The Big Picture

Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel praised Sam Peckinpah’s
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
was initially poorly received but later earned critical acclaim.
Warren Oates delivers a powerful performance in the lead role of Bennie in the crime movie.

There’s something special about the rush of being right when everyone around you is wrong. Granted, judging film is supposed to be subjective, but there’s still such a thing as a consensus, and you can fall into the majority or the minority opinion. Rarely does the reception to a film completely flip from one extreme to the other over time, but when it does happen, it’s a momentous occasion (shout out to Speed Racer, you did it). Back when they were a dynamic duo, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel found themselves ahead of the curve on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a film that was initially found to be repellent and disgusting by both critics and audiences, but is now considered a high point of director Sam Peckinpah’s career.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) A down-and-out American bartender in Mexico embarks on a dangerous quest to collect a bounty on Alfredo Garcia’s head. As he navigates through treacherous territory, he encounters violence and betrayal, testing his resolve and morality.Release Date August 7, 1974 Director Sam Peckinpah Cast Warren Oates , Isela Vega , Robert Webber , Gig Young , Helmut Dantine , Emilio Fernández , Kris Kristofferson , Chano Urueta Runtime 113 Minutes Main Genre Crime Writers Gordon T. Dawson , Frank Kowalski Expand

What Is Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ About?
Bennie (Warren Oates) is the owner of a raucous bar in Mexico City, relishing the small spotlight he basks in behind his signature sunglasses. Well-liked but clearly scraping by in life, he’s given a golden opportunity in the form of two shady bounty hunters, Quill (Gig Young) and Sappensly (Robert Webber). They give him a simple proposition: find a man named Alfredo Garcia, bring his head to a wealthy man named El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), and be rewarded with $1 million. Garcia impregnated El Jefe’s daughter and ran out on her, and El Jefe wants revenge. Bennie is quick to agree, and sets off to find Garcia with the help of Elita (Isela Vega), Bennie’s girlfriend who used to be with Garcia. The two go on a meandering journey played in a devastatingly minor key that forces Bennie to confront all that he’s been missing in his life, and the increasing desperation with which he must hold on to what he does have.

Peckinpah was a director most known for assaulting his audience with a maelstrom of carnage and grunge that felt unparalleled for his time. Films like Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch scandalized both critics and audiences with how abrasive and borderline disgusting they were in their portrayals of brutality for the sake of survival. While Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia does eventually give fans what they’re looking for (i.e. scraggly gunfights punctuated with glorious shots of bodies falling in slow motion), most of the film is more of a despairing epic poem about running out of options and letting go of regret to get what you feel you deserve.

We may not get much backstory on Bennie, but through his relationship with Elita, we see how he’d previously long given up on doing anything for himself, content to let life give him scraps. It’s painfully obvious that even though he’s been in love with Elita (and she’s obviously equally interested in him), he never truly told her how he felt and was content to coast by on what little they had, which clearly bothered her. The question of what Bennie truly cares about and how much he cares hangs over his every action, as he’s shown multiple times to be an irascible misanthrope to people who aren’t Elita and Alfredo. If it isn’t those two people, the only thing Bennie really seems to care about is…money.

Warren Oates’ Bennie Is Torn Between Money and Friendship
Image via United Artists 

From the moment we meet him, money hangs over Bennie like a devil on his shoulder. He’s seated at his bar’s piano, and right behind his left shoulder is a big dollar bill with President Richard Nixon’s caricature on it. Even though he knows Alfredo was a dear friend of his, he feels no shame for taking the bounty hunters up on the option of potentially killing his friend for the sake of $1 million. As an extension of his selfishness, he’s incredibly reckless when it comes to the safety of himself and others in his orbit. He won’t flinch when witnessing someone get knocked out cold, he’ll drive into oncoming traffic because he’s distracted, and he’ll randomly shoot at geese while driving because…well, why not? It isn’t until he and Elita have a violent encounter with two bikers, one of whom is played by a young Kris Kristofferson, that Bennie starts to fully act on the emotional connections he’d seemed previously in denial of, killing the bikers in defense of Elita. As Bennie gets deeper into his odyssey and becomes more honest with Elita about his feelings, his fixation with the prospect of money shifts towards a fixation on honoring those who he cares about.

