"Sam Peckinpah has always kept his own wild bunch in tow--shaggy, unruly supporting players like Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones. He believes in domineering eccentrics, and seems to take on stars only because it's hard to make a picture without them. This, his least known and most heartfelt picture, has the biggest part ever played by Warren Oates, a supporting actor to be put beside Walter Brennan, Agnes Moorehead, Margaret Wycherley and Elisha Cook (actors to celebrate another day, perhaps). In Alfredo Garcia, Oates plays Bernie, a piano player, who goes after Garcia because the outlaw was last seen with the whore Bernie loves. He undertakes the quest to get money, to marry his whore, to redeem his lowly status. Or so it seems. Long before the end, we know the journey and the search are bent on fulfillment and destruction. More than any other modern Western, this picture opposes furious action and ultimate futility. Yet in the course of the mythic pursuit, through the special Mexico of Peckinpah's mind, a nobody has become a legend himself, a supporting actor has been ennobled.
"Just as he loves the sun, violence, and the strange ecstasy of death and desperation, so Peckinpah needs a small-part actor to get him excited. As well as Oates here, he has two faded Hollywood heroes turned broker's men--Gig Young and Robert Webber--the sorrowful eyes of Helmut Dantine, the relatively casual appearance of Kris Kristofferson, and the best of all his actresses, Isela Vega." David Thomson