Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

It is tempting to say Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a unique film. But isn’t that par for the course for cult films? Certainly, as suggested earlier, it is in a tradition of films that have achieved cult status by being the misunderstood or ignored bastard offspring of important directors. Indeed, it was Robert Altman who said of his films, ‘it’s like your own children … we tend to love our least successful children the most’ (quoted in Mondello 2006). These words will make sense to any fan of neglected works by acclaimed filmmakers. (This is a strand within cultdom to rival the ‘one-hit wonders’, the directors who leave only one film, such as Charles Laughton with his weird and beautiful The Night of the Hunter or James William Guercio, the record producer whose sole directorial outing is the striking Electra Glide in Blue (1973).) Of course, Altman’s words can also be applied to cult movies per se, a whole canon of much-loved, least successful children.

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, Alfredo Garcia also follows a well-worn path to cultdom by virtue of being a critical and commercial flop, rediscovered by successive generations of fans. But I think its importance is greater than that. Consider The Wild Bunch, one of the unquestioned masterpieces of the American cinema, with its excellent ensemble playing, innovative use of multi-camera set-ups and skillfully mounted action scenes. Compared to this, on many levels, Alfredo Garcia can be regarded as a disaster, the squandering of a major talent. But look closer. It has a strange appeal, this lyrical car crash of a film. It’s hopeless, both on and offscreen; an ugly, sour tale that plays out like a nightmare. There are times when Peckinpah almost seems to encourage us to walk out of the cinema: Benny dousing his crab-infested crotch, anointing Al’s head with drink, waking up buried in a grave alongside his dead girlfriend. Even if you close your eyes, the soundtrack is still heady stuff: the loud snap of a pregnant woman’s bone breaking, the buzz of flies around the head, all that gunfire. Certainly, the film was, and still is, a huge turn-off to many. But this strange mix of the poetic and the hideous is as compelling as it is off-putting. While so many cult films are mutilated before release or exist in different forms ( Performance, The Wicker Man, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)), Alfredo Garcia stands out as the only film Peckinpah made without interference. Whereas Straw Dogs was censored, Cross of Iron had its budget slashed mid-shoot, The Getaway was re-edited and re-scored and Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were mutilated, it is only Alfredo Garcia that can be regarded as ‘pure Peckinpah’.

saw the film in Manhattan on the day it opened so many years ago. After the reviews came out, the studio immediately pulled the prints from the theatres and cut the most CRUCIAL scene in the film. The original release contained a scene wherein upon discovering his lover dead, the Warren Oates character makes love to her corpse … It is in this moment that he slips into madness. If you watch the film again, note the transition from the ‘pre-grave’ character and the ‘post-grave’ one. (Also note the somewhat disjointed transition from his holding his dead lover in his arms, to his leaving the graveyard.) (Posted on 16 January, 2002)

This may be persuasive to some, and Kathleen Murphy and Richard Jameson have acknowledged that Bennie’s ‘movements grotesquely suggest a sexual dalliance’ (1981: 48), but I think these stories circulate in large part due to the film’s elliptical (some would say botched) structure and what may be, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a deliberate strategy of ‘anti-pleasure’. There isn’t another film like it: John Patterson put it well when he said, ‘they really don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Truth is, they never did. This is the only one’ (2008). But that doesn’t stop a small army of acolytes and imitators doing their best to channel the shade of Peckinpah: ‘has there ever been a director whose style has been so shamelessly, and shallowly, lifted?’, adding how his ‘legion of imitators … mistook the bloodshed for bloodlust, deep melancholy for cheap comedy’ (Hultkrans 2008).

The Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller neo-noir Sin City (2005) is a good example of this, containing an explicit homage to Alfredo Garcia, as a character drives along, conversing with a severed head. But this reference sits uneasily alongside the film’s macho men, gangsters and Bruce Willis. Sure, there is violence and psychosis in Peckinpah’s film but there is also sentimentality and romance, great delicacy and wide streaks of self-lacerating neurosis. This is so often the way that filmmakers summon up the spirit of the Old Iguana, substituting slow-motion violence and would-be machismo for his dyspeptic, brutal poetry. Although they have their defenders, would anybody seriously consider John Woo (The Killer (1989)), Luc Besson (Léon (1994)) or Robert Rodriguez (Desperado (1995)) in the same class as Peckinpah? Guns, male bonding and Mexico do not an Alfredo Garcia make. Far more impressive was The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), the directorial debut of actor Tommy Lee Jones (whose grizzled visage and laconic delivery make him one of the few contemporary actors who would be at home in the Peckinpah stock company). This tale of a ranch-hand (Jones) who transports the body of his eponymous friend across the border for burial, accompanied by his killer, cannot help but recall Peckinpah. It was, therefore, no surprise when the director/star confessed to having watched Alfredo Garcia repeatedly (‘about 15 times and I love Peckinpah’s work’ (in Dupont 2005)). While the film heaps a series of indignities on the decomposing Estrada (including an anti-freeze injection and face-eating ants), the end offers a touching redemption far from Peckinpah’s freeze-framed gun barrel. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is certainly an ordeal, all that cynicism and flop sweat, self-pity and disgust. But it’s a very different kind of experience than that offered by horror films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John MacNaughton, 1986) or Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé, 1998). The nihilism of MacNaughton and Noé is so aggressive, it’s almost invigorating, lashings of dread and murder observed by a camera that pointedly refuses to look away. There is nihilism in Peckinpah’s film but it’s a kind of romantic nihilism, a wounded, tequila-soaked bitterness. In 2002, MacNaughton listed Peckinpah’s film as one of his ten favourites, in the Best Film Poll run by Sight & Sound magazine. Similarly, a Time Out poll in 1995 to celebrate the centenary of cinema saw Alfredo Garcia feature in the top ten of Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese game-show host/author/painter/actor/director. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Kitano’s films such as Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (Violent Cop, 1989), Sonatine (1993) and Hana-bi (1997), with their melancholy portraits of taciturn, violent men.

I don’t know if it’s any measure of the off-putting content or the brilliance of its title that makes most of the homages to Peckinpah’s film puns or word-plays. Aside from the examples mentioned in an earlier chapter, there is Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis (Stanley Z. Cherry, 1988) and the little-seen Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown (Jim Reardon, 1986), the latter dedicated to Peckinpah. There is also ‘Bring Me the Head of Boba Fett’, the pilot of the animated show Welcome to Eltingville (2002). 2009 will see the first production of a German play by Werner Fritsch, Bring Mir Den Kopf von Kurt Cobain (Bring Me the Head of Kurt Cobain).

There are more substantial Alfredo Garcia echoes in The Mexican (Gore Verbinsky, 2001), which substitutes A-list stars (Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts) and a pair of antique pistols for Warren Oates and a head in a sack, as well as in The Way of the Gun (Christopher McQuarrie, 2000) where Ryan Phillippe and Benicio Del Toro play losers who end up in a south of the border bullet-fest. Indeed, Del Toro is an avowed Peckinpah fan, turning up in the documentary feature Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade. There have been rumours for some time that the actor would take the lead in a remake of Alfredo Garcia (possibly due to him being one of the few actors in these Botoxed times who looks knackered enough to play Bennie) but, at the time of writing, nothing substantial. It goes without saying that remaking a film that is so defiantly a Peckinpah film sans the Old Iguana is a stupid idea. But that doesn’t mean someone won’t try it. As mainstream films become more and more expensive to make, name recognition is one way of bringing in an audience. No matter that a film has little relation to its source material (the Mission: Impossible trilogy, 1996, 2000, 2006), or happens to be a lousy/pointless re-tread (the terminally stupid ‘re-imagining’ of Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001), Alfie (Charles Shyer, 2004), Starsky and Hutch (Todd Phillips, 2004)). So why should the Old Barnacle be immune to this phenomenon? There have been reports of a remake of The Wild Bunch and a re-working of Straw Dogs with Edward Norton in the Dustin Hoffman role and Rod Lurie as the director. In interviews, Lurie has (unwittingly) put his finger on why Peckinpah’s films are so striking and why remaking them is an exercise in redundancy. Calling the film ‘very imperfect’ and Peckinpah’s direction of it ‘a little lazy’, Lurie ‘plans improvements’ to the original: ‘It was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she’s not going to be smiling in the rape in my film’ (quoted in Walsh 2007). Does Lurie (the director of The Contender (2000)) really think that ironing out ambiguities and letting an audience off the hook can be regarded as ‘an improvement’? Much of the strength of Peckinpah’s work lies in its ability to trouble and disturb with its myriad complexities and grey areas, its worrying undertows.

