Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 18 June

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah, 1974)

The editor-in-chief has Covid at the moment which means she is isolating in a remote wing of the estate and I get to choose what I watch at night without having to negotiate. (Not that I mind negotiating, you understand. She is the brains of the outfit, after all.)

But given free reign, I will usually try and put a dent in the big pile of to-be-watched physical media and, in advance of Monday night’s Wellington Film Society screening of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (and on the recommendation of reader MC of Mt. Victoria), I thought I would acquaint myself with another film from that manliest of directors, Sam Peckinpah.

Until last night, I was only aware of Alfredo Garcia as the punchline to a book I got out of the library as a kid – The Golden Turkey Awards by the Medved Brothers, snarking about the films they considered to be the worst of all time. So my hopes were not all that high.

Readers and friends, how wrong the Medveds were! Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a rough-hewn masterpiece. It’s bizarrely romantic but with the same slow-motion squib-fests that Peckinpah had come to love from The Wild Bunch in 1969. I’d go as far as to say that without it, we wouldn’t have the glory that is Breaking Bad – an ordinary man is drawn into a criminal milieu with tragic consequences, desert shoot-outs, a grotesque head in a sack.

Warren Oates plays Benny, a down-on-his-luck veteran living an aimless life south of the border. He hears that there is a bounty on Señor Garcia for knocking up the daughter of a local gang boss (Emilio Fernandez) and only he knows that Garcia is already dead. When he hatches a plan to provide proof of mortality – the head in other words – in exchange for the bounty and a ticket to a new life, he unwittingly plants the seeds of his own doom.

The irony is that he doesn’t realise until it’s too late that the middle men are only paying $2000 for the head but El Jefe’s bounty is actually a million dollars. He’s sold his soul for a pittance but he’s also sold his soul for love. He wants to move his prostitute and nightclub singer girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega), out of the infested hovel where they live and start again. But when you dance with the Devil one time …

It’s raw and messy, much like Peckinpah himself. One of the reasons he made the film was that he could work enough days in Mexico that he could gain residency. In the Blu-ray’s accompanying documentary, collaborators and friends speak warmly of a frustrating and self-destructive man. Kris Kristofferson has a cameo in the film (as a rapist) and talks about how his scene is too long because Peckinpah thought he owed him for the favour he was doing, but that it just ended up giving a monstrous character too much weight. He then goes on to play a beautiful song he wrote about the whole experience.

Kristofferson was a drinker then, Oates was also a heavy drinker and Peckinpah himself was an almost hopeless alcoholic. It is a hyper-masculine film – as its reputation would suggest – but it’s a film about broken and lost masculinity. Masculinity pointed in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons. It starts with the expectant teenage mother sitting beside a bucolic river at sunset – a beautiful setting – but then the men get involved and El Jefe’s wounded pride sends everything spiralling out of control.

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Where to watch Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Worldwide Physical Media: Imprint Films