It’s one of the great movie titles, so it may be no surprise to learn that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia‘s title came first. Co-writer Frank Kowalski came up with the Bring Me the Head bit, and co-writer/director Sam Peckinpah took it from there, helping flesh out a story that would both justify it and do it justice.
It is a deliberately shonky quest movie, set up in its opening scenes of a Mexican patriarch, his henchmen and family interrogating the man’s clearly pregnant teenage daughter as to who is the father of the child. She says nothing, even as the interrogation turns into torture. Eventually, at the sound of a bone snapping, she screams out the name of the man who brought this disgrace on the family. Leading to the big man making the pronouncement – “Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia”.
With a reward of £1 million attached, it’s a head everybody suddenly wants. Among them the nearest thing this downbeat adventure is going to have to a good guy. Bennie (Warren Oates) learns of the necessity of finding Garcia – dead not alive – when two impressively unpleasant but courteous Americans (played with off-key brilliance by Gig Young and Robert Webber) come looking for information in the cantina where he plays honky-tonk lounge piano.
They tell him there’s a reward out for the head of Garcia – $10,000, they say. Maybe they already know that Bennie and Alfredo had been sharing the same woman, Elita (Isela Vega). Maybe they already know that Alfredo is already dead, in a freak car accident, but that Elita knows where he is buried.
After a night of booze and sex with Elita – lice in his pubic hair the next morning – Bennie fires up his beat-up Chevrolet Impala and heads off with her to find Alfredo’s corpse, at first only dimly aware that other parties are shadowing them as they go. There will be declarations of a sort of love en route and much blood shed before the final credits roll, delivered in Peckinpah fashion – in guns-blazing slo-mo, with the colour scarlet much in evidence.
It’s gonzo film-making brought into the mainstream, where sex and death co-mingle, men mount rearguard defences of their masculinity and statuesque women always seem on the verge of revealing their breasts.
Full of panache and swagger Oates plays Bennie as a version of Peckinpah – shades on the entire time, even in bed, glugging hooch, shooting at things by the side of the just just for the hell of it, whooping as he goes. Isela Vega, the jaded madonna, a statuesque woman who plucks a guitar and sings a sweet song, clutching for dignity even when naked, which is quite a lot.
The symbolically beat-up car and Bennie’s increasingly dirty white suit Bennie testify to Peckinpah’s desire to rub our faces in a few dirty realities – contingent masculinity, dilapidated Mexico, transactional romance and an investigation that’s badly compromised.
The dirty glory of the second, or even third best is what this is all about. Bennie is no white knight, but he’s as near as this story will get. Fate operates mockingly, situating this film in the realm of the neo noir. Happiness seems out of reach and Bennie and Elita seem doomed from the outset, something the plaintive Spanish guitar on Jerry Fielding’s score is telling us even before anything too bad has gone down.
Peckinpah had flopped with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid before this and so shot the whole thing on the cheap, entirely in Mexico, making full use of locations that are gorgeous in their own dog-eared way. Thanks to Álex Phillips Jr’s lighting the visuals are rich and sumptuous (the 2017 4K restoration does Phillips proud).
After almost universal negative reviews, this film flopped too. Roger Ebert stood out from the pack of critics, praising it and recognising it as something new. All these decades later the film no longer has the same shock value but it remains obvious that Peckinpah was taking spaghetti western tropes and pushing them into the territory you’d now call Tarantino-esque.
Peckinpah did it all on booze and cocaine, it may come as no surprise to hear. Can I get a whoop whoop for booze and cocaine?
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
