Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

(USA / Mexico 1974) Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Following the commercial failure of "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" in 73, director Sam Peckinpah started to work on a low budget film, shot in Mexico. The idea for this project came up a few years earlier : during the shooting of "The Ballad of Cable Hogue", screenwriter Frank Kowalski, a longtime friend of the director, told him of an idea he had for a film : "I got a great title: ''Bring Me the Head of...,' - and he had some other name - 'and the hook is that the guy is already dead'." Peckinpah started then to develop the story of American drifter Bennie and his slow descent in hell, that would eventually become "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia". The result is one of the great American film of the seventies and the only film of Peckinpah's career that was released as he intended, with no interference by any moronic studio executives.

The project went into production at the end of September 73, and as so often with Peckinpah, a man famously at war with the establishment, it initiated a scandal in the US film industry when the director was quoted saying in the professional newspaper Variety : ""For me, Hollywood no longer exists. It's past history. I've decided to stay in Mexico because I believe I can make my pictures with greater freedom from here". This upset the Motion Picture and Television Unions and they openly censured the director for his statement at their National Conference in Detroit. They also threatened Alfredo Garcia with union boycotts upon its release, labeling it a "runaway" production. In his defense, Peckinpah claimed that he was misquoted. Before the film was to be released, the unions relented on their boycott threat.

At the time of its release in 74, the film, too violent, too raw, too sexist, too dirty, too manly for its times (it was banned in Sweden, Germany and Argentina) was a failure, both commercially and critically (a few US reviewers still label it as one of the worst films ever. We will piss on their graves with great delight).  Truth is, the film is now a classic of America's seventies cinema, a brilliant nihilist descent, the poetic epitomy of melancholic real machismo, made by a director who was one the only real men in film. And there are too few of those. Bring on the tequila and enjoy.