The television drama, Low Winter Sun (2006), directed by Adrian Shergold, is a bleak slice of Tartan Noir that contains (unconscious?) echoes of Peckinpah’s film, with a plot revolving around a suitcase full of money and a severed head in a bag. In one scene, a character (played by Brian McCardie) plays piano, wearing a blood-stained light suit, à la Bennie. One contributor to the Film Comment website sees Peckinpah’s influence in the best films of 2007. Discussing No Country For Old Men (Joel Coen), Zodiac (David Fincher) and There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), Adam Protextor observes that ‘collectively, they represent a return to Peckinpah’s Man – an independent man of honour and violence who cannot function in normal society’ (2008). Indeed, it’s possible to see a through-line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Alfredo Garcia and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and ending at There Will Be Blood, all films about greed and the monsters it makes of men. Perhaps the most fitting homage to Peckinpah’s film is the recurring one in Deadwood (2004–06), the brutal western series created by David Chase for the US television network HBO. This show, with its complex tale of a muddy, bloody Frontier town peopled by whores and killers, has a strong cast of grizzled veterans such as Brad Dourif, Keith Carradine and Ian McShane, and is authentically Peckinpavian. The character of murderous saloon owner Al Swearengen (McShane) keeps the head of an Indian in a box in his office and regularly regales it with boozy soliloquies. This is a nice nod to the Old Barnacle, particularly so when one considers how the savage world on show in Deadwood shares much with the world of Alfredo Garcia, with brutality, death and pitch-black humour filtered through a haze of liquor.

In some ways, having spent some time writing the book you are reading, I want to cop-out and conclude that it is an impossible film to really assess. This is partly because I do not think Peckinpah entirely knew what he was doing and partly because like all truly great films, it seems to change and grow with every viewing. It is both brilliant and awful and, as such, asks us to reassess what these terms mean. In the same way, it asks us to consider notions of authorship, all those romantic views of the artist as a misunderstood, self-destructive visionary: indeed, Peckinpah fits that template better than most, a violent, paranoid alcoholic whose unwillingness to compromise ended up destroying his once-promising career. It raises questions about setting ‘quality cinema’ against a kind of unmediated self-expression/indulgence. How much do we value notions of ‘quality’ and what happens when these notions come into conflict with art, particularly repulsive, inconsistent or just plain shoddy art? How useful is Bertolt Brecht’s idea of rejecting the ‘well-made’ in this case? Do we come out of Alfredo Garcia reflecting on the violence of the film, the ugliness, the tenderness of it? Or is the ineptitude of its execution and the bleakness of tone just a huge turn-off? How enervating can a film be when it seems to revel in the fact that nothing matters, not love, not honour, not money, not film?

To many, Peckinpah’s film is a defiantly ugly work, a confused and confusing film that gets under the skin of those who see it in a way that ‘better’ films could never hope to do. Perhaps its lasting legacy is that it represents a kind of untramelled free expression, an autobiographical vomiting up of neuroses and bile from a director who has come to represent a very personal type of filmmaking, one that we see fewer and fewer examples of with every passing year. A film so naked, raw and personal that even three decades later, viewers are thrilled and moved, or they recoil in embarrassment, disgust or loathing. In 1972, Peckinpah gave an in-depth interview to Playboy magazine’s William Murray. The director’s lengthy response to Murray’s question ‘when you say that someone is a real man, what do you mean by it?’, included the following: