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
Producer: Helmut Dantine
Cinematographer: ?lex Phillips Jr.
Writer: Sam Peckinpah
Producer: Gordon T. Dawson
Writer: Gordon T. Dawson
Producer: Martin Baum
Writer: Frank Kowalski
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (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: Brutality from the inside out...
Summary: 5 Stars
Easily one of the best films of 1974, `Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' is intelligent, alarming and brutally entertaining. Highly regarded today as a cult masterpiece, the film is one that you may never have heard of, but one that you really should NOT miss.
After Alfredo Garcia breaks the heart of a wealthy man he has a hit put out on his head. The thing is that Alfredo is already dead. With a lot of people vying for the million dollars offered for Alfredo's head, Bennie, a Mexican piano player, finds himself searching for Alfredo's dead body in order to collect the money himself. With his girlfriend Elita (a friend of Alfredo's) in tow he travels the Mexican countryside in search of his big payoff, leaving a wake of bloody bodies behind him.
The film is marvelously crafted to be so much more than just a violent action film. It is really about the isolation one encounters when his dreams finally become reality. Bennie has always dreamt of this moment, when his worries would be no more and he could spend out his days with the woman he loves, but reaching that dream could cost him that very woman. There is a hardness about Bennie that overtakes him as the days progress, as he gets closer to realizing the travesty that is his mission. He starts out so complacent and almost jovial and slowly yet profoundly becomes guarded and internally destroyed.
With one twist and turn after another, `Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' will keep you glued to your seat in anticipation.
The acting is all very good; from Warren Oates naturally progressive take on Bennie, to Isela Vega's marvelously centered portrayal of Elita. She steals every scene she's in with her wide eyed knowingness. Even Kris Kristofferson brings a depth to his solitary scene that makes for a very nicely done cameo.
The real star here is director Sam Peckinpah. I remember when I watched `Straw Dogs' for the first time. I was just in awe of the directorial achievement the film really was; the mood and precise layering that Peckinpah took to build tensions upon tensions. He does the same thing here, delivering an abrasive yet emotionally stirring film. This is far from just a loud and bloody film, for Peckinpah gives brings it to a personal level. The truth remains that no matter how shocking the films visuals are, it is the inward struggle that is certainly the most painful and most fatal.
Like many have said, and the tagline surely suggest this as well; this film has guts. It's a brutal depiction of desperation, greed, anger and revenge and it works gloriously on every level.
Summary of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
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?(r) nominee* Sam Peckinpah and starring Academy Award?(r) 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) recruita 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 Greenand Roy N. Sickner) **1969: Supporting Actor, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?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
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