Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Cinema 21, $8 admission
Feb 21, 5:30pm

Sponsored by Mike Clark's Movie Madness

Sam Peckinpah
USA 1974
112 min.
You can drench it in booze, pack it in ice, drive it as far across the border as you can, but there’s no escaping the stench, no stifling the reek of a life you know might have been something beautiful.

Watch Alfredo Garcia, and you can’t believe Sam Peckinpah directed four more movies: This is his valediction, covered in gristle and cheap tequila. Its very release was a kind of self-immolation: People hated this movie, and loathed its director on a mortal level. (Imagine the outrage if a Saw installment added rape, live burial, and poetry.) But it is an American Hamlet—the grief-maddened prince lugs around his resentments, he talks to a skull, and everybody dies. Warren Oates is the hero, if you can call it heroism when you are tasked with tallying the losses: “Sixteen people are dead because of him, and you, and me. And one of them was a damn good friend of mine.”