The parallels with ''The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'' are obvious, starting with 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 formula movies 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 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 to me: '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.''
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