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Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (INTRADA)

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One of the tricks in being a film composer is to be able to help set the mood for a movie. Every great film composer from Erich Wolfgang Korngold through to John Williams and beyond is aware of that. But every film composer's methods are different. Such is true for Jerry Fielding, perhaps the most underrated of all film score composers of post-World War II Hollywood. He was a genuinely iconoclastic composer who was highly regarded by his colleagues but got nowhere near the attention that Williams or Jerry Goldsmith got. And yet he managed to compose a lot of great film music, there's simply no question about it--at least not among the most careful listeners of the form. Perhaps his best-known collaborations were with Sam Peckinpah, a six-film partnership that included Oscar nominations in 1969 for THE WILD BUNCH, and in 1971 for STRAW DOGS. On this particular recording are the scores for the final two films of the Peckinpah/Fielding partnership.

We start with the final one, for THE KILLER ELITE, the director's critically reviled but moderately successful combination of martial arts and espionage that was released at the end of 1975, and which starred James Caan and Robert Duvall as two longtime friends in the intelligence business who find themselves on opposite sides in an internecine war involving their bosses and an Asian politician (Mako). The score itself is somewhat martial in tone, but also employing some minor Oriental influences, and some dissonant passages redolent of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki; and they help the film maintain a good level of suspense and action, even though it was on this film that Peckinpah's excess obsessions with booze and drugs began taking a toll on his creativity. Fielding basically shoved those concerns aside and delivered a score that, while it may not have had any big "numbers" to it, did what any good film score is supposed to do--set the mood.

And then there is the one he created for Peckinpah's weird, warped, and (unsurprisingly) violent 1974 south-of-the-border brew BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, which, as any cineaste knows, involves a down-and-out bartender (Warren Oates) out to grab the head of a two-timing Mexican gigolo for a boatload of cash, a job that leads him down an ever-darkening path. The score here frequently involves motifs very redolent of Mexican classical music, especially on the two cues ("El Jefe"; "Killer's Rhapsody") that we hear, seemingly, over a sound system in the Mexico City hotel room where Oates confers with the hitmen who've roped him into doing their dirty work. And in the cue "Gathering Information", Fielding engages in mariachi-like rhythms, with Spanish guitars, brass, and marimba. The other cues, however, have a darkness and brooding atmosphere not unlike what he did for STRAW DOGS. Given that ALFREDO GARCIA is a film awash in horror, crime and Western film elements in a modern-day setting down Mexico way, this mix of disparate styles in the score isn't so surprising in and of itself. But once again, it defines Fielding's genius, one that was, with the exceptions of Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood, and Michael Winner, not really appreciated by Hollywood, or the public, until after Fielding's untimely death in February 1980.

Both scores on this collection, and both are eminently listenable, especially the one for ALFREDO GARCIA. And for true film score buffs, they are to be considered essential, to be placed right alongside those of Williams, Goldsmith, and all the other heavyweights of this form.