#40 at 40: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)—Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Warren Oates plays an American barroom pianist who, along with his prostitute girlfriend, goes on a trip through the Mexican underworld to collect the bounty on the head of a dead gigolo.
A drunken, violently cantankerous iconoclast. No, asshole, not me. I am referring to the great Sam Peckinpah, whose work I only discovered in my late 30s, and frankly, I am grateful for this fact. In my 20s, I would have likely either found his films dull or, arguably more detrimentally, heroicized his self-destructive characters more than I ABSOLUTELY did in my 30s.
I’ve always been picky about my westerns. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s far from my preferred genre. More often than not, the ones I love have been the ones that have been showered in praise by AFI and/or now rest comfortably within the National Film Registry: Highly Praised Noon and The Good, the Great, and the Legendary. The titles that I will something something on my Tombstone. Nailed it.
Venturing outside of those landmark films has yielded, shall we say, inconsistent results. Therefore. with as close to certainty as I can muster, I am convinced that I wouldn’t have cared for Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia at 20. I count this as a two-fold mark against my younger self, because not only is Alfredo Garcia a great film, it’s also not really a western. It has the trappings of the genre, but is set within the far bleaker world, if you can believe it, of contemporary 1970s. It’s like an angry, sweaty drunk living in the abandoned shell of a general store at the Spahn Movie Ranch; a drunk who is every bit as violent as the Mason Family but ain’t got time for their hippy shit.
Ironically, if Top 40 at 20 had been shifted to Top 40 at 28, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia would have easily been a Top 10 contender, if not Top 5. Peckinpah is a storyteller who thrives in disillusionment and despair, which are two sensations I hadn’t yet truly experienced before age 30. Failing therefore to speak to me on that level, what I was left with, at least with my first-to-early viewings of Alfredo Garcia, was how impossibly cool I found Warren Oates. He was a total bastard with a gravel-pit of a voice who took not a speck of shit from anyone as he consumed dangerous amounts of booze seemingly by osmosis. He represented the 1970s for me, an era with which I had been desperately infatuated since I moved to Austin at age 23.
I also delighted in how transgressive it felt to love a movie like this, and perhaps I still do. But in my 40s, I’ve now been to some of the same depths of despair and self-loathing as experienced by Oates’ protagonist. No, wait, that’s absurd. I have once or twice secured a day pass to the Disneyland version of the depths of despair and self-loathing as experienced by Oates’ protagonist. Even still, it’s not anything I romanticize any longer. This is why, despite the fact that I still love this movie, it’s sitting at the bottom of my Top 40; not dissimilar to how I was 33rd out of a senior graduating class of 330. Just barely top ten percent is still top ten percent, bay bay!
Still, the movie accomplishes what westerns must do for me in order to earn my love: contain an interesting and/or nasty hook. And I’ll be damned if, collecting the bounty on the head of a dead gigolo ISN’T an interesting and/and nasty hook.
#40 at 30: The Car (1977)—Directed by Elliot Silverstein
Having loved Jaws my whole life, it was only a matter of time that my Austin-centric crash course in b-cinema lead me to the massive man-eating menagerie of knockoffs that swam in Jaws’ wake. Thanks to The Alamo Drafthouse, Vulcan Video, and various tipsy movie nights with friends, by the time I hit thirty, I had seen people devoured by sharks, whales, bears, squid, octopi, piranha, more bears, great cats, rats, rabbits, and even goddamned slugs. But it was Elliot Silverstein who gave me the wildest Jaws clone that also proved to be my favorite.
The Car has so much more under the hood than all of the other imitators that rolled off the assembly line almost the minute that Jaws became the first ever blockbuster.
For one thing, it has two sympathetic and lovable leads, James Brolin and Kathleen Lloyd, supported by a gaggle of great character actors including John Marley and R.G. Armstrong. Then there is the staggeringly beautiful cinematography; shooting the wide-open highways of the American west like John Ford on a road trip. And let us not forget the fantastic kills and accompanying stunt work that completely belie the film’s low budget. Allow all of this to be underscored by that iconic car horn sound and you’ve got one of the best drive-in movies ever made…or possbily worst drive-in movie in that you’d be afraid of being run over by a massive Lincoln bursting through the screen.
#40 at 20: The Shadow (1994)—Directed by Russell Mulcahy
Of all the films on this particular list that fill my heart with cringing regret, I haven’t an ounce of shame seeing The Shadow breach the Top 40 at 20. In fact, I almost regret that I’ve seen so many truly amazing films in the last two decades as to force this one off my Top 40 at 40.
My dad was the biggest fan I knew of not only this movie, but of the character The Shadow. That fascination and love for properties that existed long before he was born is something he definitely passed on to me. I remember being sick with a stomach flu just before I turned 10. Dad tried day in and day out to rent a copy of The Shadow from our local Blockbuster Video for us watch together. As I recall, we had seen it in theaters and really enjoyed it. It was always out of stock. As a form of compromise, and in his continuing efforts to make me feel better, he bought and read to me the film’s novelization. Having lost dad two years ago, I think about this movie a lot; about what this truly goofy mess means to me.
There’s of course the added irony that it would be director Russell Mulcahy’s ozploitation flicks like Razorback that became my obsession shortly after moving to Austin. Well that, and of course, Highlander.
