Horseless Headsman

By JAY COCKS

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Directed by SAM PECKINPAH Screenplay by GORDON T. DAWSON and SAM PECKINPAH

Shame! Infamy! Horror! Sam Peckinpah has really tried to do it this time. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a gift to everyone who persists in misunderstanding such Peckinpah films as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs simply as paeans to brutality and orgies of tasteless violence. Alfredo Garcia could almost be dedicated to those benighted types. It is as if Peckinpah, sick of the accusations, decided to hurl them back and really make a film about violence.

Peckinpah means this movie to outrage; it is a kind of calculated insult mixed with generous doses of self-satire. What plot exists centers on a wrecked cocktail pianist named Bennie (Warren Dates), who tickles the ivories in some dive far into the bowels of Mexico. Once long ago Paulette "Goddard came into the joint and requested a tune, but the place has gone downhill since then. Bennie still keeps a bleary lookout for a buck, and his greed and desperation get him hooked into a feudal revenge scheme to track down a certain Alfredo Garcia and separate him from his head. Bennie does not ask who specifically requires Alfredo's head; such matters are of secondary importance to him.

What does concern him is that Alfredo's head will fetch a bounty of $10,000 and that Bennie's girl friend (Isela Vega) has just wrapped up an affair with Alfredo, who really seems to have got around. Alfredo has also impregnated the daughter of some big back-country honcho (Emilio Fernandez), who happens to be the fellow looking to have him done in. Bennie does not find this out until practically the last scene, when he has eliminated a lot of middlemen, mostly by gunfire. For the balance of the action, blistering jealousy and outright greed suit him as motivation just fine.

Peckinpah spends a lot of gleeful time showing Alfredo's head in a sack, being rudely bumped on the front seat of Bennie's car and swarming with dozens of interested flies. The movie has its fair share of action and a good deal of bloodletting, but gets ragged and desultory in the quieter portions.

The dialogue contains direct tributes to such classics as John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and John Ford's The Searchers. But the most obvious homage is to Huston's Beat the Devil, a bit of straight-faced parody made more or less off the cuff. The picture has strong overtones of a director's not only assaulting the audience but deflating himself in the process. Indeed, Warren Gates seems to have modeled his excellent characterization of Bennie on Peckinpah himself, complete with foggy aspect, enveloping sunglasses and calculatedly gross behavior.

Beat the Devil was good-humored and breezy, however, and Alfredo Garcia is full of fury and bile. It is a troubling, idiosyncratic and finally unsuccessful film--troubling not for the feelings of horror it intermittently tries to conjure up but for the impression it gives of being a dead end. It is like a private bit of self-mockery, a sort of ritual of closet masochism that invites, even challenges, everyone to think the worst.

Many will. That is part of what Peckinpah was after, and his success in getting it is the most disturbing element in this strange, strangled movie. -Jay Cocks

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