Sam Peckinpah's (The Wild Bunch) most uncompromising work is a road movie, a love story, a Mexican-American western and a brutally honest self-portrait of the artist as a doomed loser. A womanising scoundrel by the name of Alfredo Garcia has crossed the wrong crime lord, and El Jefe (legendary actor/director Emilio Fernández) will pay one million dollars for whoever can deliver him, dead or...just dead. Bennie (Warren Oates) is an ex-army officer and now two-bit piano player in a rundown Mexico City tavern who figures the bounty could be his way out, and his lover Elita (Isela Vega) knows just where Garcia can be found. Gutsy, violent and arguably the last true Peckinpah film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is "Bloody Sam" at his best.

Peckinpah's longtime friend and co-writer created the character of Bennie as a thinly-veiled portrait of the director's worst qualities, one which Oates gleefully embraced by mimicking Sam's distinctive style and mannerisms. Dressed in a once-white linen suit that gets progressively filthier as the body count rises, Oates truly embodies the three-time loser desperately looking for a way out, ricocheting from snarling savagery to moments of tenderness with the only woman who ever cared for him. Despite the bloodshed (and there is a lot of that), there's a genuine love story at the heart of this strangely affecting film, the most authentic work from a director who gave up everything else in his life for the job.