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. But it represents Bennie's fortune, and he will die to defend it. During Bennie's odyssey across the dusty roads of Mexico, many will die, and the head, carried in a gunny sack, will develop a foul odor and attract a blanket of flies. 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. He needs money to escape from the trap he is in. He and Elita love each other, in the desperate fashion of two people who see no other chance of survival. He knows that a prostitute named Elita (Isela Vega) was once sweet on Alfredo, and he discovers that the man is already dead. 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. 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.
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. I gave it four stars and called it ''some kind of bizarre masterpiece.'' Now I approach it again after 27 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. Martin Baum, the producer, recalled a sneak preview with only 10 people left in the theater at the end: ''They hated it! Hated it!'' ''Turgid melodrama at its worst,'' said Variety. It was a catastrophe, said Michael Sragow in New York magazine. It was grotesque, sadistic, irrational, obscene and incompetent, wrote Joy Gould Boyum in the Wall Street Journal. The reviews went beyond hatred into horror. The film was reviled when it was released.
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