- There are movies that contain violence and those that celebrate it, and then there are movies like Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia that treat it like a religious experience. The word "gratuitous" almost isn't strong enough to apply. Imagine Jim Thompson's novels stripped of the psychological complexity or those of Mickey Spillane if Mike Hammer hadn't avoided civilian casualties. In other words, adult graphic novel instead of kid's comic book. Of course, these days it's not that tough to imagine such perverse and explicit characterizations thanks largely to the popularization of sensationalists like Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino. Although Peckinpah himself owes a lot to Don Siegel, the artistic tendency to prefer violence over style (nevermind substance) had its inception partly in movies like this one.
- The title Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia tells you pretty much all you need to know. A wealthy Mexican aristocrat (Emilio Fernández) wants a man named Alfredo Garcia dead because Garcia impregnated his hapless daughter (Janine Maldonado). The eponymous call goes out for Garcia's head, a reward is announced, and bounty hunters stream out of the villa like rats from a sinking ship. Two of them (Robert Webber and Gig Young) stumble upon a grinning American expat named Bennie (Warren Oates) whose job playing piano at a local bar is certainly the most respectable thing about him. Bennie suspects that his girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) knows where Garcia is hiding, but Elita insists that Garcia died last week in a car accident. Most people would have given up at that point, but Bennie figures that these particular circumstances should only make it easier to collect Garcia's head. Once he gets his hands on a shovel and a machete, that is.
- The rest of the film is basically bounty hunters pursuing each other, plenty of drinking and driving, a little grave-digging here and there, much killing, and, yes, an enjoyably smarmy Warren Oates holding one-sided conversations with a bloody head in a fly-infested bag. If you wanted to see Kris Kristofferson play a rapist biker, this may be the film for you. I'm guessing all of this was intended as comedy? When one of the bounty hunters asks Bennie where "the cutoff" is, as though asking for driving directions, it's admittedly pretty damn funny. On the other hand, two women violently getting their shirts ripped off, one attempted rape-turned-seduction, and about a dozen innocent corpses somehow struck me as slightly less humorous. Maybe some people just can't take a joke. With jokes like these, I hope I continue to be one of them.
- Gig Young's character identifies himself as Fred C. Dobbs, seemingly unaware that The Treasure of Sierra Madre was a much better film than this one, even if they were both set in Mexico.
