Top Trailers: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
BringMe The Head Of Alfredo Garcia is one of those titlesthat grabs you by the throat and commands your attention. Such a title does alot of the work in getting the target audience interested but you can seal thedeal if you have a trailer that makes good on the promises it makes. Thetrailer for Bring Me The Head Of AlfredoGarcia does that - and then some.
This spot moves at a snappy pace right from the firstimages, working in lockstep with a grim-voiced narrative to pull the viewerright into the grimy heart of its premise. Within 35 seconds, it establishesthe premise, the main characters and slaps you in the face with that bold,unforgettable title. The bad guys arebeating the bushes for someone named Alfredo, Warren Oates is a grizzled dudewho throws his hat in the ring to get that guy and all the bad guys ask forpayment is... Alfredo's head.
And that's when this trailer gets really mean. The nextminute is like a little self-contained symphony of call-and-response made ofinterplay between three components. Thefirst is a series of pulp-hearted promises of viciousness from the narrator ("This man... will become an animal.Holy ground... will be desecrated.") The second are bullet-pacedbursts of quotable, hard-edged dialogue ("Alfredo'sour saint. He's the saint of our money!") The third element connects and paces theother two elements: snippets of gunplay between all the characters, withwell-timed splashes of the slow motion that the film's director, Sam Peckinpah,specialized in.
At this point, we must stop for a brief but importantside-note: whoever cut this trailer made brilliant use of Jerry Fielding'sLatin-tinged score for the film, cutting together different cues in aneffectively jagged way that captures the trailer's shifts in tone.
The final third of this two-minute trailer goes for baroque. The flying bullets and rip-roaring machine guns take center stage as the fast cutting sneakily gives you a preview of the film's final moments. It's interesting to note how Peckinpah's solo title card follows a closeup of Warren Oates because Oates is essentially Peckinpah's surrogate in the story. Fittingly, the closing image is a smoking machine gun barrel aimed right at the audience: like the rest of the trailer, it sets you up for a film that literally and thematically takes no prisoners.