Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #75 Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Alternately, you could follow in the footsteps of two kind, incredibly appreciated patrons and have me watch and then write about a filmmaker or actor’s entire filmography.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last eight months or so with the filmography of “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah, the manly man behind such masterpieces of machismo as The Wild Bunch. And I recently began a jaunt through the films of David Bowie for another Patreon benefactor.

The big-hearted patron who commissioned the Peckinpah series was a little worried that these often unrelentingly brutal, violent movies might be taking a toll on my fragile psyche. So he gave me the option to watch the motion picture Velocipastor, a documentary (I assume) about a pastor who is also a velociraptor, and vice versa, as a bit of a palate-cleanser before I waded into the pitch-black waters of the famously brutal Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, which takes its famous title from a line of dialogue and also the stinking, fly-infested disembodied head of the titular luckless lady’s man that figures so prominently in the proceedings that it deserves to be listed third in the opening credits. 

I appreciated this patron’s concern and like everyone, I have always wondered what would happen if a pastor were to transform,  Incredible Hulk-like, into a velociraptor whenever it becomes angry after being the subject of a mysterious curse, the premise of Velocipastor. 

But the truth is that I have been looking forward to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia since the very beginning of this project because it is such an incredible showcase for Warren Oates, one of my favorite actors and a man born to play one of Peckinpah’s trademark broken, booze-sodden men of violence chasing oblivion in a world as vicious as it is insane. 

Oates excelled in supporting roles in myriad Peckinpah productions, an essential component of his righteous repertory of tough guy character actors who brought enormous personality, power and conviction to everything they did by virtue of who they were and the lives they’d led. 

If you seemed like someone who might have killed someone in a drunken bar fight at some point in your wild youth, Peckinpah knew how to use you better than just about anyone else.

If Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia never made it out of the cheap, tacky bar where degenerate pianist Bennie (Warren Oates, oozing oily magnetism and sadness from every booze-sweat-soaked pore) tends bar and sings endless rounds of “Guantanamera” for tourists I would not have minded a goddamn bit. I could live forever in that simultaneously scuzzy and weirdly homey world, that pit of loneliness and sadness. 

If I were a rich man I’d have Oates’ entire wardrobe reproduced in my size. Oates’ style here, all white suits, paisley shirts, shades and a rakish mustache, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a bottle of tequila in one hand, a firearm in another, is my aesthetic. 

Apparently Oates based the character’s personality and appearance on Peckinpah himself, which means that Sam Peckinpah is my style icon. That’s kind of weird in that we’re otherwise somewhat antithetical figures. 

A never better Oates is magnificent in his dissipation, kingly in his desperate fatalism. From his very first moment onscreen it’s obvious Bennie is doomed, and his unmistakably tragic air suggests he’s all too aware of his imminent demise. 

Bennie has led a hard life and is destined for an even harder death but Oates gives him a core of genuine decency that allows us to not just feel for him but to experience the soul-consuming grief and sadness that is wracking his body and soul nearly as acutely as he does. 

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is about death and destiny and fatalism but it’s also very much about mourning, about a man trying and failing to find a reason to go on after he loses the one thing of genuine value in his life, a woman he loves in spite of himself and his rapacious demons and boundless capacity for self-annihilation.

One of Peckinpah’s most personal films, and reportedly the only one that came out the way he intended, Alfredo begins on a note of deceptive gentleness and tranquility, opening on a pregnant young Mexican woman in white gazing at a pond full of ducks and swans and nature’s quiet splendor. 

The reverie is violently and predictably broken when it is revealed that the girl’s father is El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez), a brutal crime boss who angrily demands the name of the father of her unborn baby. She resists but ultimately reveals that the titular Casanova is the guilty party. 

In a rage, El Jefe utters the infamous title line, putting a one million dollar bounty on Alfredo Garcia’s head. Alfredo Garcia’s shift from dreamy and gentle to brutal is as bracing as it is brutal and expected. 

