Jay Rohr
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) is a tragic poem about a doomed loser. Unable to take his eyes off easy money, Bennie (Warren Oates) races through the gutter to the grave. Along the way, he loses the chance to have a love story. Some call the movie garbage, while others see a cinematic mirror.
Better known for flicks like The Wild Bunch (1969), the movie is directed by Sam Peckinpah. Though his films such as Straw Dogs (1971) are often remembered for their at-the-time graphic violence, the poetic philosophy of his revisionist Westerns is often a secondary consideration. However, his movies like The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) lament a lifestyle that can’t be lived if it ever even existed, that calcified myth of the Old West.
Spoilers ahead.
There’s a line in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia that sticks out. When Bennie is accused of being a loser he sharply replies, “Nobody loses all the time.” Afterward, the film seems to confirm this as he shoots his way out of one improbable gunfight after another. However, the movie ends with him being shot to bits by every bullet in Mexico. Yet, if such a defeat is inevitable than accepting it is an act of bravery.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is about Bennie and Elita (Isela Vega). When word hits the streets that a crime lord wants the titular head, a down on his luck piano player managing a dive bar sees a chance at quick cash. The pay day seems even bigger when he discovers the wanted man is already dead. All Bennie needs to do is collect the head and cash out. If only things could be so simple.
See, despite a lot of macho bravado, Bennie doesn’t really know what’s going on. His epic pay day is ten grand in cash, yet the head is worth one million. He doesn’t track down the wanted man so much as realize his lady love spent three days cheating on him with the suave Garcia. Parting ways, she witnessed Alfredo die in a drunk driving accident. Bennie then insists she show him the grave so he can be certain there won’t be any more infidelity.
This demand plays into a recurring theme in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. From start to finish the movie involves men trying to control women. The only way they do so is through varying degrees of brutality. For instance, the film opens with a pregnant teenager being tortured by her father’s henchmen until she admits the baby is Garcia’s. When gunmen on the hunt meet Bennie, a prostitute solicits her services by rubbing one on the thigh. Instead of simply shooing her away the goon knocks her out cold. Ninety percent of Bennie’s dialogue with Elita is expressed in a growl or snarl, and a rare tender moment is interrupted by two bikers showing up out of nowhere to try and rape her.
Amy Shubert observed how Peckinpah would employ “violence used against the emotional complexity of the movie, against the fullness of feeling and all the contradictory responses that fly in the face of objectification.”
Women are never really broken by their mistreatment in Peckinpah pictures. They often bear it with a grim stoicism. It’s the men who snap or suffer the consequences. In The Wild Bunch when Angel discovers Teresa has survived a massacre by becoming a prostitute, he shoots her dead. Straw Dogs features Dustin Hoffman as a coward who tells his wife to wear a bra instead of reprimanding the leering men ogling her openly. When Kris Kristofferson tries to humiliate Elita before raping her, she defiantly stares him down and slaps him until he retreats like a defeated child. Then there’s the teenage mother from the film’s beginning. When Bennie hesitates to shoot her father, she gives the word that pulls the trigger.
The mistreatment of women in Peckinpah’s movies always reveals some weakness within the male characters. It isn’t a celebration of misogyny so much as a blunt statement about its prevalence and toxic qualities. Love and the tenderness it requires are vulnerabilities in these macho melodramas, so the men resist it tooth and nail. They react with hostility towards anyone who risks inciting such feelings. Yet, death lays it all out in the open even when it comes to friendships.
Take for example the gunmen Sappensly and Quill played by Robert Webber and Gig Young. More aware of the head’s value than Bennie, they follow him. During an ambush both are killed but one dies before the other resulting in his, presumably best friend, reciting his name tenderly several times before dying. Or, considering he’s the one who knocked out the prostitute, perhaps there’s an implication of a gay relationship. Either way, love isn’t fully realized or expressed until it’s too late.
Whatever the interpretation of this casual misogyny, many write it off as honestly autobiographical, making Bennie a stand-in for the director. Benjamin Kerstein wrote, “[Peckinpah’s] vices were obvious and public: drug abuse, alcoholism, possible paranoid schizophrenia, a tendency towards sentiment matched only by his capacity to abuse his intimates, a melancholic temperament punctuated by fits of irrational rage.”
The film wasn’t reviewed well when it came out. In the book Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage, Garner Simmons details the negative critical response. He quotes Joy Gould Boyum, who wrote for the Wall Street Journal that the film was “grotesque in its basic conceptions, so sadistic in its imagery, so irrational in its plotting, so obscene in its effect, and so incompetent in its cinematic realization that the only kind of analysis it really invites is psychoanalysis.”
Roger Ebert, meanwhile, called Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a “bizarre masterpiece.” Like many who praise the film, Ebert saw the autobiographical elements underpinning the picture. He’d met Peckinpah a few times, on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) as well as during the promotional tour for Alfredo Garcia. Contemporary reevaluations of the film stem from similar information.
