This movie has a great title, a great premise(a guy who has always wanted to be a criminal badass tries to claim a bounty on Alfredo Garcia along with his hooker girlfriend, so they go hunting in the Mexican criminal underground) and even features a drunken guy cracking up talking to a rotting decapitated head.
But until perhaps the final half hour or so the movie never thrilled me, to started with the film used and sets and costumes made me think this thing was set in the 1800s or something, it did not look like how I imagined the Mexican criminal underworld to look in the 1970s when it is set.
Second the film seems so detached, these characters are starting out on an adventure that soon becomes harrowing(DUH!) and only in the final minutes does this come across. In a story about a guy and his girlfriend getting in over their heads and then losing their marbles and basically committing suicide it should not feel detached!
I’ll not even mention the odd rape scene with the victim enjoying it.
Oh and while the amount of topless scenes is not hated, it started to feel silly. Movie dragging? EXPOSE BOOBAGE!
This is a Peckinpah staple (cf Straw Dogs and [arguably] The Getaway).
i agree with what you said about BMTHOAG, but that’s also common in Sam’s films. But it’s all worth it to see what I consider Warren Oates’s greatest performance.
Never saw the movie, but I do remember seeing the unintentionally hilarious trailer for it. Included in a list of all the horrible things we’d see in the movie, like rape and murder and all that, an ominous voice says, “Holy ground will be desecrated.” I burst out laughing in the theatre at that.
The movie includes an automatic handgun, machine guns, indoor plumbing, telephones, motorcycles, cars, and jet passenger planes–this suggests “set in the 1800s”?
She doesn’t fight because her attacker has a gun. She doesn’t appear to be “enjoying” the threat of rape. Her action/inaction is strategic.
I said to start, in the first few minutes of the film nothing suggests it is set in the 1970s.
I started watching it and wondered if I had misread the synopsis until modern objects started showing up. I never said I was under that impression at the end of the movie, but it still felt off. The 1970s were the era of drug cartels, documentaries from the period show a very different look, in fact I just realized it might have been an intentional decision to make the film look like a western.
One kind is aimed at the goal. Everything is directed towards the final product: the movie that will be released. In this kind of production, the production itself is unimportant. What matters is what ends up on the screen.
The other kind is aimed at the process. Here everything is directed at making the movie rather than being primarily concerned about the movie that’s being made.
A stereotypical filmmaker of the first kind would say, “I don’t care if it was the best production I ever worked in or the worst production I ever worked in. All that matters is the movie that came out of it. The production is temporary but the movie lasts forever.” A stereotypical filmmaker of the second kind would say, “My job is to make a movie. Once it’s done being made, it’s over for me and I don’t care what happens to it from that point on. I immediately go to work on making the next movie and never look back at the movies that are done.”
Peckinpah, from what I know, was the second kind of filmmaker. He didn’t make Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia because he thought it would be a great movie. He made it because he thought he would enjoy making it. Once it was made, he wasn’t too concerned about whether audiences or critics liked it - he had already gotten what he wanted out of it.
You wrote:
“But until perhaps the final half hour or so the movie never thrilled me, to started with the film used and sets and costumes made me think this thing was set in the 1800s or something, it did not look like how I imagined the Mexican criminal underworld to look in the 1970s when it is set.”
“Second the film seems so detached, these characters are starting out on an adventure…”
When you write “to started [sic] with,…” followed by “Second the film seems…”, the phrase “to started with” suggests that what follows is your first point, followed by your second.
Apparently you meant to say “The film’s opening scenes used sets and costumes…etc”
This is correct–the opening scenes contain no visual clues suggesting the year(s) in which the film is set. That lasts for what–five or ten minutes?–followed by jet planes and Warren Oates singing “Guantanamara.”
This creates a striking contrast that I don’t see as a problem. And the opening scenes are beautiful, featuring the legendary Emilio Fernandez.
And the film really isn’t set in, nor about, the “criminal underworld.” It’s one guy finding Garcia’s head, who’s chased by two other guys who want to steal it.
The film is indeed bizarre, one of those films that creates its own universe. Critics were divided; Ebert wrote an excellent review.
