List Price: $14.95 Our Price: $11.21YOU SAVE $3.74!
Buy it
DVD Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Sam Peckinpah knew he couldn't call a movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and get away with it. That's why he did it. When he undertook this nakedly personal project, in self-exile in Mexico, the director was a deeply bitter man out of favor with critics, the media, and the Hollywood establishment, which had just released his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a mutilated version. "Bring Me the Head..." sounded like the parody title of an ultraviolent Sam Peckinpah movie, and he flung it in our faces just as his onscreen surrogate tosses the titular object at the camera.
Thing is, the movie is a masterpiece--raw, shocking, beautiful, and brave--in which Peckinpah confronts his enemies and his own demons. Warren Oates plays a gringo piano-player stuck in Mexico who hears that some powerful men are willing to pay a bounty on a guy he knows. They don't know the guy is already dead, killed in a car accident. It'll be easy to exhume the trophy and collect the money--except that it will cost our seedy hero everything he has and ever wanted.
John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre had always been a key legend for Peckinpah; this film is a subterranean re-imagining of it, with Oates as both the son of Fred C. Dobbs and the carnival-mirror reflection of Peckinpah himself. And Isela Vega's performance as the sainted whore Elita--bruised and worldly one minute, radiant and clear-skinned as a child the next--is an act of grace. --Richard T. Jameson
Review(s): DVD Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Grab your tequila and a gun...we goin' on a road trip!
I bought this flick after i watched the WILD BUNCH. I must confess, i am new to Peckinpah as a whole, but DAMN! this movie starts weird, a pregnant chick gets her finger broken and then the search for Garcia begins. The two old sadists, tossin an elbow chop to some hooka's mug, start looking for info on garcia. Once they get Billy (warren Oates) on the case, with his girl (she's kinda plain looking but type sexy), the fun begins. Only Peckinpah could envision Kris Kristofferson as a bike riding rapist. Oates rocks sunglasses ALL the time, epitomizing "loser" cool. He's a man looking to make his piece in this unforgiving world. And he replies in kind, no mercy, no bull$%t.
If you're into rugged films charged with testosterone, pick this up. It will annoy your girlfriend and parents, easily, while you watch every gritty minute with guilty, smitten glee. Do it. You know you want to.
And if you don't, i guess it's because you're late for your ballet lesson, sissies!
"I've been no place I wanna go back to, that's for damn sure!"
Sam Peckinpah's 1974 crime drama/modern-day western, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, is a bloodbath to be sure; some simply feel it is a bloody mess of a movie. However, the movie is notable for Warren Oates's strong performance as Bennie, an expatriate American hanging out in Mexico and for Peckinpah's signature slow-motion shoot-em-ups which occur with regularity throughout this film.
When wealthy rancher "El Jefe" (Mexican director Emilio Fernández) offers a million dollars for the head of lothario Alfredo Garcia in the wake of his daughter's disgrace, bounty hunters spread out across Mexico in search of the big prize. Among those searching for Garcia are the ambiguously gay hit men, Sappensly and Quill (Robert Webber and Gig Young), who soon encounter the loser Bennie in a hole-in-the-wall bar where he plays the piano and sings "Guantanamera" for loose change from tourists. When it becomes evident he may know the whereabouts of Garcia, they offer him a couple of grand for the head. As it turns out, Bennie's hooker/girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) has been shacked up with Garcia of late.
As is the case with many Peckinpah characters, Bennie's moral code is non-conventional and seemingly loose, and he has no problem going back to Elita in order to get to Garcia. When it turns out that the title character is already dead, Bennie and Elita set off in search of his gravesite in search of the head. Then, things start to turn a bit bloody.
Peckinpah was never a director to shed a tear over a little collateral damage, and he certainly doesn't hold back in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. Once a dozen or so bodies have piled up on the wayside, Bennie begins to think that the titular head may be worth more than a few thousand dollars after all. Queue the slo-mo a few more times...
I don't think that it pays to think to much about the moral values of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALREDO GARCIA. Suffice it to say that they are not the values we should seek to live by in our own lives. But, this movie is an enjoyable release with some memorable performances by Oates, Webber, Young, and others (look for Kris Kristofferson as a greasy biker). The film ends in classic Peckinpah style as Bennie, refusing to compromise his own moral code by taking his money quietly, makes his stand in a final blaze of gunfire and glory.
