Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (58 page)

Altman's comment on the people and time is carried out through the way he observes them; if you try to understand his intention by analyzing the story, you won't get far. Audiences have always been so plot-oriented that it's possible they'll just go ahead and think this is a bad movie, without pausing to reflect on its scene after scene of poignant observation. Altman may not tell a story better than any one, but he sees one with great clarity and tenderness.

OCTOBER 29, 2001

(Great Movies)

think I can feel Sam Peckinpah's heart beating and head pounding in every frame in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (19'74), a film he made during a period of alcoholic fear and trembling. I believe its hero, Bennie, completes his task with the same dogged courage as Peckinpah used to complete the movie, and that Bennie's exhaustion, disgust, and despair at the end might mirror Peckinpah's own. I sense that the emotional weather on the set seeped onto the screen, haunting it with a buried level of passion. If there is anything to the auteur theory, then Alfredo Garcia is the most autobiographical film Peckinpah ever made.

The film was reviled when it was released. The reviews went beyond hatred into horror. It was "grotesque, sadistic, irrational, obscene, and incompetent," wrote joy Gould Boyum in the Wall Street Journal. It was "a catastrophe," said Michael Sragow in New York magazine. "Turgid melodrama at its worst," said Variety. Martin Baum, the producer, recalled a sneak preview with only ten people left in the theater at the end: "They hated it! Hated it!"

I gave it four stars and called it "some kind of bizarre masterpiece." Now I approach it again after twenty-seven years, and find it extraordinary, a true and heartfelt work by a great director who endured despite, or perhaps because of, the demons that haunted him. Courage usually feels good in the movies, but it comes in many moods, and here it feels bad but necessary, giving us a hero who is heartbreakingly human-a little man determined to accomplish his mission in memory of a woman he loved, and in truth to his own defiant code.

The film stars Warren Oates (1928-1982), that sad-faced, gritty actor with the crinkled eyes, as a forlorn piano player in a Mexican brothel-an American at a dead end. When a powerful Mexican named El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez) discovers that his daughter is pregnant, he commands, "Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia," and so large is the reward he offers that two bounty hunters (Gig Young and Robert Webber) come into the brothel looking for Alfredo, and that is how Bennie finds out about the head. He knows that a prostitute named Elita (Isela Vega) was once sweet on Alfredo, and he discovers that the man is already dead.

He and Elita love each other, in the desperate fashion of two people who see no other chance of survival. He needs money to escape from the trap he is in. He will dig up the body, steal the head, deliver it to El Jefe, and then he and Elita will live happily ever after-a prospect they honor but do not believe in. During Bennie's odyssey across the dusty roads of Mexico, many will be killed, and the head, carried in a gunnysack, will develop a foul odor and attract a blanket of flies. But it represents Bennie's fortune, and he will die to defend it.

The parallels with Treasure of the Sierra Madre are obvious, starting with a broken-down barfly down on his luck, and when Gig Young's character says his name is "Fred C. Dobbs," the name of Bogart's character in Treasure, it's a wink from Peckinpah. Dobbs is finally defeated, and so is Bennie, but Bennie at least goes out on his own terms, even though his life spirals down into proof that the world is a rotten place and has no joy for Bennie.

Alfredo Garcia is a mirror image of the formula movie where the hero goes on the road on a personal mission. The very reason for wanting Alfredo Garcia's head-revenge-is moot because Garcia is already dead. By the end, Bennie identifies with the head, talks to "Al," acknowledges that Al was the true love of Elita's life, and puts the stinking head under a shower where once he sat on the floor and watched Elita, and tells it, "a friend of ours tried to take a shower in there."

The sequences do not flow together; they bang together, daily trials under the scorching sun. Of all the extraordinary scenes in the film, the best is the one where Bennie and Elita pull off the road for a picnic, and talk long and softly, tenderly, to each other. Kris Kristofferson, who plays a biker who interrupts this scene, recalled years later that it was supposed to end with Bennie confessing that he had never thought of asking Elita to marry him. "But the scene didn't stop there," he told Garner Simmons, author of Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage. "She [Vega] didn't stop. She says, `Well, ask me.' And he says, `What?' And she says, `To marry you.' And I swear to God, Warren just looked like every other guy who's ever been confronted like that. But he didn't break character. He says, `Will you marry me?' And then she starts crying. And every time I saw it, it broke me up. Warren said tome: `I just knew there was no place to hide in that scene. She had me, and I was cryin', too."'

Then the two bikers appear, and the one played by Kristofferson intends to rape Elita. She knows Bennie has a concealed gun but the bikers are dangerous and she tells the man who has just proposed to her not to risk his life, because, as a prostitute, "I been here before and you don't know the way." 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.

