"They really don't make 'em like this any more. Truth is, they never did. This is the only one." That's John Patterson weighing in on Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,, a great holiday film that's being shown as part of a BFI tribute to the director but is always a splendid way to ring in the new, begin anew, or start killing a fresh six-pack. (The hero even gets knocked off and buried halfway through, only to rise from his grave, dust himself off, and start all over again. It's also a great Easter movie!) This is the last of four movies Peckinpah made with the great character actor Warren Oates, and it may not be much of a coincidence that it was both the biggest fling that Oates ever got to have as a leading man and the terminal last word on Peckinpah's nihilistic world view. With his dark glasses and mustache, Oates looks like Peckinpah here, though as often is the case when a director seems to have turned his star into his own doppelganger, he's playing a fantasy of the director as a man who embodies what the director might prize most about himself. In Peckinpah's case, that doesn't mean that the role would have ever called for Cary Grant. Slouching up to the bar in a South-of-the-border cantina, Oates's demands, "Gimme a double bourbon, a soda back, none o' your Tejano bullshit and get lost." "No wonder he dies in the end," Patterson writes. "It's amazing Oates lasts as long as he does."

There's an argument to be made about just how long he does make it; in my own long history of pissing people off by chewing on this movie, I have been known to take the position that Bennie dies midway through but is too ornery to take it like a man and keeps going anyway, until the final moments, when he is so bent, folded, and mutilated that to persist in the illusion that he's still alive would just be unseemly. At any rate, he is a man who has lost what little he had in the way of love, companionship, and dignity that he's as good as dead. The sick joke of the movie is that this liberates him, transforming him from a greasy little chiseler whose greatest goal in life is to pull off a coup of grave-robbing into what the Joker would call "an agent of chaos". In this new incarnation, he manages to lay waste to a great many people who are upholstered in corruption and so well-protected that they could only be punished for their sins by someone who plainly does not give a rat's ass about suffering the worst consequences imaginable. As Patterson points out, this was a movie that Peckinpah had more or less complete creative control over, after a long history of having his movies butchered and messed with by studio ghouls, and it may have come a movie or two too late. The precision and whiplash daring of Peckinpah's editing and staging and the rhapsodic celebration of natural beauty are only sporadically in evidence; there are scenes, such as ineptly assembled picnic tableau, where the director's lack of interest in bothering to get it right is palpable, and there are also scenes, such as one of Oates waking in a toxic-looking bed and examining himself for parasitic vermin, that seem designed to clear the wussies out of the theater. But the sheer power of the movie's emotional ugliness, and its faith in that ugliness as the last potent thing a man has in the tool chest after the jackals have picked him clean, makes it a vital entry in the director's filmography in a way that a more polished piece of commercial goods like The Getaway could never be. I've said it before, and as we all try to summon up whatever it'll take to carry us into the new year, I'll say it again: Sam Peckinpah invented punk if anybody did.