That craggy, beaten face is first seen hiding behind a big pair of dark shades, a wide smile accentuated by a moustache, playing piano in a dive bar, looking to make visitors smile and sing along in order to fill that bowl with cash tips. While apparently Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974) was the only film that director Sam Peckinpah had final cut on, without any studio interference or oversight, it’s the face of Warren Oates that is his true canvas, a character actor of westerns and thrillers given leading man status as the piano player desperado, Benny. Though in essence Oates said he was playing aspects of Peckinpah himself, a symbolic double in a neo-noir modern western thriller with a ghoulish kicker for a plot, which all functions as a metaphor for losing, losing due to the money men sure, but also losing because of your own vices. When a Mexican land owner and chieftain puts the call out for the title directive against Alfredo Garcia, a gigolo who has knocked up the chieftain’s daughter, the gangsters spreading the word for a big cash reward cross Benny’s path. Thankfully his on and off again paramour Elita (Isela Vega) is a consort of Alfredo Garcia, and knows where he is – ironically dead due to a car accident. Despite the possibility of romance and love between Benny and Elita, two broken down people in middle age looking for one last shot of companionship, Benny is caught up in the prospect of the money. A road trip is planned for Mexico and the gravesite with a shovel and a machete in tow. When I was fifteen, I sought this film out because it was mentioned in a review of Robert Rodgrigeuz’s Desperado (a film I liked back then being a teenage Tarantino fanboy); at the time I basically wanted the slow motion shoot outs. Watching it again recently on the Arrow Video Blu-ray, I was more caught up in Benny and Elita’s hopeless road trip, and the inevitable bad fortune that awaits. The second half is a revenge quest with Benny trading conversation with the severed head (wrapped in a bag), a mirror for all of Benny’s wrongs. Beautifully shot on location in Mexico with a plaintive, poetic score by Jerry Fielding, this is a bloody, nihilistic road to oblivion, perfectly rendered by the performances of Oates and Vega. While a box office bomb and critical failure on release, time has been kind to Peckinpah’s film and its cult status has grown into serious critical reevaluation, little comfort to a film about a loser’s last shot; “You can’t lose all the time”, Benny snaps at the gangsters who think very little of him. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 