Personally, I don’t care for this inside baseball reassessment. It feels like sidewise bragging about esoteric knowledge the movie shouldn’t depend on. It implies reading David Weddle’s Peckinpah biography If They Move… Kill ‘Em! is necessary to get the tragedy of Elita and Bennie. Facts outside of the film don’t add to the quality of the picture; audiences shouldn’t need to know about Peckinpah’s disastrous marriages he burned down to fully get these doomed lovers. When Elita becomes aware of Bennie’s plans, she asks him to forget the head and disappear with her. It’s clear he wants to, but he can’t leave cash on the table. It’s all there already, but people like Ebert want to praise the autobiographical honesty of the abusive alcoholic auteur, rendering the director as an artist criticizing his own life and themselves as intelligentsia deciphering his brave introspective genius.
Frankly, Alfredo Garcia often drags. The film is a road trip movie that throws out violence to wake up the audience. Occasionally it lurches into painfully obvious poetics such as when Bennie escapes a grave he dug that he’s been buried alive in. It isn’t a perfect picture, yet what it does well is help expand the neo-western premise.
The Western genre began between 1889 and 1902 with the publication of two novels, The Administratrix by Emma Ghent Curtis and The Virginian by Owen Wister. Building off pulp dime novels, the books establish the cowboy mythos that would define the genre. The Administratrix is about a widowed rancher who poses as a male rough rider to pursue the men who lynched her innocent husband. The Virginian involves an unnamed narrator recounting moments throughout his lifelong friendship with the titular character which include various Western staples.
Wister’s novel would end up the more popular of the two, eventually inspiring several stage and screen adaptations. However, cinematically, the genre’s evolution had already begun. Scott Simmon’s book The Invention of the Western Film: a cultural history of the genre’s first half-century details how in 1894 Thomas Edison began featuring reels of veteran performers from Wild West shows as well as Native American rituals like the Sioux ghost dance. Then in 1903 came The Great Train Robbery, a narrative driven motion picture.
All these would grow into the Western mythos. Early examples of the genre revolved around gunslinging heroes who followed a moral code of honor that justified shooting outlaws or alien others such as indigenous peoples who threatened the peace. A clear example of this is Stagecoach (1939).
The many films that followed—3:10 to Yuma (1957), El Dorado (1966), and The Magnificent Seven (1960)—would calcify these myths along with radio programs, many of which eventually evolved into television shows like Gunsmoke (1955-75) and The Lone Ranger (1949-57). The point being that the Western grew as the United States defined itself during the 20th century. It solidified notions about the country while glorifying things like Manifest Destiny. Western genre fiction justified the slaughter of native peoples as defense against violent savages and made the near extinction of the buffalo a display of man’s dominance over nature. Might makes right and the good guys (like sheriffs) only do the right thing.
But changing cultural values soon poked holes in that gilded perspective. This paved the way for the revisionist Western which Sam Peckinpah helped define. Movies like The Wild Bunch and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), not to mention Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, exposed the flaws in the Western mythos. Protagonists urged by mixed motives brought a psychological complexity and moral ambiguity to the genre. It didn’t hurt that the Hays Code had relaxed by 1968 allowing for more graphic violence and sexuality on screen.
Evolving almost simultaneously is the neo-western. This offshoot of the genre could be said to begin with Lonely are the Brave (1962). The plot is oddly similar to First Blood (1982) since it involves a Korean war veteran trying to live life as an Old West cowboy, coming into conflict with modern society and the police. Neo-westerns tend to be about anachronistic individuals struggling to live in contemporary society according to rules that don’t work, or as the revisionist Western suggests never did. Midnight Cowboy (1969), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and Sicario (2015) all fit the bill as do Rancho Deluxe (1975). They all involve people trying to live the cowboy mythos in modern times only to realize they can’t and maybe no one ever could. The closest anyone comes still doesn’t end well.
Setting Alfredo Garcia in Mexico allowed Peckinpah to sharply juxtapose visual nods to the past with the present, sometimes sharply. Warren Oates runs a bar with stereotypical banditos in bandoleros, presumably for tourists, but the contempt for such clichés drips off the screen. Guns may settle scores in this movie, but like his other films Peckinpah doesn’t have a massacre a minute. Instead, violence is a paradoxically avoidable thing made inevitable by bad decisions that results in characters dwelling on the consequences of their actions.
After Elita dies, Bennie drives around talking to Alfredo’s head about what’s happened, what it means, and what happens next. It’s clearly the inspiration behind the Designated Driver sequence Tarantino directed in Sin City (2005). The difference between the two scenes, however, is Peckinpah uses violence as sad poetry while Tarantino turns it into black comedy. It’s the difference between catharsis and sick glee.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a neo-western ode to every failed outlaw. It shows that strong women too often settle for small men because misogynistic codes restrain the ladies. The film’s biggest fans insist it’s a self-portrait anyone can see if they collect enough trivia to see the reflection through. But its real importance is as a reminder that the Western mythos is a flawed tapestry revealing as much as it hides.
