The Screen

...The film is unbalanced, not only structurally because Anita's journey out with Benny is not so well done as the head's journey back with him, but mentally too, because Peekinpah has this necrophiliac's reaction to life--because he is incapable of imagining healthy, erotic feelings the way he can those that are distraught and morbid...

...To capture the moment, Peckinpan puts a wide-angle lens on his camera and positions the camera on the edge of the ear's seat...

...Benny is hoping to collect a large reward that has been offered privately for Alfredo's head, and now that he has exhumed the head from Alfredo's grave in his native village, his only problem is getting it back to the man who put the price on it...

...This is apparent enough in almost all the scenes of the return journey with the head, but it is even more apparent in the climactic scene of the journey which brought Benny out to Alfredo's village in the first place...

...The head is thrown right into our laps, as it were, while the camera gives us a lap's-eye view...

...But when it finally dawns on him that she can't do so, he just shrugs it off as if they were only having a squabble, some minor difference of opinion of the sort lovers are forever falling into...

...But we should be aware that the erosion of two preserves of women's power--the Sisterhood and the sisterhood of the women's college--may seriously reduce the number of women college administrators...

...It is true that 4 October 1974:18...

...It's quite a trip...

...Peckinpah begins the trip by having Benny open the door of his car and throw the bag containing the head onto the seat...

...Whatever the reason, the love scenes between Benny and Anita are embarrassing to watch...

...The search committee, charged with finding a president for this small, private college which has recently become coeducational and which suffers the financiai stresses of all such under-endowed institutions, apparently felt they needed a-man-for-the-job...

...In fact, this severed head seems in many ways just the ultimate logical extension of all those slow-motion eruptions of blood and gore in earlier Peckinpah works...

...Prometheus, $10 When Frederick Rudolph published his general history of American colleges and universities in 1962 he remarked that "for some time . . . the general reader and the professional historian have had greater access to the history of almost any skirmish of the Civil War than they have to the history of education in the United States...

...Defending the small class size to business interests at a meeting of academic and business leaders, Peter Armacost, President of Ottawa Univerity, Ottawa, Kansas, argued: "We're in the business of producing growth and learning, and it could be one man teaching a small class is much more productive than one man teaching a big class...

...We would not want to argue that a young woman who aspired to a leadership role in higher education should enter the convent, nor that the women's college should necessarily be revived...

...The head also reduces Peekinpah's argument to an Commonweal: 17 absurdity...

...McCormaek--who has served in the distinguished tradition of the women before her, Grace Dammann and Eleanor O'Byme--explained that the search committee reviewed hundreds of candidates but "found the right man in our own backyard...

...It is always to rub our noses in violence, to protract violence so that we can have the experience of it, can examine and contemplate it, more fully even than those who experience it first-hand...

...Having been knocked unconscious at the moment he retrieves the head from its grave, Benny awakes to find himself buried alive in that same grave with Anita, who is now dead...

...The intention never varies from one Peckinpah film to the next...

...This in addition to the well-documented discrimination in salary and rank against women college faculty suggests that the century and a half struggle initiated by Mary Lyon in 1837 to make women full citizens of the academic world has far from achieved its end...

...This head bouncing across the seat at us in its bag has very much the same effect as the shoot-outs in The Wild Bunch, the siege of the farmhouse in Straw Dogs, and the blast aimed in our faces from a shotgun filled with dimes in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid...

...We rejoice in the new order that allows Elizabeth McCormack, as she leaves Manhattanville and the religious fife, to accept a handsomely paid job with a national foundation...

...Like a man who is simply on tour he stops for a beer at a roadside cafe, and when he gets back to his apartment he packs the head in dry ice the way somebody might save the leftovers from a picnic in order to get one more meal out of them...

...You seem serious about your studies, Margaret," he said...

...If the slow-motion "brutal ballet" was the sublime version of what Peckinpah has to say, Alfredo's head is the ridiculous...

...After catching a glimpse of Alfredo's classic Latin features in a locket photo during the opening scene, we don't lay eyes on him again until about half way through, when his head is being carried around in a burlap bag by an amateur bounty hunter named Benny (Warren Oates...

...Does not the university locate itself universally, not particularly and parochially...

...The lens distorts the action, making the head balloon out at us at it falls, making it loom large in our cringing consciousness...