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An early reference to another film serves as a key to unlocking the journey that Bennie goes on. Before the bounty hunters leave, Bennie asks what one of their names is, and he responds “Fred C. Dobbs,” referring to the Humphrey Bogart character from the John Huston-directed film Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In that film, Dobbs’ search for gold sends him further into insanity, turning him into a paranoid monster who only acts for himself. In the case of Bennie, his search for money does push him into a kind of delusion, but it’s one that careens him into making his heart grow three sizes. It gets to a point where he’s talking to Alfredo’s head as if he’s a traveling companion and willing to throw all the money he currently has away just to regain possession of him. Despite knowing almost nothing about how close he ever actually was to Alfredo, it’s clear how tightly Bennie has grown attached to honoring the memory of his friend, and how much he’s willing to throw it all away to do right by him. This is all thanks to the blazing performance of Warren Oates.

Warren Oates Has the Role of His Career in the Sam Peckinpah Crime Movie
Image via United Artists 

Oates made a career out of being one of the great “hey, it’s that guy” actors in film history, popping up and stealing scenes in films like In the Heat of the Night, Stripes, and 1941, usually playing surly authority figures who could cut anyone down to size. He didn’t often get the chance to lead a film, but after previous films like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah gave him the role of Bennie, enabling him to be front and center. Oates is such a wild card, who constantly vacillates between grimy and sweat-caked loser, to deranged commando warrior, to hopeless lover, and he unifies them all with his blinding white smile and dogged conviction.

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Bennie is, in many ways, an abjectly awful person, and yet Oates gives him an honor and nobility worthy of a knight on a valiant quest, despite his suit of armor being a lousy suit. This is exceptionally paradoxical, as Bennie has barely any honesty or belief in him, outside his belief in money. In that context, Bennie goes on a journey worthy of Thomas Malory, as he goes from calling Alfredo “the saint of our money” to insisting he’s going to finish his adventure with Alfredo in his hands. That’s by far the most that Oates ever had to carry in one film for his entire career, and he latched onto it like a wounded dog clamping on a steak. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for anybody to be drawn in when the film released.

Siskel and Ebert Praised ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia turned out to be a bomb in every way when it landed, both financially and critically. Numerous critics, either angrily or dismissively, shrugged off the film using phrases like “turgid melodrama.” Peckinpah’s previous film, Straw Dogs, had been met with a similar outrage, but that was at least directed towards a film that was designed to be controversial and instigate conversation about its subject. Alfredo Garcia is ultimately B-movie material supercharged with an uncomfortable level of identification and pathos courtesy of Sam Peckinpah’s direction, and it frankly feels like many critics were lashing out at Peckinpah out of indignation over his previous film.

That makes it all the more shocking that Roger Ebert would publicly praise the film so much, considering that he eviscerated Straw Dogs for its “hypocrisy” towards violence. He described Alfredo Garcia as “a weird, horrifying film that somehow transcends its unlikely material” and praised how it asks the audience to “see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he’s trying to write about the human condition.” Gene Siskel, meanwhile, praised the film’s accurate portrayal of Mexican locations and the physical details that Peckinpah captured, as well as its “lyrical mood between society’s outsiders.”

People love Siskel and Ebert, both separately and together, because of how frequently they had their fingers on the pulse of what current audiences would respond to in films. That’s not to say they were always right, as they both had their fair share of whiffs, and sometimes would even fight pretty bitterly with each other. They also both had spines of steel, and never backed down from their unpopular opinions (though Ebert did once apologize for his Zoolander slam). So for them to vouch for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia when the tide was all against it, and they had a track record that implied they’d trash it, is a sign of the character they had as critics that should be commended and modeled on by all who aspire to be honest critics.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is available to buy on Amazon in the U.S.

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