Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

I knew of Peckinpah’s reputation from an early age, from repeated references and admiring notices in horror magazines like House of Hammer and Monster Mag. There was the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch, ‘Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days’, with its slow-motion gore, a bright young thing impaled on a tennis racket and hands chopped off by a piano lid, the stumps spouting great gouts of bright red blood. Bloody Sam. I don’t know who started the game we played in the school playground but I was the one who called it Peckinpah-ing. Falling down a grassy hill, writhing in pretend pain, trying to do it all in slow-motion. I’d seen The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Getaway (1972) on TV and they’d been everything I’d expected, blood, whisky and the romance of violent death. Fast-cutting. Slow-motion. So, I expected great things when the BBC scheduled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia close to midnight one Friday in the late 1970s.

God. Even before the rushed ending, my sense of disappointment was crushing. It was terrible. Badly shot and hammily-acted, Warren Oates (as Bennie) all sub-Bogart mumbles and snarls. It didn’t seem to make sense, I didn’t know who was who and it wasn’t even that violent. Worst of all, the slow-motion was perfunctory, a world away from the stylised bloody ballet of The Wild Bunch. Was it me? Had I missed something? It came as no surprise, therefore, that the first substantial piece I read on the film was in the 1978 book, ‘The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time’ by Randy Dreyfuss and Harry and Michael Medved, sharing space with Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Nicholas Webster, 1964) and The Terror of Tiny Town (Sam Newfield, 1938), a western with an all-midget cast. The authors seemed to pick up on all the stuff I had hated so much: the lousy plotting and the murky cinematography, the slipshod pacing and the corny dialogue (they make particular sport with the line ‘you guys are definitely on my shit list’). I felt vindicated, these being the days before Michael Medved reinvented himself as the scourge of Hollywod, attacking profanity and blasphemy on talk radio and in his willfully stupid book, Hollywood Vs. America (1992). Indeed, Medved’s enthusiastic adoption of a puritanical conservative stance suggests he may well have had motives for attacking Peckinpah other than the purely aesthetic: Medved’s vision of ‘America’ is one not shared by the self-dubbed ‘Old Iguana’. Later, when I saw Straw Dogs (1971) and Cross of Iron (1977), I put Alfredo Garcia down as a blot on a great director’s copybook. I blamed the drink (his, not mine). Besides, it happens to a lot of great directors. Alfred Hitchcock with Topaz (1969); Woody Allen with Mighty Aphrodite (1995); Roman Polanski with The Ninth Gate (1999). Not to mention the ones who plummet from grace so dramatically it’s frightening: Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Francis Coppola.

I’ve seen Alfredo Garcia many times in the decades since and I’ve realised something, realise it more with every viewing. I was wrong. The Medveds were wrong. All of the others were wrong. It is one of the great films of the 1970s. It may well be Peckinpah’s masterpiece. Yes, it is a maddening film, it is ugly and messy, it is a work of ‘overwhelmingly negativity’ (Prince 1998: 210) and it may even be, in Mark Crispin Miller’s words, ‘deliberately unprepossessing’ (1975: 2). But it is also unique, full of profanity and poetry, filth and beauty. It is a fever dream of a film, soaked in alcohol and with an almost hallucinatory power. Jesus, was I wrong. It is not a film for a kid. I am not talking about the violence: I was barely into my teens when I saw The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975) and Peckinpah’s own Straw Dogs and I loved them. That masochistic sense of making it through some sort of ordeal is a pleasurable one and one that is not affected by age: indeed, I was well into my 30s when I saw Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) and still felt I had achieved something by remaining in my seat until those climactic strobes started flickering. No, it is the palpable sense of decay and disillusion, the almost unbearable desperation that hangs over the film like a black cloud: that of Bennie and that of Peckinpah. It is a film stripped of the cinematic flourishes present in other films by the same director: the climactic siege in Straw Dogs, the bravura opening sequence of The Getaway, with the prison cell, the deer and the clatter of machinery, all of The Wild Bunch. Missing, too, is the mythic dimension so often present in Peckinpah: the wild bunch, walking into town to fight an army or Pat Garrett shooting Billy the Kid then his own reflection in disgust. Alfredo Garcia is a pointedly squalid film, where drink is an anaesthetic, violence is not redemptive and formal considerations like pacing, editing and lighting are secondary to this pervasive sense of waste. That, in the end, is what it comes down to: waste. It is important to avoid the suggestion that because a film is (technically) bad, it’s good, a lack of proficiency being some sort of guarantee of ‘authenticity’ (although there are cult film fans who would argue such a thing, citing the likes of Andy Milligan, the Kuchar brothers or Herschell Gordon Lewis). But film is a conservative medium, being (until recently, at least) prohibitively expensive and with production and distribution traditionally being the preserve of big corporations. Given this, unregulated free expression is much rarer than it is in other artistic disciplines and consequently, there are few instances where a talented filmmaker so blatantly chronicles his damaged psyche, his rage, even his own decline, artistic and otherwise. Maybe Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975), a decadent film from a man at the end of his string, reeking of death and sex. Or Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992), a druggy raw wound of a film, with Harvey Keitel’s performance equal parts astonishing and embarrassing: critic Gavin Smith suggests that the latter film ‘is to Ferrara what another masterpiece, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was to Sam Peckinpah, in precisely the same hardboiled tradition of personal/artistic/spiritual statement’ (1993: 21). Perhaps the best comparison is with Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock’s last masterpiece, a slice of self-autopsy, widely misunderstood at the time of its initial release (this comparison is explored further in chapter 4).

