennie's bar knows who Garcia is; they simply don't know where he is. Bennie goes to meet his girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega), a prostitute at a bordello. Elita admits to having cheated on Bennie with Garcia, who had professed his love for her, something Bennie refuses to do. Elita informs him that Garcia died in a drunk driving accident the previous week.
Bennie is excited by the possibility of making money by technically not having to do anything wrong. (He sees nothing particularly immoral with desecrating a grave, as its occupant is already dead.) He goes to Sappensly and Quill, who have set up headquarters in a hotel along with other businessmen who comprise the legitimate "face" of El Jefe's criminal endeavors. Max (Helmut Dantine) agrees to pay Bennie $10,000 for Garcia's head, plus a few hundred dollars in advance for expenses. Bennie convinces Elita to go on a road trip with him to visit Garcia's grave, claiming initially that he only wants proof that Garcia is in fact dead and no longer a threat to their relationship.
En route, the two work out their personal issues. Bennie proposes, promising that their future will soon change, that he can stop working in a bar and she can retire from prostitution. Elita is cautious and warns Bennie against trying to upset their status quo.
On the road, Bennie and Elita are accosted by two bikers (including Kris Kristofferson), who pull guns and intend to rape Elita. Bennie seems unsure how to react. Elita offers to willingly have sex with the bikers if they will spare Bennie's life. They initially agree and one takes Elita to a nearby field, where he accosts her.
Bennie builds up his nerve. He gets his hands on an iron skillet and knocks the first biker unconscious. He takes the gun, finds the other biker ravaging Elita and shoots him. When the first biker wakes up, Bennie kills him, too.
He confesses to Elita his plan to decapitate Garcia's corpse and sell it for money. Elita is disgusted. Still shaken from the attack by the bikers, she begs Bennie to give up this quest and return to Mexico City, where they can be married and live a life of relative peace. Bennie again refuses, but does agree to marry Elita in the church of the town where Garcia is buried.
They find Garcia's grave, which Bennie promptly sets about exhuming. As soon as he opens the coffin, Bennie is struck from behind with his shovel by an unseen assailant. He wakes up to find himself half-buried in the grave with Elita, who is dead. The corpse of Garcia has been decapitated.
Bennie learns from villagers that his assailants are driving a station wagon. He catches up with the men after they blow out a tire. Bennie shoots them, searches their car and claims Garcia's head. Stopping at a roadside restaurant, he packs the sack containing the head with ice to preserve it for the journey home. A deranged Bennie begins addressing the head as if Garcia were still alive, first blaming it for Elita's death and then conceding that they probably loved her equally.
Bennie is ambushed by members of Garcia's family. They re-claim the head and are about to kill Bennie when Sappensly and Quill arrive. The hitmen pretend to ask for directions. Quill produces a sub-machine gun and murders most of Garcia's family, but is fatally shot by one of them. As Sappensly sorrowfully looks at Quill's corpse, Bennie asks, "Do I still get paid?" Sappensly turns to shoot but Bennie kills him, takes Garcia's head, and returns to Mexico City, "arguing" with Garcia's head all the while.
At his apartment, Bennie gives Garcia's head a shower. He takes it to the hotel room to speak with Max. At first he feigns willingness to surrender the head for his $10,000, but then reveals that he is no longer motivated by money; rather, he blames Elita's death on the bounty and intends to kill everyone involved. Several men pull guns but Bennie manages to evade fire and kill them all. He takes a business card from the desk with El Jefe's address on it.
El Jefe greets him as a hero and gives him a briefcase containing the promised million-dollar bounty. Bennie explains how many people died for Garcia's head, including his beloved. El Jefe responds apathetically, telling Bennie to take his money and throw Garcia's head to the pigs on the way out. Infuriated that the object for which Elita died is now viewed as nothing more than garbage, Bennie first wounds El Jefe and then guns down all of his bodyguards.
Teresa enters as Bennie points a gun at El Jefe's head. Holding her newborn son, she urges Bennie to kill her father for what he has done. Bennie obliges. He then leaves (with the words, "I'll look after the father, and you look after the son"). Bennie makes a mad dash for escape, but El Jefe's family, alerted by the gunfire, gun him down at the gates to El Jefe's estate.
Reception
On its release in 1974, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García was disapproved by viewers and critics, and failed at the box office. However, the film has since found a contemporary audience, maintaining a 77 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with an 82 percent fresh user rating.[2] Some film critics (including Michael Medved) argue that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García is one of the worst films ever made, while others (among them Roger Ebert and Slant Magazine) consider it a masterpiece.[3]
Vincent Canby felt the film was "witless" and found it hard to believe that it was made by the same director as The Wild Bunch.[4] Some viewers found the film's bleak worldview and constant violence difficult to take, and Bennie's elevating psychosis throughout the film, expressed through his macabre relationship with the severed head of the title, led many critics to see the film as proof of Peckinpah's declining mental state.
Peckinpah himself was deeply proud of the film. Never apologizing for it, he often cited it as his purest and most personal work, and the only one of his films which was completed without any compromises to studio or audience, precisely as he had intended it. After Peckinpah's death, the film began to be reevaluted by critics and audiences. Many critics came to praise the film's uncompromising vision and the film has begun to be seen as the consummation of the themes present in all of Peckinpah's films – the conflict between honor and the necessity of survival in a dishonorable world, the dangers of vengeance and greed, the nature of human violence, and the self-destructive tendencies of modern masculinity. Some have gone so far as to compare it to the films of John Huston such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which Peckinpah had cited as an inspiration. (The bounty hunter played by Gig Young actually gives his name as "Fred C. Dobbs" at one point – the name of Bogart's character in the Huston film.) Others consider it to be one of the worst films ever made.[5]
The dark humor and satirical interpretation of the cinematic clichés of the '70s road-movie and of the buddy film (Bennie drives around Mexico talking to a severed head; a pair of hitmen in business suits travel the rural Mexican badlands in a suburban station wagon) identify Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García as an anticipatory film of the surreal, violent, black humour of directors David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino (primarily in the scene he shot for Sin City). "Bennie" was Warren Oates's interpretation of Peckinpah, donning the director's clothes and sunglasses for the part. Moreover, co-writer Gordon Dawson admitted basing "Bennie" on Peckinpah.
The film remains a cult favorite, although it has never found a wide audience. It tends to polarize critics and viewers, some claiming that it is the beginning of Peckinpah's descent into mediocrity and self-parody, while others declare it to be Peckinpah's last true masterpiece (though some would reserve that accolade for Cross of Iron). Medved listed it among his "50 Worst Movies of All Time" (alongside the likes of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster). Ebert, on the other hand, included this film in his "Great Movies" series, along with Peckinpah's acknowledged classic The Wild Bunch.
Cast
References
See also
Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown
External links
