Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Fuck, Eat, Shit, No One Here Gets Out Alive

directed by Sam Peckinpah

starring Warren Oates, Isela Vega,
Robert Webber, Gig Young, Helmut Dantine

After being screwed in the ass by various producers and powers-that-were for thirteen-odd years, Sam Peckinpah simply made lubing up a part of his morning routine. So along comes producer Martin Baum, with the backing of United Artists, to give him free rein on the making of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. And Peckinpah thanked them by squeezing out an utterly repulsive, rancid piece of shit that, pacing-wise, lurches on rubber legs like an accident victim in his first week of physical therapy, and displays shocking dips both in quality and in consistency of mise-en-scèneand lighting (at least in its first half). Bennie (Warren Oates) is an American dirtbag down in Old Mex, playing piano in a shithole dive behind a pair of shades and a fog of tequila breath. Critics said Oates was a mere character actor who wore the occasional lead role like an ill-fitting suit. Bennie might as well have expired at the midway point, and the rest of the film could simply be a dying man's fever dream of redemption as he withers away in the Mexican sun. It's what happens when Nixon's America infects the Mexican countryside with its greed and savagery and violence; when the modern world of corporate murder in three-piece suits blithely waves its suitcases full of dinero, its ladies-in-waiting and its Coca-Cola chairs in the face of a land where tenement shacks, beat-to-shit family cars and little boys who wipe the gringoes' windows for a couple of pesos define a way of life. Be it an endless war abroad or the gradual decaying of our ability to face ourselves in the mirror -- sooner or later, we all have to face the "merchandise" we've bought.

And no one gets away clean.