To prepare for the job of composing the score for The Wild Bunch (1969) Jerry Fielding undertook a serious study of the music of Mexico. This study, John Takis observes in his liner notes for this Quartet Records release, turned out to be "better preparation for the more contemporary setting of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia than it was for The Wild Bunch."
The reason being that "the music he heard was very much the music of Mexico during the late 1960s, not [The Wild Bunch setting of] the 1910s," W.K. Stratton observes in The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film.
Jerry Fielding's underscore for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia amounts to less than a half an hour of music, the rest of his work being source music for the production (i.e. music heard from sources in the film itself).
A Variety review of the film, quoted in the liner notes, described Fielding's score as "spare but dramatically haunting," and I agree. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia can be a harsh, unpleasant, and melancholic viewing experience. One that, as John Takis notes at the close of his liner notes, was "captured by Jerry Fielding in a ballad of exquisite pain and imperfect love."
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