Jeremy W. Forstadt
Get this. It is a masterpiece.
This is a brilliant & riveting movie with terrific acting, terrific pace, terrific ending, terrific everything.
If this had been a Japanese movie starring Toshiro Mifune or Shintaro Katsu it would long since have been considered a classic, at least of its genre.
Just check out Gig Young & Robert Webber as a pair of mean macho gay hitmen totally devoted to each other. Check out Warren Oates' totally unornamented performance, as real as a toothache or a dying best friend.
So get this rarity now that it's out on widescreen DVD. It don't need commentaries & extras. There are so many amazing layers & textures & details in this great film, you'll watch it many times, believe me.
Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $14.98YOU SAVE $4.99!
Buy it
This restoration of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western Major Dundee is nothing short of magnificent, a noble attempt at restoring a famously wrecked masterpiece. When Peckinpah went over budget and over schedule during the Mexico shoot, unshot scenes were canceled and the footage rudely cut by the studio. The director disowned the results. In 2005, surviving footage was patched back in, and a new musical soundtrack commissioned to replace the score Peckinpah hated. This raises some legitimate questions about interpreting a director's intentions, and about messing with film history, but Major Dundee--The Extended Version is such a rousing, mysterious experience, one feels grateful.
Major Dundee (Charlton Heston) is a vainglorious officer busted to the decidedly inglorious job... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charlton Heston - Richard Harris Director(s): Sam Peckinpah DVD Release Date: Released the 20 September 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.94 Your Price: $14.96YOU SAVE $4.98!
Buy it
Prime Cut is a strangely likeable if decidedly oddball thriller from 1972. A happy collision of gangster genre grit (validated by Lee Marvin's granite-faced lead performance) with a strain of shameless (though shrewd) exploitation not unfamiliar to screenwriter Robert Dillon (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes), plus the kinetic, semi-documentary wit of director Michael Ritchie (The Candidate) makes Prime Cut both a straightforward noir and a satire of itself. Marvin plays Nick, an aging enforcer for the Chicago mob, sent to Kansas City to deal with a ruthless cattle baron (Gene Hackman) who owes a half-million to Windy City racketeers. Hackman's character (inexplicably named Mary Ann), dismissive of old-guard crime chieftains, has set up his own heartland empire... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Gene Hackman - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Michael Ritchie DVD Release Date: Released the 14 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.99 Your Price: $11.99YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
This vastly underrated Arthur Penn film from the mid-1970s ranks as one of the era's nastiest and most fascinating pieces of business, a detective story that shuttles back and forth between Hollywood and the Florida Keys, with a plot nearly as complex as Chinatown. Gene Hackman stars as a tired, aging private eye who, as a favor to a friend, agrees to track down a runaway teen. But the case turns out to be something much larger: a smuggling ring of Mayan antiquities. The human impulses get darker and darker and Hackman's character gets pulled in deeper and deeper, even as his own life is falling apart. Ultimately, in one of his best and most unsung performances, Hackman winds up hurting the people he is trying to help. A great cast includes Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, a young... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Hackman - Jennifer Warren Director(s): Arthur Penn DVD Release Date: Released the 12 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
Here's how director Sam Peckinpah described his motivation behind The Wild Bunch at the time of the film's 1969 release: "I was trying to tell a simple story about bad men in changing times. The Wild Bunch is simply what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." All of these statements are true, but they don't begin to cover the impact that Peckinpah's film had on the evolution of American movies. Now the film is most widely recognized as a milestone event in the escalation of screen violence, but that's a label of limited perspective. Of course, Peckinpah's bloody climactic gunfight became a masterfully directed, photographed, and edited ballet of graphic violence that transcended... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): William Holden - Ernest Borgnine - Robert Ryan Director(s): Sam Peckinpah DVD Release Date: Released the 27 August 1997 Usually ships in 6 to 8 days
List Price: $14.96 Your Price: $11.22YOU SAVE $3.74!
Buy it
