Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Neo-Western by Sam Peckinpah. Warren Oates plays a down on his luck bartender taking on a bounty from a mexican crime boss to bring him the head of the man who got his daughter pregnant, dragging along his girlfriend. Now, that man, the eponymous Alfredo Garcia, is already dead so exhuming his remains and taking his head, he figures, shouldn't be too difficult. It turns out he's wrong.
I saw Wild Bunch a couple of weeks ago and didn't quite know what to make of it, but after seeing Alfredo Garcia I can confidently say that I'm not on a wavelength with Peckinpah at all. Maybe there's something I'm missing here but I feel like the guy couldn't direct impactful violence for shit. The scenes of his protagonists gunning down entire platoons of random adversaries feel so cartoonish and so utterly removed from the raw cynicism and brutality that their tone insists on that all investment just dissipates once they get going. Don't get me wrong here, there are actually a whole lot of individual beats in this that I think are interesting, most of them happening after, spoiler, the girlfriend dies and he's on his way to take back the head, but the conclusion is way too ridiculous for me to take any of it seriously.
See, there's a discussion to be had about violence in movies. Realistic violence, gratuitous violence, satisfying violence, stylized violence, cartoonish violence, shocking violence... and in many cases it's not so much the nature of the violence itself as the context around it that determines what kind you're seeing, or at least what you're seeing it as. There's no context in which a character we've only gotten to know as a sleazy, drunken sadsack shooting up a room full of armed gangsters is ever gonna work as a conclusion to something that's been built up as a nihilistic neo-western that certainly has a touched exaggeration but not to the point of going off into complete fantasy.
Which, again, is a shame, because there's some basic framework of a good movie in there. Warren Oates is fantastic in the lead role, in the way he embodies an amalgamation of sleaze and sadness who, one way or another, is gonna dig his own grave before too long. What makes that performance work is that he very decidedly isn't a badass, he isn't a Clint Eastwood type, he's a cowardly scumbag who's barely hanging on. The way he's starting to lose his mind after his girlfriend is murdered is portrayed quite well. But the way the movie frames his quest for revenge almost feels like it's about as out of touch with reality as he is. And, see, it was somewhat the same with Wild Bunch.
I simply don't see a place for these big, operatic standoffs in movies that otherwise try to drive home the cruelty and futility of a lawless life. I don't see the point of establishing characters as crude and pathetic and then affording them the glory of killing all their enemies and going down in a blaze of glory. This is something that a movie like The Great Silence understood so incredibly well. Despite all of its nihilistic posturing, a movie like Alfredo Garcia still feels frustratingly escapist. It's not willing to confront that a meaningless life usually ends in a meaningless death.
letterboxd.com