Garcia is an often unrelentingly ugly movie studded with moments of great beauty and human connection, most notably in the relationship between Bennie, a man with way more yesterdays than tomorrows, and Elita (Isela Vega), a sometimes maid who hangs around the bar, sleeping with tourists for money. 

Elita has just returned from a three day fling with the man of the hour and consequently knows that the universe has done El Jefe’s work for him; Garcia died in a drunk driving accident.

Luckily for Bennie, the small army of killers on the lookout for Garcia, most notably a pair of white American hitmen, Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Johnny Quill (Gig Young) don’t know that. 

How troubled was Gig Young? Young was so deep into his alcoholism in the 1970s that he was unable to perform a crucial role in Charlie’s Angels that would have resurrected his career and made him a whole lot of money. The really sad part? The role was for Charlie.  

Young was too inebriated for an entirely offscreen role that called for nothing more than delivering lines into a microphone. In 1978 Young’s tragic life reached a horrifying end when he killed his fifth wife and then himself in a murder-suicide. Adding to the free-floating misery and madness of his final years? At one point Young was also a patient of Eugene Landy, the notorious quack who took over Brian Wilson’s life and career in a way that struck some as a tad bit unprofessional. Young also got fired from a lead role in Blazing Saddles the first day of shooting because he was struggling so visibly and intensely with alcohol withdrawal; Young’s famous failures and rejections cast a long shadow over his extraordinary successes. Of course a guy like Peckinpah was attracted to him as a collaborator.

So even though Young’s role here is small in screen time he brings an extraordinary amount of cultural and meta-textual baggage that makes an already compelling performance and character absolutely riveting. 

The strong implication that the two elegant older men are a gay couple adds an additional element of fascinating subtext to an already thematically rich motion picture. 

In an unnecessary bit of candor, Elita concedes to Bennie that her fling with Garcia was emotional as well as sexual, that they didn’t just fuck; they loved each other as well. This enrages Bennie, who calls her a “lying, cheating, no-good two-bit bitch” but who also genuinely cares for her in ways that make him feel vulnerable and powerless because he can’t control her, or anything else in a world spiraling out of control.  

Elita is understandably horrified at the prospect of Bennie literally digging up the dead body of a man she loved so that he can chop off the head and deliver it to a vicious crime boss in exchange for a big payday.

This ever so slightly misrepresents the film’s tone and content.

Peckinpah’s grim universe is so brutal that it almost seems adorable that the warm-hearted Elita would feel terrible about something as minor as the desecration of a corpse when there are so many more major crimes to worry about. 

When Bennie tells Elita “I love you” it’s absolutely shattering; these are two people who have lived, who have suffered but who have found something good and true in each other. 

So when Elita is killed around the time he’s excavating Garcia’s grave Bennie loses his only real connection to the world. 

He is utterly lost, a shattered ghost of a man just barely holding it together. He’s haunted by the looming specter of Elita, who brought out the best in him but on a much more literal, concrete level he’s haunted by the very real head of a man he hated and envied and never quite came to terms with, in life or in death. 

There’s a lot of ghoulish, pitch-black comedy in Bennie having understandably one-sided conversations with the head of his greatest romantic rival but because of the great pathos and melancholy Oates brings to the role, particularly after Elita’s death, it’s achingly sad as well. 

There are no happy endings for men like Bennie, just endings. He begins the film in a state of bone-deep exhaustion and defeat and grows more tired and hopeless with every scene until death, even violent death, begins to seem preferable to a world that has nothing to offer him but unbearable pain. 

As its title indelibly and iconically conveys, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is dark and disturbing, bleak and unrelentingly cynical about human nature but thanks to the chemistry between Oates and Vega, this is an expectedly tender and human story as well.  

Alfredo Garcia is unforgettable as a richly textured character study about a complicated man staggering towards a violent demise but it’s even more powerful and unexpected as a tragic romance from a decidedly unexpected source. 

If you’d like to choose a film (or filmmaker, or actor) you can do so over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace or just kick in whatever you’d like. Everything is appreciated.