Word: peckinpah
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Directed by SAM PECKINPAH Screenplay by GORDON T. DAWSON and SAM PECKINPAH...
Shame! Infamy! Horror! Sam Peckinpah has really tried to do it this time. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a gift to everyone who persists in misunderstanding such Peckinpah films as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs simply as paeans to brutality and orgies of tasteless violence. Alfredo Garcia could almost be dedicated to those benighted types. It is as if Peckinpah, sick of the accusations, decided to hurl them back and really make a film about violence...
...Peckinpah means this movie to outrage; it is a kind of calculated insult mixed with generous doses of self-satire. What plot exists centers on a wrecked cocktail pianist named Bennie (Warren Dates), who tickles the ivories in some dive far into the bowels of Mexico. Once long ago Paulette "Goddard came into the joint and requested a tune, but the place has gone downhill since then. Bennie still keeps a bleary lookout for a buck, and his greed and desperation get him hooked into a feudal revenge scheme to track down a certain Alfredo Garcia and separate him from...
...feeling for the almost reflexive defenses of masculine camaraderie and for its excesses, with his eye and grudging affection for Western lowlife, Cimino has an obvious affinity for the work of Sam Peckinpah. What really animates Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, though, and makes it distinctive is its shellbursts of lunatic comedy. Thunderbolt and the kid hitch a ride with a crazy who has the exhaust pipe of the car channeled up into the back seat, a caged raccoon riding in the front seat, and a couple dozen rabbits stashed in the trunk. "What am I going to do with all these...
Most of us were refreshed when the naive American movie myths were gradually revised in the '60's. In Sam Peckinpah's and Arthur Penn's films all social forces were culpable; villains sometimes wore badges and good men could revel in crime. But the mass imitators have not borrowed anything from these men except a violent surface, and have based the content of their films on empty hybrid genres like the spaghetti western. Our movie screens are now replete with dizzying, blood-soaked chaos, apocalyptic visions produced on an assembly-line...