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	Bring Me the Head Of Alfredo Garcia Warren Oates, Isela Vega MGM (Video & DVD), 1995 average customer review:based on 58 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Thing is, the movie is a masterpiece--raw, shocking, beautiful, and brave--in which Peckinpah confronts his enemies and his own demons. Warren Oates plays a gringo piano-player stuck in Mexico who hears that some powerful men are willing to pay a bounty on a guy he knows. They don't know the guy is already dead, killed in a car accident. It'll be easy to exhume the trophy and collect the money--except that it will cost our seedy hero everything he has and ever wanted.

John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre had always been a key legend for Peckinpah; this film is a subterranean re-imagining of it, with Oates as both the son of Fred C. Dobbs and the carnival-mirror reflection of Peckinpah himself. And Isela Vega's performance as the sainted whore Elita--bruised and worldly one minute, radiant and clear-skinned as a child the next--is an act of grace. --Richard T. Jameson

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A search for dignity, simple dignity....

SPOILERS....

At first, many will rent this film based on its title. It has one of the greatest titles in movie history. It sounds like a crass, exploitation film from the 1970's. It may have been made in 1974, but it is not exploitation, nowhere near it. It's actually a violent, moving, deep, and dare I say, spiritual film. There's something so strange, yet so serene, about this film.

You see Benny (brilliantly played by Warren Oates) playing in a bar in Mexico, entertaining drunk, obnoxious American tourists. In walks in 2 hitmen (Robert Weber and Gig Young) who are looking for Alfredo Garcia, a gigolo who knocked up the daughter of a Mexican don (played by Emilio Fernandez, a director himself and who starred in several Peckinpah films). The 2 hitmen tell Benny to come to a hotel where he'll be given instructions. There Benny finds out about Alfredo Garcia, and starts off on his quest to "bring back the head of Alfredo Garcia". Benny hunts Alfredo down for the duration of the film, "finds" him, and ends up becoming friends with the head of Alfredo Garcia. Benny is generally what people call a loser (when he goes to the hotel where the hitmen are, he is openly mocked and one of them even calls him a loser), a man who hasn't had too many breaks in his life, who sees life from the bottom usually, and he feels finding Alfredo's head is his last shot. Oates is so good here that you feel something for him, you identify with him. Everyone (and I mean everyone) has been down in the gutter at one time or another. When Benny does find Alfredo, he's already dead. Benny descrecrates the grave, chopping his head off, and taking it back to El Jefe. In the meantime, he loses his girlfriend whore/wife, is nearly buried alive, and has to kill the 2 hit men who hired him in the first place. He begins to feel a kinship to Alfredo, and realises that Alfredo isn't his enemy, it's the bastards who hired him, so instead of just selling out for a payday, he takes the real scumbags out. He goes out in a hail of bullets, but still makes his point known to everyone.

This can almost be seen (forgive me if I sound pretentious) as a spiritual quest. Benny's soul is tested. He's had all this s*** thrown at him, and now he's still being tested. The world never lets up on you. It's always there in some way or another. You feel like you're a f***ing pawn most of the time, and you feel like Job, and you act out like Job. Here, I personally feel for Benny big time. This film is probably Peckinpah's greatest. It's one of the most unique, misunderstood, and powerful films ever made, and it should be better known. Peckinpah was really on his downward slide by this time (he only made a few more films, only one of which, Cross of Iron, was like the old Sam). He was a drunk and a cokehead, and his constant battle with producers and studios (sometimes the result of his drug problems, but sometimes because studio heads were fools at the time) had worn him down into a shell of a man. He died very young at 59 in the mid 80's. A real shame, but here in this film you see Sam for what he was. A very complex man, and a very complex film.

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Grime under your skin

Peckinpah's 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' is one of the most under-rated films of the 1970's. Starring Warren Oates as Bennie, a Piano player in a bar who stumbles upon a bounty for Alfredo Garcia. Garcia is responsible for a pregnancy but has not taken responsibility.

In a another filmmakers hands this could easily have been a total disaster, but Peckinpah turns this into one of the greatest road movies ever made. However unlike most road movies this is seriously downbeat. There is a major plot twist half way through that nobody will expect. Metaphorically Peckinpah pulls the rug from under you completely at this point, and it really is quite shocking. I agree completely with a previous reviewer who stated that it appears that Peckinpah had a free-hand with this movie.

