Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet
Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy St., Cambridge
September 5-12
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Sam Peckinpah was a drunk and a drug addict, a narcissist and a misogynist, a genius and a crap artist. He's known for the extremes of his life and the violence of his work. He shares an obsessive attention to detail, and a detailed attention to obsessives, with his mentor, Don Siegel, and an attraction to bilious melodrama with his spiritual forebear, Samuel Fuller. His films could be brilliant or abysmal, and sometimes both at once. As a stylist of death, nobody had been as brutal as Peckinpah, and few have been since.

Peckinpah's reputation is based largely on a string of movies he made between 1968 and 1974, the year when his on-set drug problem transformed his films into multimillion dollar cocaine boondoggles. His best known film, the revisionist western The Wild Bunch (1968), has been both praised and condemned as the most violent western ever to screen, but also as a tender exploration of how men live, and kill, with other men. It's a theme that he would return to with The Cross of Iron (1976), a picture about German frontline soldiers during World War II that Orson Welles considered one of the best anti-war films of all time.

In retrospect, however, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), his surreal exploration of violence and cunning, might be his best picture. (If the Harvard Film Archive's schedule for their Peckinpah retrospective is any indication, they would tend to agree. The movie opens the series tonight.) The film's title is very literal; Alfredo Garcia's head rolls through roughly half of the movie. The head's former owner was a playboy gangster who knocked up his boss's daughter. The man charged with bringing the head to the enraged ganglord is Bennie (Warren Oates), a hapless piano player and cuckold, who learns, in the course of the film, to kill.

The movie was shocking to its original audience—too much blood and black humor with no redeeming characters—but those of us brought up on Lynch, Tarantino, and grindhouse horror flicks will find it much easier to crack the shell of ultraviolence in order to enjoy the meat of existential displacement and despair. Peckinpah's Mexico, as seen in ...Alfredo Garcia is a nihilistic wasteland: just the place to visit at the end of a work week.