Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia [1974] by Sam Peckinpah

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Spanish: Tráiganme la cabeza de Alfredo García) is a 1974 neo-Western film co-written and directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring Warren Oates and Isela Vega, with Robert Webber, Gig Young, Helmut Dantine, Emilio Fernández and Kris Kristofferson in supporting roles. The film is about a down-on-his-luck musician (Oates) who joins a deadly manhunt for the titular character, who is wanted after impregnating the daughter of a crime boss. On its release in 1974, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo García was savaged by many critics and bombed at the box office. Nora Sayre of The New York Times wrote that the film started off well but "disentegrates rapidly," explaining: "Without Garcia as a victim, the plot has almost nowhere to go. Therefore, random episodes are slung into the narrative, including one of the silliest near-rape scenes I've ever seen ... But even this gratuitous garbage can't prevent the movie from dragging." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety panned the film as "turgid melodrama at its worst ... Considering the vast carnage, it is a measure of the film's nothing impact that the bloodletting fails to stir much emotional reaction." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times stated, "For all the violence, the movie is a very, very long two hours. The bodies shot at close quarters crumple in slow motion, but the motion is slow even when it isn't." Michael Sragow of New York magazine called it "a catastrophe so huge that those who once ranked Peckinpah with Hemingway may now invoke Mickey Spillane". Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that the film was a "time-machine foul-up, with modern, airborne killers functioning in the romanticized Mexico of an earlier movie era." John Simon called Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia "a all-out preposterous horror horror, except for a fine performance by Isela Vega and the clever way in which the protagonist is sneaked into our consciousness". Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.