Sam Peckinpah’s most personal movie, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is often regarded as his last great masterpiece, concluding the period in which he also made The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. A love story playing out against a backdrop of brutality, this gripping film is released by Arrow Video with a brand new 4K restoration created exclusively for this Limited Edition Blu-ray on 23rd January 2017.
NOBODY LOSES ALL THE TIME
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia concluded a remarkable period for filmmaker Sam Peckinpah. It brought to an end a seven-year and seven-film run of masterpieces that included the taboo-breaking ultra-violence of The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, and the more elegiac tones of The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner. A love story that plays out in a brutal environment, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia sits somewhere between these moods and may just be Bloody Sam’s greatest work, as well as his most autobiographical.
Warren Oates plays Bennie, a piano player in a Mexican bar who gets himself involved in the manhunt for Alfredo Garcia, a man with a million-dollar price-tag on his head having impregnated the daughter of crime boss El Jefe (Emilio Fernández). Sensing an easy pay day, Bennie takes his girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega) on a trip that’ll prove fatalistic for many of those involved.
During a career that was blighted by studio interference, Peckinpah would later say that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was the only which ended up exactly as he wanted: “I did it exactly the way I wanted to. Good or bad, like it or not, that was my film.” And it was. This is as close to ‘Pure Peckinpah’ as it gets – beautiful, violent, troubling, heartbreaking, astonishing.
LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS
– Brand new 4K restoration from the original camera negative produced by Arrow Films exclusively for this release
– Original 1.0 mono audio
– Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
– Brand new audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, recorded exclusively for this release
– Audio commentary by Sam Peckinpah scholars Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle, moderated by Nick Redman
– Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron, Paul Joyce’s feature-length 1993 documentary featuring interviews with James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Monte Hellman, Ali MacGraw, James Robards and others, available on home video in the UK for the first time ever
– The John Player Lecture: Sam Peckinpah, audio recording of the director’s on-stage appearance at the National Film Theatre
– Four songs by Kris Kristofferson, filmed during the making of Man of Iron
– Theatrical trailer
– Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain
– Extensive collector’s booklet containing new writing by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and numerous reprints including interviews and more [Limited Edition exclusive]
LIMITED-EDITION BONUS BLU-RAY
Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron – The Director’s Cut
A brand-new, extended version of Paul Joyce’s documentary, containing more than TEN HOURS of previously unseen interview footage, featuring actors RG Armstrong, James Coburn, LQ Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw and Jason Robards, director Monte Hellman, producers Michael Deeley and Daniel Melnick, writers Alan Sharp and Jim Silke, writer-producer Gordon Dawson, assistant Katherine Haber, editor Garth Craven, satirist Mort Sahl, property master Bob Visciglia, bar owner Tom Runyon and cousin Bob Peckinpah, plus newly-shot interviews with Joyce, Haber and actor David Warner.
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