The film's screenplay and story, by Peckinpah, Gordon T. Dawson and Frank Kowalski, has other dialogue as simple, direct, and sad. When Elita questions the decision to cut off Garcia's head, Bennie tells her, "There's nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that's in it-or you, or me." And then he says, The church cuts off the toes and fingers and every other damn thing-they're saints. Well, Alfredo is our saint." Later, there is a hint of Shakespeare, even, in Bennie's remark to the sack: "You got jewels in your ears, diamonds up your nose."

The thing is, Oates and Vega are so tired and sweet and utterly without movie-actor affect in this film. They seem worn out and hopeless. These are holy performances. Maybe the conditions of the shoot, and the director's daily personal ordeal, wore them down, and that informed their work. David Weddle, who wrote a book on Peckinpah named If They move . . . Kill 'Em!, quotes Gordon Dawson as a daily witness on the location. Dawson had worked with Peckinpah many times before but refused to ever work with him again: "He really lost it on `Alfredo.' It tore my heart right out."

Peckinpah was a tragic drunk, and booze killed him in 1984, at fiftynine. When I visited the Durango, Mexico, set of his Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), he sat in a chair under an umbrella, his drink in his hand, and murmured his instructions to an assistant. "The studio screwed him so thoroughly on that picture that he got sick," Kristofferson told me. "There were days when he couldn't raise himself up from his chair." When Peck inpah visited Chicago to promote Alfredo Garcia, he sat in a darkened hotel room, wearing dark glasses, hung over, whispering, and I remembered that in the movie Bennie even wears his dark glasses to bed.

Booze destroyed Peckinpah's life, but in this film, I believe, it allowed him, or forced him, to escape from the mindless upbeat formulas of the male action picture, and to send Bennie down a road on which, no matter how bad a man feels, he finishes his job. Some days on the set there must not have been a dime's worth of difference between Peckinpah and Bennie.

Sam Peckinpah directed The Wild Bunch (1969), the best Western I have seen, and he brought in a lot of box office money in a career that included Straw Dogs and The Getaway. He came up as a writer on TV Westerns, starting with Gunsmoke in 1955, and in his earliest Western as a director, Ride the High Country (1962) he starred the old-timers Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in a story of two professionals hired to do a j ob. The Wild Bunch was also about aging men whose loyalty was to one another and not to society.

A real director is at his best when he works with material that reflects his own life patterns. At a film festival, after Pat Garrett had become the latest of his films to be emasculated by a studio, he was asked if he would ever make a "pure Peckinpah" and he replied, "I did Alfredo Garcia and I did it exactly the way I wanted to. Good or bad, like it or not, that was my film."

DECEMBER 23, 1979

ometimes a character in a movie inhabits his world so freely, so easily, that he creates it for us as well. Ben Gazzara does that in Saint Jack, as an American exile in Singapore who finds himself employed at the trade of pimp. He sticks his cigar in his mouth and walks through the crowded streets in his flowered sport shirts. He knows everyone, he knows all the angles-but this isn't a smart-aleck performance, something borrowed from Damon Runyon. It's a performance that paints the character with a surprising tenderness and sadness, with a wisdom that does not blame people for what they do, and thus is cheerfully willing to charge them for doing it.

The character, Jack Flowers, is out of a book by Paul Theroux, who took a nonfiction look at this same territory in The Great Railway Bazaar, one of the best modern books of travel. The film is by Peter Bogdanovich, and what a revelation it is, coming after three expensive flops. Bogdanovich, who began so surely in The Last Picture Show, seemed to lose feeling and tone as his projects became more bloated. But here everything is right again, even his decision to organize the narrative into an hour of atmosphere and then an hour of payoff. Everything.

Not many films are this good at taking an exotic location like Singapore and a life with the peculiarities of Jack Flowers's, and treating them with such casual familiarity that we really feel Jack lives there-knows it inside out. The movie is complex without being complicated. Its story line is a narrative as straight as Casablanca's (with which it has some kinship), but its details teem with life.

We meet the scheming Chinese traders Jack sometimes works for; the forlorn and drunken British exiles who inhabit "clubs" of small hopes and old jokes; the whores who do not have hearts of gold or minds at all; the odd Ceylonese girl who is Jack's match in cynicism, but not his better. And we meet William Leigh, another remarkable fictional creation. Leigh is a British citizen out from Hong Kong on business, who looks up Jack Flowers because Jack can arrange things. To Jack's well-concealed surprise, William Leigh doesn't want a prostitute. He wants some talk, a drink, some advice about a hotel room. Jack never really gets to know Leigh, but a bond forms between them because Leigh is decent, is that rare thing, a good man.