Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
by Sam Peckinpah
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Gig Young, Helmut Dantine, Isela Vega, Robert Webber, Warren OatesDirector: Sam Peckinpah
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 112 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-22
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Movie Review: Gross, but Engrossing
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Summary of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Sam Peckinpah knew he couldn't call a movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and get away with it. That's why he did it. When he undertook this nakedly personal project, in self-exile in Mexico, the director was a deeply bitter man out of favor with critics, the media, and the Hollywood establishment, which had just released his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a mutilated version. "Bring Me the Head..." sounded like the parody title of an ultraviolent Sam Peckinpah movie, and he flung it in our faces just as his onscreen surrogate tosses the titular object at the camera.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
Some people will do anything for a million dollars even if it means killing anyone who gets in their way! Written and directed by Oscar? nominee* Sam Peckinpah and starring Academy Award? winner** Gig Young Warren Oates Robert Webber Kris Kristofferson and the seductively beautiful Isela Vega Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a gritty classic that vibrates with explosive action and nail-biting tension.When a Mexican land baron puts a million dollars on the head of the man who seduced his daughter two money-hungry men (Young and Webber) recruit a small-town bartender (Oates) to help them do their dirty work. But their tequila-fueled trek across the desolate Mexican frontier grows more intense gruesome and bloody with every savage murder they leave in their wake!*1969: Original Screenplay The Wild Bunch (With Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner)System Requirements: Running Time 112 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: R UPC: 027616920522 Manufacturer No: 1008007
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