Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

If memory serves me correctly, this was Sam Peckinpah's most controversial film, as well as the only one in which he had the right to final cut, as well as, in my opinion, his most forlorn and personal film. While perhaps not as great as Straw Dogs, this film has a kind of sad, desperate passion constantly driving it forward. Peckinpah regular, Warren Oates, stars as a bartender/piano player who gets wind of a chance to make a lot of money for bringing in Alfredo Garcia's cabeza to a wealthy Mexican landowner whose daughter was impregnated by Mr. Garcia. We never meet Garcia, by the time the bounty is placed on his head, he is already dead and buried which automatically makes this different than how one might typically expect. So he takes his Mexican girlfried (Isela Vega) and starts driving the dusty roads of modern Mexico(1974 -- it's a Peckinpah Western that isn't set in the old West). The relationship between Oates and Vega is as sad, passionate, and desperate as the movie itself. In fact, they are granted what may be the most tenderly beautiful scene of Peckinpah's career in a hotel shower (not what you're thinking). Of course, it wouldn't be a Peckinpah picture without a healthy dose of metaphysical violence, which he depicts not as horrifically as Straw Dogs nor as gung ho as The Wild Bunch but as the last resort of desperate men with nothing left to lose and with nothing left to gain. You know, the more I think about it, in some ways, this may be Peckinpah's finest film. From what I hear, Peckinpah was frighteningly like his films -- hard drinking, tough talking, violent, and died early a sad, lonely man. In this film we see the soul of an artist laid bare before us just daring us to show compassion, when in reality, that's probably all he ever needed.