"Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia"

This is what I forgot to mention.

Saw this a little while back and was completely flummoxed.

It's a Peckinpah movie (only reason I watched it) and I was so sure that I would like it, I ended up getting a DVD of it for Christmas.

But, to tell the truth, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

This happened before, with Segio Leone's "A Fistful of Dynamite" … that overlooked Western of his with Rod Steiger and James Coburn. The difference, though, is I was pretty firmly on the side of not liking "Dynamite" and yet wondering what all the fuss was about and whether I was missing something.

With "Alfredo Garcia," I wasn't quite sure that I didn't like it, even as I cursed the incoherence of the movie and squirmed through the uncomfortableness of the last 45 minutes or so.

I'm not going to review it, there's no shortage of self-important pontificating on the Internet here. But for those of you looking for the short recap:

It's a modern-day Western (or was, when released in 1974) set in the interior of Mexico. When a powerful Mexican jefe (drug lord? land baron?) finds out that Alfredo Garcia has impregnated his daughter, well, it ain't gonna end well for Alfredo.

Bounty hunters spill out of the jefe's compound to secure Alfredo's head, and, ultimately, our anti-hero Benny (Warren Oates pictured below) gets caught up in the quest.

 

The whole movie is coated in dust where the blazing sun beats down and covered in grime where it don't.

It has its moments, for sure. Moments of brilliance. But I couldn't embrace it, like the other Peckinpah films I love so. "The Wild Bunch" is my favorite movie. "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is like a Western made specifically for me. "Junior Bonner" spoke to me on a personal level. I adored all of them immediately.

I've kept a safe distance from "Alfredo." And yet I can't quite turn away from it, either.

Sure, one critic called it one of the 50 worst movies of all time. But good ol' Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece.

And I have to find out why.

Think I'm gonna have to watch this one again.