Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia

This 1974 film is the first film we have seen from Sam Peckinpah. It truly impressed us, up there with some of the very finest moments from Hollywood, that congealed around that boundaries-breaking period.
As with all even close to mainstream Hollywood, this isn't exactly shot in an avant-garde manner, but still does have its own distinctive style. One of the first we have here is the dreamy shot. The floating, abstract quality, which changes the entire colour tone of the film, has a special kind of psychoanalytic magic to it.
Peckinpah has a few nice wide compositions throughout. We have some stark shadows of the lone figure, the long man, caught among the contrasts of the rocks and the detritus of Mexico.
An easy thing to say about Pecknipah is to accuse him of sexism, or rather misogyny; and there is undoubtedly more than a question of this. Their are too many shots of the lead female topless, and, though the casual violence has a purpose (showing how it infiltrates from top to bottom, the way they can't have proper relationships in this world, even if they liked) there is perhaps a bit too much dwelling, an undoubted fascination which seems erotic in its gaze.
The key element of this film is how it is one of the perfect, perhaps the very purest we can see committed to film in a clear manner, show of commodity fetishism. The love of the dead object is quite literal. The obsession with the use-value over exchange-value, how it makes what it does make out of personal relations. This can be explicated right up to a very specific point. The raising of the dead as the bringing of violence, how there is simply no way out.
We again have how the individual's world collapses in on him; the classic trope of every single great Hollywood movie. For that reason we are in a variety of minds about the end of the film; is it too much, a wish fulfillent. Or maybe that is the point, the ridiculous scream, that of course blows up in the face.
This is a film of violence and almost the absurd. It is both entertaining, occassionally beautiful, and heated almost beyond belief. Skirting on the edges of the great Hollywood movies.