If there were ever a filmmaker that could truly be called a “man’s director,” Sam Peckinpah would be that director. This film starts out with the pregnant Theresa (Janine Maldonado, only film performance) sitting by a river. Her father El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez, WILD BUNCH) is furious that she is pregnant and calls for the head of her lover Alfredo Garcia.
Two of El Jefe’s hitmen Sappensly (Robert Webber, 10) and Quill (Gig Young, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?) turn up in a brothel looking for Alfredo and meet piano player Bennie (Warren Oates, 1941), who knows how to find Alfredo and wants to get paid for it. Bennie learns that Alfredo has hooked up with his favorite prostitute Elita (Isela Vega, THE STREETS OF L.A.), which upsets him. He then discovers that Alfredo is already dead, but the hitmen want proof (i.e. Alfredo’s head). So Bennie and Elita head out on a road trip to find Alfredo.
Bennie and Elita are losers who the world has beat up badly. They have little prospects, so cutting off the head of a dead man for $10,000 looks like the golden ticket for Bennie. Elita finds the whole thing gruesome. Is the money worth losing your soul?
The movie is sad in relating the lives of its main characters, who work and demean themselves just to survive. There’s a scene where bikers attack Elita that may read as sexist at first, but the following scene defines what Peckinpah is really saying. Elita’s actions with the biker Paco (Kris Kristofferson, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE) says a lot about what she thinks about herself, but the following scene clearly shows how Peckinpah wants us to think about her. The film deals with greed and the way it warps the soul much like TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, which Peckinpah references by having Sappensly say his name is “Fred C. Dobbs” – Humphrey Bogart’s character in MADRE.
Oates and Vega are perfect in the film with performances of real emotion. Bennie wears his sunglasses throughout the film, but take notice to when he takes them off after returning from the road trip. Oates nails that moment without overplaying the metaphor a single bit. Once Bennie finds Alfredo the film moves into a bizarre kind of poetry where the simple nature of Bennie following through with his task puts forth amazing visual metaphors. The ending is tragic in an unexpected way, which has nothing to do with Bennie’s fate, but has everything to do with the pointlessness of the whole affair.
The tail end of the film could be read as a revenge story, but Bennie isn’t gaining any pleasure in anything he does. He’s drudging through a job like he’s done for his whole life, only this time it’s on his own terms. He knows his soul is lost, but he wants to know what it was all for.
If you know anything about Peckinpah’s life, the film eerily echoes his own problems with working for the Hollywood studios. This was the film that he claimed as all his own. This is a deceptively powerful film that will have many of its images seared into my memory forever. That’s powerful cinema.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
