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If you swapped out the horses for cabs and the Stetsons for fedoras, a western becomes a crime noir pretty easily. They've both got bad dudes who drink straight from bottles, hold themselves to strict personal codes, and learn a thing or two about money along the way, like how fast people start dying for it once there's enough to fill a large burlap sack.
So in a sense, isn't 1974's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a modern western? It's got planes and stuff, but it's also got a classic western antihero and a whole ton of Mexican scrublands and also shootings. Either that or I first watched it with a load of other westerns and forgot it wasn't really one, but since this is my theme month, I instead decree it's a cleverly offbeat choice.
When a wealthy Mexican man places a million dollar bounty on the head of the deadbeat who knocked up his young daughter, it draws plenty of attention. Among those hired in the hunt is local pianist Warren Oates, who takes his girlfriend on a violent road trip into rural Mexico to bring back a severed head.
How cool is that? Supremely cool, that's how. Director/cowriter Sam Peckinpah's simple tale of greed and decapitation is straightforward but twisted, a story about the ugliness of money-chasing that predates No Country for Old Men by three decades.
The more Oates loses along the way to his goal, the more he starts to lose it. His descent into boozy rage is fleshed out by naturalistic, half-crazy dialogue, Peckinpah's love of slow-motion gunshot deaths, and a cast that looks like it was culled from a Kris Kristofferson convention, especially when it is Kris Kristofferson. The men hired to hire Oates are particularly affecting, slick American killers so coolly robotic they even look like each other.
Alfredo Garcia gets off to a quick start, lending it some momentum as it cruises into the episodic drift that mars all road stories. It's a little slow for a while, but Peckinpah uses that time to build depth for Oates and his girl.
It's the equivalent of digging a tiger trap in your roommate's closet. It takes some time and effort, but once he gets those limbs reattached, man will you have a good laugh. After that setup, Oates' trip into a land beyond law is raw and violent and cataclysmic. Like many movies from those cheery '70s, Alfredo Garcia flirts with nihilism all the way--maybe even has a drunken one-nighter with it--before concluding that, way out west, the only way out is to fight madness with madness.
