Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year Released: 1974
Rating: 3.5
One of Peckinpah's greatest achievements, this road movie also serves as an allegory for the late American maverick's career, with Warren Oates playing the director as a down-and-out nobody doing a 'contract job.' Oates is hired to kill the title 'villain,' who, it turns out, is already dead - so Oates takes the head (a monstrous, almost Biblical entity, which gathers obscene amounts of flies wherever it rests) and takes sides with it (he even refers to it by name, 'Al'), maniacally acting 'in behalf' of it. If Oates is Peckinpah, then the head is one of Peckinpah's films - fought for and guarded by the director - and the Mexican industrialist that ordered Garcia's execution a studio producer ready to do with it (the film) whatever he pleases. However, the problem with a lot of the director's films - including Straw Dogs - is their treatment of women, and the mother-whores here are beaten up, stripped, raped and treated like nothing, which may be representative of his deep, private views of the fairest sex but is still discomforting to watch. Other than that debatable issue, it's a splendid cult item.