...Not realizing that Anita is dead, or maybe not being able to distinguish life from death anymore, Benny pleads for her to come along with him as he struggles to unearth himself...

...Perhaps what goes wrong in his films is that no man can fancy violence the only fundamental experience the way he does without losing all sense of what the other fundamental experiences in life are like...

...BOOKS THE MODERN UNIVERSITY DENNIS O'BRIEN Our l#vmded U n i v e r s i t i e s RONNIE DUGGER Norton, $14.95 The I d e a o f a Modern U n i v e r s i t y SIDNEY HOOK, PAUL KURTZ, MIRO TODOROVICH, EDS...

...The language is revealing, as is the language used by Elizabeth McCormack in discussing the appointment of the first male president in the century and a quarter history of Manhattanville College...

...The audience laughs out loud at the way Peckinpah plays this scene, which is, I think, precisely what Peckinpah wants...

...The failure of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is that none of Anita's earlier scenes, when she was still alive, is anywhere near as interesting...

...Having fought their own skirmishes, colleges might now hope to receive equal time in the history books...

...This is why Peekinpah has so often used slow motion at the climax of his films, to draw out for us the supersensory, otherwise ungraspable moment, and the purpose in making Alfredo's head into Benny's baggage is comparable...

...Violence now becomes at least a normal experience, if not a normative one...

...It allows us to spend an hour in the presence of all those ruptured arteries and detached members which Peekinpah's earlier films could only hold on the screen for a few, exaggerated minutes...

...The two volumes at hand have their genesis in this recent time of troubles but they do not cure the historical inattentiveness to which colleges have been subiect...

...Okay, stay here if you want," he says petulantly, like a man who thinks that his walking away might bring a woman back from the dead as readily as it could make her regret a quarrel...

...We so shrink from them that it is difficult for Alfredo's head to upset us much afterwards...

...The point is, of course, that as long as women administrators and academicians are not full citizens of that world, women undergraduates never will be either...

...The only thing redeeming Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia at all is that Peckinpah himself seems to realize his ballet has here become a burlesque...

...This is so because the head dilates the effects of violence nat only in time, but in emotional pitch...

...Have you ever thought about becoming a nun?' It was not that the remark was made by a non-Catholic at a large secular university that startled me, but the fact that for some years I had been considering entering the convent and I wondered how he knew...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...There may be a deep reason why histories of the academy are scarce...

...In a way this makes Alfredo the perfect antagonist for a Peckinpah movie, and the very character whom Peckinpah's work has been striving to create for years...

...It's a moment done in that inimitable Peckinpah style...

...Benny's relationship with Anita has its ups and downs much as his relationship with the head does, and in fact the two simply exchange places as if there were no difference between them...

...But now I think I understand it all: in those days I also wanted to be a college president...

...The head becomes an emblem of violence, a fixed symbol that at last arrests the fleeting process which earlier films could only slow down a little...

...What ensues is the most grotesque and, at the same time, effective scene in the film...

...In the late '60s, colleges and universities joined in what some alarmed observers judged to be a new civil war...

...Physicists in Princeton commune with Faraday and the physicists of Peking...

...Though creating an awesome picture of new battles to be fought in the financially difficult years ahead, the above statistics and reflections offer some personal illumination...

...The chairman of the search committee, Peter McCulough, is the president of Xerox...

...At least, he doesn't resist the natural tendency of his material to turn out this way...

...To write historically about something is to give it a palpable time and place and yet there is something at the core of the academic tradition that denies these necessary factors of historicity...

...All things considered, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is, like Peckinpah's other recent work, an originally seen and directed film, but an inhuman one...

...HEAD GAMES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN In Sam Peckinpah's new film, Bring Me the Head el A l[redo Garcia, Alfredo's part is indeed played by the mere part mentioned in the title...

...Just as the head is his traveling companion on the way home, his companion on the way out is a girlfriend named Anita (Isela Vega...

...For years I have puzzled over a remark made to me by the director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University of Michigan...

...While driving with the head on the seat beside him, Benny cuffs and berates it as if it were some paid traveling companion who hasn't worked out...

...Its body may be in Oxford or Austin but its mind--its true life--is transcendent, cosmopolitan, at home in all ages and places of men...