Avis des critiques

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) is simply one of the greatest American films, a protracted, pained scream directed at a society where all values have been supplanted by price tags, in which Warren Oates's increasingly unhinged cantina piano man, rendered seemingly Godmode invulnerable by his reckless suicidal grief, tries repeatedly to ascertain the cost of a human life from behind the barrel of a blazing pistol.

It was the director's most personal film, and its images feel almost too intimate. It's less a film than a booze-soaked diary whose pages have been ripped out and hung up to dry.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is indelible not only because of its amazing central visual metaphor – a moldering skull right out of Shakespeare that becomes a sounding board for poor, death-wishing Warren Oates – but because Peckinpah writes his personal philosophy into the space between the shoot-out.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) is easily Peckinpah's bleakest, most brutal film, and that in itself is saying something. It's also a film that seems almost wilfully self-destructive, inasmuch as it is completely uncompromising in its vision of an utterly amoral and violent world.

Peckinpah frames Bennie's (and his own) future as one of a ranting crank, railing at the injustices of his life. It is bitterly mordant commentary on Peckinpah's own career. The style and tempo are as uncertain as Bennie's psyche. There is a lot of panning and zooming in the frame, as if Peckinpah is unclear of what he wants to focus on. It is a sloppy looking movie, bobbing and weaving to find its center, which usually ends up on Warren Oates' deeply lined face...

[...It] has a brute, blunt, and ultimately honest poetic force. Like its antihero, and probably like its director, the film is engagingly obstinate and prone to shooting itself in its own metaphorical foot. If the film was more visually consistent, and if the plotting more coherent, it probably wouldn't work as well. That lack of polish conjures an unforgettable atmosphere of fevered decay and instability.

This movie, one of the only pictures Peckinpah had total control over, isn't just personal, it's fucking personal. For Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia isn't merely declarative for those seeking the headless bounty, but for those demons rattling around Peckinpah's near nihilistic noggin.

By far the most underrated of Sam Peckinpah's films, this grim 1974 tale about a minor-league piano player (Warren Oates) in Mexico who sacrifices his love (Isela Vega) when he goes after a fortune as a bounty hunter is certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works — even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.