Mostly set in Mexico the film has a dirty grubby feel to it. Bennie isn't a particularly nice character himself, being mainly interested in collecting the bounty money on Garcia. After the plot twist mentioned above though I did begin to symapthise with him. That said this is still miles away from a typical Hollywood (espcially these days) movie.

There are a few of Peckinpah's trademark slow motion shooting scenes as well as the inevitable topless women; noteably Isela Vega who gets to show off her impressive figure on a number of occasions!

I've watched the film twice now, and the second viewing only confirmed my view that this is a hugely influential film, that works on many levels.

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Peckinpah's dark Mexican road trip.

"I think I can feel Sam Peckinpah's heart beating and head pounding in every frame in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia"--Roger Ebert.

Sam Peckinpah's 1974 low budget film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Tráiganme la cabeza de Alfredo García), followed his 1973 western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It is often referred to as his "darkest" work. Certainly, Peckinpah's demons are evident in this film. Alcohol. Despair. Defiance. Warren Oates plays Bennie, an American gringo piano player living a dead-end existence in a Mexican brothel, who decides to collect a million dollar bounty set by a Mexican land baron (El Jefe, played by Emilio Fernandez) on the head of Alfredo Garcia, the man who seduced and impregnated his daughter. Although the gritty film was universally panned (or perhaps the more accurate word is "reviled") by critics upon its release, it has since become a Peckinpah cult favorite. Much of the film consists of a desolate Mexican road trip on which Benny talks to a severed head he calls "Al." He carries it with him in a gunny sack. Beautiful Isela Vega plays Benny's whore/girlfriend, Elita, who is world weary in one scene, and then as innocent as a child in the next. There is no happily-ever-after in this film; it ends in a violent rampage. Not a film that will change your life, but it is nevertheless recommended as a rare, bizarre, extraordinary film experience.

G. Merritt

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Bizarre and entertaining

This film is so weird that it's completely entertaining. I never could figure out, however, whether this movie is supposed to be serious or is a comedy. That's what makes it so much fun. It's kind of a blood-soaked "Mad, Mad, Mad World". Alfredo Garcia has impregnated the young daughter of a wealthy Mexican hacendado. The rich man puts one million dollars on his head. Criminals and reprobates from all over Mexico converge in a lethal competition to put Garcia's head in a sack.

It's truly bizarre--Warren Oates driving along with his car full of houseflies feeding on Garcia's moldering head. I won't go on because I don't want to spoil it for you. Pardon the pun.

Still I didn't give the film a full five star rating because of one scene involving Kris Kristopherson that I thought was gratuitous sex and nonsense. Otherwise the film is a winner---for me, anyway.

Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

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Gross, but Engrossing

I just recently watched this again on DVD, surely one of the strangest movies ever released by a major studio and by a major American director. Shot on what appears to be a shoestring budget, Peckinpah delivers a story set in a hellish landscape, where drunken killers compete for a bounty on the head of a Don Juan named Alfredo Garcia. Garcia's a marked man for having knocked up a Mexican millionaire's daughter, and we meet some very unsavory characters who want him dead. Watching this movie, which becomes a revenge tale, you can see where Quentin Tarantino got his chops (particularly the scene where Bennie gets buried alive). This movie predates Kill Bill by 30 years, and one can also see where No Country for Old Men came from.

Much of Bring Me the Head is great--the Mexican locations, Warren Oates (Stripes, the Wild Bunch, Dillinger) playing his character Bennie in a white suit and perpetual shades, the existentialist absurdity-of-the-human-condition narrative, and the slow motion and poetic justice of the killing scenes. What bothers me about the movie is puzzling character motivation. The middle scene, in which Bennie's Mexican "wife" befriends her rapist, is odd to say the least, but so too is Bennie's decision not to simply walk away after he's accomplished his mission. I guess it's Peckinpah's vision that no one here lives happily ever after, that destructiveness leads inevitably to self-destructiveness.

Probably my biggest problem with the DVD was the sound quality. There are very often strange echoes when the action gets loud. Hopefully they'll remix the sound for future DVDs.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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