August 09 2007
Why You Should Watch: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
posted by Steven Shaw at 1:46 pmBring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia 8.30pm, Sunday 12 August, MGM Sky Digital With a title like that, how can you not want to see this film? For many years, Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) was slated as the worst film ever made. A modernised, ultra-violent western, it’s now considered to be one of the director’s purest works. Warren Oates stars as Bennie, a piano player working bars in Mexico, who is informed of a million dollar bounty placed on the head of his friend Alfredo, a gigolo who has impregnated the daughter of a wealthy Mexican. Bennie is down on his luck, he looks like the walking dead, and he’s keen to grab that bounty, a decision that seems fairly ruthless at first. But Bennie’s decision to dob his friend in for the money is justified when it’s revealed that Alfredo is already dead. Bennie figures Alfredo would prefer that he gets the bounty over some stranger. And as for desecrating Alfredo’s corpse to retrieve his head, the increasingly psychotic Bennie reasons that Alfredo’s not using it anymore and won’t mind (“There ain’t nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that’s in it. Or you. Or me.”). Oates wore Sam Peckinpah’s clothes while in character, and spends much of the screen time talking to the bagged head (he calls it “Al”) while drunk-driving a large automobile –- a black comedy style that would eventually influence directors like Quentin Tarantino. Screens this Sunday, 12 August at 8.30pm on MGM Sky Digital, followed by Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite
