With Friends Like These...

Film: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Momentous anniversaries and milestones often are a cause for reflection or something special. I’d love to say that I have something special planned for this; as it turns out, this is the 1,000th review to be posted on this site. I’ve (after this) written 952 from The List and put up another 48 of one type or another. But there’s no retrospective here, nor a film that I love especially much. Instead, it’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which just happened to be what came in from NetFlix today. Nothing particularly meaningful to me. I guess the momentous thing will happen when I hit this number from The List or 1,000 posts. Or maybe not.

This film was directed by Sam Peckinpah, and that means a few things. It means slow-motion violence for one thing. It means that when someone gets shot (and someone gets shot a lot in this film), the bullet tends to go through the person and out the other side. It means a lot of blood spray. It’s what made Peckinpah who he was, and especially with Westerns, it’s not that easy to step away from what made you a great director in the eyes of the viewing public.

...and Two Bits for the Body

Film: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass DVD player.

We’re venturing into 50 Worst Films of All Time territory again. The first time I did this, it turned into the profanity laced rant that was my write up on Last Year at Marienbad. Sad to say, there’s no profanity (or at least not much) this time around, although in many ways, this movie deserves it more. Peckinpah without swearing is sort of like a cheeseburger without the cheese.

Regardless, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia isn’t hiding what it is or what it wants to be. That title is pure grindhouse schlock at its best, and the film does everything it can to live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to it. I’d like to call it a revenge movie, but it really isn’t one. It’s less about that than it is simply an excuse for Sam Peckinpah to have guys die of bullet wounds in slow motion.

The plot is pretty simple. The daughter of a Mexican crime boss called simply El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez) has gotten herself in a family way. After a little torture, El Jefe gets her to admit that the father is Alfredo Garcia, a former lieutenant of sorts and a known ladies’ man. Garcia has hoofed it, and so he must be found and brought to crime boss-style justice. El Jefe demands Garcia’s head, offers a $1 million bounty on it, and we have a title for the film.

One of the many people who gets caught up in the search is Bennie (Warren Oates), a bartender. He discovers that his sort-of girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega), a hooker with a heart of perhaps bauxite or cadmium instead of gold has spent a bit of time with Garcia lately “saying goodbye.” One would think that having a prostitute girlfriend would inure one to such things, but this is not the case. Elita tells Bennie that Garcia is dead—killed in a drunk driving accident. However, since Bennie has been promised $10,000 for collecting the head, he decides to dig up the body, saw the head off, and claim the reward. He goes, and Elita goes with him.

What follows is, for lack of a better way to put it, a series of attempted rapes, gun battles, and grisly deaths. There’s a real grindhouse feel to this film that goes beyond the lurid title. There’s a sense going in that everyone who is given a name and quite a few people besides will not make it to the final frame still breathing, and that sense is exactly correct. The body count hits the mid-20s easily, and that’s not counting Garcia. But the violence is only a part of the lurid business of this film. There’s plenty of grotesquery to go around here.

Eventually, Bennie gets the head, Elita almost gets raped and then gets killed, and Bennie drives around Mexico talking to the bloody, fly-encrusted melon of Garcia as a form of confession. He packs the thing in ice after awhile, pours booze on it, and speaks to it as if he was hearing it answer back. We never actually see the head itself—not really—but we get plenty of looks at the oozing cheesecloth it’s wrapped in.

As I’ve already said, this is not a movie about anything as important or noteworthy as revenge (although once Elita dies, Bennie goes on a killing spree that lasts roughly the last half of the film). It’s more or less here to give Sam Peckinpah an excuse to have guys get shot, see blood splatter out of their chests from fresh bullet wounds, and have them tumble gracefully to the ground as if they were Baryshnikov on a bender all filmed lovingly in slow motion. It’s not Peckinpah unless we get a slowed down view of every blood droplet.

I can’t say that I hated this film completely. There’s a certain poetry to the level of nihilism present here. Bennie becomes a sort of wrecking crew, mowing down anything and anyone who stands in his way, but he’s also pretty fragile. By the time the film ends, Bennie looks like he hasn’t been near a shower in a month, which is something he seems to share with pretty much everyone else in the film. There’s a feeling I get from this film that everyone in it smells like week-old body odor, cigarettes, and stale beer.

So I don’t hate it. I also don’t love it. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy to recommend it. Peckinpah was far better in films like The Wild Bunch, and equally nihilistic and violent. Unless you’re a Peckinpah fanatic or have a thing for guys flopping to the ground in slow motion, I can’t offer a really good reason to spend any time with this one. The gruesomeness of this film exists simply because it does and not for any other purpose.

Why to watch Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: The name of it really says it all.
Why not to watch: It’s an excuse for violence rather than a reason for it.

Nihilism and Six-Guns

Films: High Plains Drifter, The Wild Bunch
Format: DVD from Wilmington Public Library through interlibrary loan (High Plains), DVD from South Beloit Public Library through interlibrary loan (Wild), both on little bitty bedroom television.

Ah, the western is very much its own thing, isn’t it? It has its own language, its own rhythm, its own feeling. And yet, there are many different types of western, and the western as a genre has gone through a number of different periods.


Westerns from the 60s and 70s, for instance, tended toward the violent and nihilistic. While there are certainly a number of excellent examples of this, High Plains Drifter stands out near the top. It seems very much like there isn’t a single person to root for in this movie—everyone is tainted in some way. Still, there is a perverse pleasure in watching the hero toy with the people who live in Lago. The joy comes from not his ability to twist and distort them into new shapes, but to force them to see themselves for what they are.

Essentially, as with many a great western, we start when a stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides into town. His presence causes an immediate stir when he’s harassed at the local saloon. He leaves and heads to the barber, where he orders a shave and a hot bath. Three men come into push him further, and the stranger shoots down all three. On his way out, a woman (Marianna Hill) intentionally runs into him, and he drags her off to a barn and rapes her.

As it turns out, the three men from the day before were hired guns there to protect the town and the town’s mining interests. We see in a series of flashbacks that the town’s previous lawman, Marshall Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn) was whipped to death in the middle of town with virtually all of the townspeople watching, and doing nothing to help. The three men responsible, Stacey Bridges (the underrated Geoffrey Lewis), and the Carlin brothers, Cole (Anthony James) and Dan (Dan Vadis) are being released from prison. The people of Lago have a reason to fear the men coming back.

So, the strangers stays on in town, and asks as his price anything he wants. He kicks everyone else out of the hotel, buys himself new boots, gives away the general store’s merchandise, and has rounds of drinks bought at the saloon on the town’s dime. He also makes the local laughing stock, a midget named Mordecai (Billy Curtis) the new sheriff and mayor of Lago. The stranger also requisitions 200 gallons of red paint and has the townspeople paint the entire town red, a town that he renames “Hell.”

In the meantime, we learn that the townspeople are starting to come apart at the seams. The stranger is driving them all crazy and turning them against each other. More importantly, we learn why Marshall Duncan was killed. It seems that the Marshall discovered that the town’s mine and only real employer and source of income is located on government property. IF he’d reported this, the mine would have been closed, and the town would have died. To prevent this, the leading townspeople allow the outlaws to horsewhip the Marshall to death with the promise of a large reward when they were done. They reneged on the reward and sent the men to prison instead. And just when the three bad men are riding into town, the stranger leaves, forcing the townspeople to deal with the problem they’ve created on their own.

However much it feels like nihilism, though, there is a message here. It’s never really clear if the stranger is the revenant of Marshall Duncan or not, although that seems to be the most likely thing. What is true, though, is that the townspeople are forced to face their sins and pay for them, often pay for them at the cost of their own life. It’s no accident that the town’s name, Lago, is almost exactly the same as Iago, the name of one of Shakespeare’s greatest and most treacherous villains, and one whose particular crime is betrayal of an innocent man. In essence, the film seems to be about karma more than anything—a karmic game of Russian roulette with a six gun.

Beyond that, it’s a Clint Eastwood western, and the first one he directed. He’s not really gotten into his later great form as a director, but he’s already mature as a director in this film. He already knows what he wants to show and how to use his camera. The fact is that this film is still incredibly watchable, interesting, and exciting, and Eastwood only improved in the director’s chair after it. There’s a few great lines, some tremendous action, and lots of guys killed in a variety of ways. Really, it’s everything anyone would want in a horse and saddle picture with a nicely realized message thrown in for good measure.






















It’s impossible to discuss the idea of violence in a western without discussing the work of Sam Peckinpah, though, and of all his westerns, The Wild Bunch may well be the best. The film concerns a group of outlaws and thieves, a gang of former outlaws and layabouts turned bounty hunters, the Mexican Revolution, and a large shipment of guns for the U.S. Army. What’s interesting here is that the film takes place in 1913, much later than a typical western.

We start by being introduced to the eponymous Wild Bunch, headed by Pike Bishop (William Holden), lieutenanted by Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) and crewed by the Gorch brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), as well as a number of others, most notably Angel (Jaime Sanchez) and Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien). Disguised as cavalry soldiers, the crew breaks into San Rafael, Texas, and robs the bank. However, also in town is a group of bounty hunters lead by Patrick Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is a former member of the gang.

This crew has been sent to capture Pike and his crew, but except for the leaders, the gang is completely incompetent, and most of the crew gets away. Sadly, they discover that they’ve been set up. Rather than getting away with sacks of loot, they’ve made off with sacks of worthless washers. While they decide what to do next, we discover exactly why Deke Thornton is so ready to catch his old friends. He’s currently out on parole, and has 30 days to bring them back or will be sent back up the river.

Pike’s team winds up in Angel’s village in Mexico, where they discover that the people are under attack from a local Mexican general named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez). They go to visit Mapache, who hires them to steal a shipment of U.S. Army weapons and ammunition for $10,000. While Angel doesn’t want to help the people destroying his home, he agrees, because Pike secretly agrees to give him and his people a crate of weapons as well.

And so we have a set up for a lot of high powered action and violence. Nobody trusts anybody else and everyone is out to kill everyone else. Angel wants Mapache dead and his army destroyed, Deke has been charged to bring back the bodies of his former friends, Mapache wants to take out the village, and Pike and his team just want to get paid and head off.

So what’s the point? It’s entirely possible that there is an intended meaning in Peckinpah’s film. He could well be trying to present a message of the inevitability of violence, something that we saw a few days ago in Straw Dogs. Perhaps, like High Plains Drifter, this is a story about karma, and that those who live by the gun will also die by it eventually. Or perhaps it is about karma in a different sense—that there are prices to pay for everything, even trying to do the right thing or even a score.

Or it could just be a great, exciting story with a lot of opportunities for Peckinpah to show guys getting shot in slow motion with the blood spurting from their chests. While I’m almost certain that there’s something more here, the truth of the matter is that there doesn’t really need to be more than just an excuse for a great story. There is a particular joy to watching the characters in this movie grin at the start of battle and while the lead flies. The message is there, but do you really need it?

Why to watch High Plains Drifter: It’s a Clint Eastwood western. What more do you need?
Why not to watch: Your hero is a killer and a rapist.

Why to watch The Wild Bunch: A ripping western yarn, as late in the western period as you can get before it stops being wild.
Why not to watch: S-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n d-e-a-d g-u-y-s.

Dogs and Death

Film: Straw Dogs, C’est Arrive pres de Chez Vous(Man Bites Dog)
Format: VHS from Maple Park Public Library through interlibrary loan (Straw Dogs), VHS from Northern Illinois University library (Man Bites Dog), both on big ol’ television.

The “1001 Movies” book contains any number of controversial films. At times, it feels like the creators of the book looked for everything that cause a controversy and included it, whether worth watching or not (see my comments on Salo in early February). Certainly a number of worthy films were left off the list. I introduced my kids to The Fugitive last night and still can’t understand why it wasn’t on the list. Not controversial enough, probably.

This doesn’t mean that I’m anti-controversy. Many controversial films are worth watching, some because they are controversial and some despite it. Straw Dogs is a film that is worth watching despite the controversy it caused, and it takes a little digging to uncover the actual controversy itself. You can expect violence—it was directed by the king of slow-motion death, Sam Peckinpah. But it’s not the violence that made the film so controversial. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were filled with extreme violence movies: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Peckinpah’s own The Wild Bunch (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Last House on the Left (1972), The Exorcist (1973), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It’s the rape scene that occurs in the middle. We’ll get there in a moment.

We start with David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), an American mathematician and his British wife Amy (Susan George). The couple has moved to a small town in England so that David can work on his book on celestial mechanics and formulae. Amy spent some time in the town when she was younger, and she is accosted by Charlie Venner (Del Henney), an old flame very interested in rekindling what was once there. Amy’s not interested, though, and she and David head off to their house in the middle of nowhere.

While David works, he and Amy alternately get along and quarrel, mostly over the amount of time he spends with his chalkboard. Outside, a group of local men work at fixing the garage. These men spend a lot of their time hazing David, who is both an outsider culturally and intellectually. What time they don’t spend working, they spend ogling Amy. Amy is both uncomfortable with this and defiant of it, walking around topless at one point just to see their reaction. Amy’s cat turns up dead—hung in their bedroom closet. Amy says this is to prove the men could get into their bedroom, a phrase that soon proves prophetic.

Things turn worse when the locals invite David out for the equivalent of a snipe hunt. While he stands in a field holding a bag, Charlie goes back to the house for some alone time with Amy. And here’s the controversy. Charlie slaps Amy a couple of times and proceeds to rape her. Bad, right? The controversy happens when, part way through the rape, it becomes evident that Amy is enjoying it, even encouraging it. They finish, and another of the men, Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), arrives and rapes her again, and she clearly doesn’t enjoy it this time.

The film culminates in a siege of the house. Local Henry Niles (David Warner, uncredited in the role) is a known pedophile. He inadvertently kills a young girl named Janice (Sally Thomsett) and runs off. The locals who have been persecuting David and Amy track Henry to the Sumners’ house, but David refuses to let them have him. And all hell breaks loose as the men attempt to get in and David does what he can to defend himself, his house, and Henry Niles.

A lot has been written about what Peckinpah (who also wrote the screenplay) meant with this film. One of the most common readings of its meaning is that it’s anti-feminist, and that essentially it says that men have to prove to their women that they are willing to fight for them, and that women can only be taken through violence and combat. I disagree. I see how people come to that conclusion, but I also see that that particular conclusion leaves out an important piece of information.

David is defending himself and his house, nothing more. Amy never tells him about the double rape, and he’s unaware that, well, his bedroom has been violated a second and third time. Amy’s desire to leave comes both from her recent rape at the hands of Charlie and Norman and the presence of Henry Niles, a known pedophile and rapist in her house. David simply thinks she’s scared and wants to keep her safe from the mob outside, and is convinced that her actions are nothing more than a manifestation of that fear. He’s wrong, of course, but has no chance of guessing the truth.

The whole point of this film is the violence, which is not to say that it’s violence for its own sake. David and Amy came to England to get away from the increasing violence in the U.S., but the violence tracks them down and they are caught in the middle of it anyway. The violence of everyday life is inescapable, essentially, and at some point, everyone must stand up and face it. That David’s stand is against the right people for the wrong reasons doesn’t matter—the violence occurs naturally because people are violent creatures. The siege is inevitable, because there is no true escape from the troubles of the world.

So why “Straw Dogs”? A straw dog is not unlike a straw man—it’s a thing created to be easily destroyed. Is David the straw dog? Are the men from the local village? Or is the real straw dog the notion that we can somehow escape the reality of the world and the knowledge that every part of our society is violent in some aspect or another? That’s my thinking—the straw dogs of the title are David’s beliefs, which fade the minute he is put into jeopardy.

Man Bites Dog is a different take on violence, just as realistic in many ways and far more disturbing. Essentially, this film is a fake documentary about a serial killer named Benoit (Benoit Poelvoorde). Benoit has invited a film crew to follow him around for a while to film his life and what he does. What he does is kill people. A lot of people. While he kills, he discusses the various methods he uses and how he disposes of the bodies. There’s a certain weight needed to sink a body, according to Ben. Typically, it’s three times the body’s weight, but that’s different for the elderly, children, and midgets.

According to Ben, the elderly are the best targets. They tend to have money and people don’t miss them too much. He generally starts the month by killing a postal carrier, using the uniform to deliver mail and steal pension checks, and discover the locations of old people worth killing.

This really is the bulk of the movie. A crew consisting of the interviewer, Remy (Remy Belvaux); cameraman Andre (Andre Bonzel); and a trio of soundmen named Patrick (Jean-Marc Chenut), Franco (Alain Oppezzi), and Vincent (Vincent Tavier) tail around with Benoit as he kills people and steals their money. The body count is impressive, mainly because the longer conversational pieces are cut with montages of Ben slaying multiple people. He tends to use a gun, but frequently strangles or kills in other methods, including causing a heart attack in one elderly woman.

Aside from his constant killing, Ben seems to have a pretty normal life. He gets along with his mother and grandparents, has friends who he enjoys spending time with, and even plays the piano accompanied on flute by a woman named Valerie (Valerie Parent). Some of the people in his life seem to know exactly what he does, but many of them have no idea.

The violence in the film isn’t highlighted as it is in Peckinpah’s film. There’s not much slow motion here. People just get killed when they run into Ben more often than not. This means there are frequent cuts to the local quarry and shots of Ben dumping bodies to avoid detection.

What’s disturbing here isn’t so much the constant death and the huge body count (certainly in the multiple dozens by film’s end), nor even the nonchalance of Ben’s murders. What really becomes disturbing is that the camera crew, particularly Remy, become complicit in Ben’s crimes, even helping him commit a number of them. When the crew starts to run low on funds to keep filming, they rely on the money Benoit steals from his victims to keep them working.

Just as disturbing is how much of the film is played for laughs. Remy gives little tributes to his slain soundmen, both of whom have identical lives—they’ve both recently moved in with a woman of the same name, and both women are pregnant. Going to dispose of another body at the quarry, Ben discovers that the water level has dropped so low that there is a death tableaux of scores of bodies now visible from the top. He stands and directs the other three as they dig into the floor of the quarry to hide the evidence of Benoit’s crimes.

Like Straw Dogs, the violence here is a part of the film world, inevitable and inescapable. The difference is that here, the violence not only can’t be avoided, it is sought out and, while not precisely reveled in, seen as being a completely natural and good thing. It’s a guilty feeling to laugh at parts of this film, and yet it also feels like the most real and natural reaction.

Incidentally, the literal translation of the French title is “It took place close to your home.”

Why to watch Straw Dogs: Peckinpah’s signature slow-motion death ballets with nary a horse or cowboy hat in sight.
Why not to watch: In Peckinpah’s world, sometimes rape is enjoyable for everyone involved.

Why to watch C'est Arrive Pres de Chez Vous: The friendliest killer you’ll ever meet.
Why not to watch: This is not a world anyone wants to live in.