Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia does have some sloppy photography, a few unintentionally humorous scenes, and an excess of Peckinpah's signature slow-motion violence, but it stands as one of Peckinpah's more daring films.

Like few modern films, Alfredo Garcia seems to not only be a product of a director’s singular vision, but a virtual window into one man’s fractured, tortured soul.

Sure, it's one of the silliest titles of all time, especially if you make a drinking game of substituting words for Head? chair, spleen, lunch, etc. But it's a masterpiece from The Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah. [22 Mar 2005, p.H22]

It's all sweat, death and bloody retribution: one of Peckinpah's finest. [03 Apr 2010, p.53]

The film's story - about a gringo loser (Warren Oates) who digs up and decapitates a body to claim a reward - seems much less gratuitously shocking today, and its dated brand of macho pessimism has a nostalgic appeal. [14 Jun 2002]

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia is turgid melodrama [from a story by Frank Kowalski and Sam Peckinpah] at its worst.