Certain terms frequently recur in discussions of cult cinema, terms such as oppositional, transgressive and plain bad with a film’s cultish credentials often being measured by its distance from the mainstream. For Jeffrey Sconce, cult audiences promote:

This oppositional, transgressive quality can be a matter of content, as in the violent horror films of Ruggero Deodato and Lucio Fulci or the stylised hardcore porn of Radley Metzger and the Mitchell brothers, the acid movies of the 1960s or the ‘New Queer Cinema’ of the 1990s. Sometimes, it may be a question of form, as in the undergound movies of Kenneth Anger or the homemade nightmares of Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) and Nekromantik (Jörg Buttgereit, 1987). Indeed, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), a zero-budget mix of coprophilia, blow-jobs and chicken-killing ticks all the cult boxes. A smaller sub-category are those films where traditional notions of quality are undermined and incompetence is a virtue. Examples of this include the work of Ed Wood, Al Adamson or the more outré work of Jess Franco (such as Barbed Wire Dolls (1975), where the slow-motion scenes are achieved by having actors move very slowly). But Alfredo Garcia stands alone, representing as it does a spectacular fall from grace as a director seen as a possible heir to John Ford, admired by Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini, so spectacularly screws up. There have always been films from acclaimed directors that have misfired, from Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968), with a tripping Burgess Meredith and Groucho Marx as God to Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980). But these films are often regarded as aberrations whereas Peckinpah’s film led critics to question his judgement, his talent and even his sanity.

Any serious consideration of cult cinema takes in a bewildering variety of material, encompassing films that are weird, strange, innovative and nasty, quirky, passionate and personal, sometimes defiantly so while others seem to amount to demented accidents, and all with a devoted fanbase. These films offer up a shadow history of film: F. W. Murnau and Tod Browning, James Whale and Edgar Ulmer, Robert Hamer and Henri-Georges Clouzot, Phil Karlson and Sam Fuller, Roger Corman and Mario Bava, Monte Hellman and Peter Watkins, Lucio Fulci and Nicolas Roeg, Jerzy Skolimovski and Takashi Miike and Gaspar Noé. Don’t forget the misfires and the oddities from acclaimed filmmakers: Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). And the one-offs, the freakish and the plain mad: A Page of Madness (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1926), White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1933), Strange Cargo (Frank Borzage, 1940), Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947), Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), La Maman et la Putain (Jean Eustache, 1974), The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, 1980), Paganini (Klaus Kinski, 1989), The Young Poisoner’s Handbook (Benjamin Ross, 1995). All of the above films and filmmakers offer something unique, whether strange or sad, striking or stupid. Unlike so many other films, in or out of the mainstream, there is always room for what David Lynch, interviewed for the 1993 documentary Made in the USA, described as ‘an abstraction or a dream’. I don’t know if The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1969) was supposed to be so strange, both campy and horrific, amateurish and assured. Was future soft-porn auteur Zalman King winging it in Blue Sunshine (Jeff Lieberman, 1976) or was his bizarre performance actually directed? Did Ted Post want to create something as unique as The Baby (1972), a too-sick-to-be-funny, too-funny-to-be-scary freak-out with big hair, wacky outfits and an unforgettable ending? Or did something just happen along the way, to warp a nasty little melodrama into something else? How did anyone come up with something as freakish as Café Flesh (1982), a hardcore-porn sci-fi film written by Jerry Stahl (celebrity junkie and creator of television’s cat-eating alien Alf (1986–89)) and directed by Rinse Dream? And how the hell can anyone sit through the inept poetry of Ed Wood’s films and fail to see them as a striking example of warped autobiography, their director kin to Sam Fuller and David Lynch?

For Sconce (who is nothing if not provocative) the ‘histrionic, anachronistic and excessive’ (2003: 118) paracinema offers pleasures that ‘academy icons such as Sirk and Godard’ (ibid.) can not. Indeed, he suggests that such oddball fare as Zontar the Thing from Venus (Larry Buchanan, 1966) and The Corpse Grinders (Ted V. Mikels, 1972) may come closer to embodying Bertolt Brecht’s conception of an anti-illusionist aesthetic than Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1955) or Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout va bien (1972). While not wishing to place Peckinpah alongside Larry Buchanan, the tension between ‘the academy’ and the cult canon that is so important to paracinema is worth applying to Alfredo Garcia. For Sconce:

Cult films can scar, leave a mark, cause images to rise out of the subconscious years later like Romero zombies, images that can thrill, amuse, revolt. Some, like Peckinpah’s coruscating blend of romance and nihilistic rage, manage to do all three things at the same time. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a film full of vivid moments, many of them etched on my mind like an acid flashback: a topless, heavily-pregnant woman having a bone snapped. A couple sitting under a tree by the side of the road, drinking. A gleaming machete. A slo-mo spade swinging out of the dark. A shot man, doing a spastic roll and ending up back on his feet. A severed head, crawling with flies, soaked in tequila, steaming under a hot shower. A freeze-framed gun barrel, this big black circle signifying nothing. You might not like Peckinpah’s film, but I don’t think you’ll forget it.