“Not so much seedy as downright abject”

It is the sad poetry of that line that expresses Peckinpah’s vision, in which people find the courage to do what they must do in a world with no choices.

So says Roger Ebert about Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

The line in question is Elita’s. Elita the prostitute and Bennie the bartender’s lover. She says it to Bennie as she is being led away to be raped by a nameless biker, played by Kris Kistofferson. “‘I been here before and you don’t know the way.”

According to Susan Compo in her biography Warren Oates: A Wild Life (Univ Press of Ky, 2009), Peckinpah had originally intended the movie as a vehicle for Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda, a casting that, in hind sight, I find utterly unthinkable. Cat Ballou, this is not.

Compo says that Peckinpah also tried James Coburn and Peter Falk before he finally offered the part to Warren Oates.

Oates was never, ever going to say no. “If a director like Peckinpah offers me a film tomorrow, I’m not going to read the script,” he told Image et Son. “I wouldn’t know how to stop myself. There aren’t many people I’d say that about.” [p. 275]

If it had not been for my interest in Warren Oates, I would not have watched Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Having seen it, I can’t imagine anybody but Warren Oates in the lead role. With any of those other actors, the movie would probably have been a more typical Hollywood adventure, and a Hollywood adventure is not what Peckinpah had set out to make.

I have to say that he got me in this one. Two-Lane Blacktop, the other cult film for which Oates is famous, struck me a pretty lame. The only vital thing in it was Oates’s performance. But Alfredo Garcia is a gripping film.

According to Compo, Oates got $50,000 for doing the film and his co-star Isela Vega got $7,000 for the role of Elita. Vega’s performance is compelling. I have a lot of respect for Jane Fonda, but she could not have done this role the way Vega did it. Jane Fonda has no idea of a world where there are no choices.

Indeed, when Bennie proposes to Elita during a picnic, there were tears from onlookers and actors. “I just knew there was no place to hide in that scene,” Oates told Donnie Fritts, who played a biker in the movie. “She had me, and I was cryin’ too.” [Compo, p. 280]

For a plot synopsis, see Wikipedia. For a great review, see Roger Ebert. For the story of on-the-set hi jinks, see Compo’s biography.

“The script deals with female vengeance,” Peckinpah said. [Compo, p. 275]

So it does. Maybe that’s why it resonates so with me.