The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 9-15
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Peckinpah spent the 1970s making great films nobody seemed to want. Like with Orson Welles, critics had crafted a narrative about a fallen genius, and reviews got worse with every film in order to keep it intact. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia was when the bottom dropped out. It was the director’s most personal film, and its images feel almost too intimate. It’s less a film than a booze-soaked diary whose pages have been ripped out and hung up to dry. Warren Oates plays a piano player turned bounty hunter tasked with tracking down the man who impregnated a kingpin’s daughter. He encounters one ragged loser after another on his journey to the underworld, from Kris Kristofferson as a rapist biker with easily hurt feelings, to a pair of soused assassin lovers played by Gig Young and Robert Webber. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia transpires in a drunk, damaged world, a place Peckinpah called home. Scout Tafoya (September 10, 9:30pm at the Nitehawk)