Amazon.com essential video: One of Sam Peckinpah's most controversial efforts, this film came out at a critical moment in the early 1970s, released in the same month as both Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange, causing a furor over film violence. Based on a little-known British novel, the film casts Dustin Hoffman as a bookish American mathematician on sabbatical in rural England, in the town where his young bride (Susan George) grew up. He finds himself forced to defend his home against an assault by local toughs, and discovers a frighteningly feral and vicious side to himself. Though Straw Dogs has a reputation for graphic violence, it actually looks tame by contemporary standards. Instead, the violence is psychological, and the suspense and shocks are induced by the editing--you're more terrified by what you think you see than by what you are actually shown. --Marshall Fine
Incredibly sophisticated film-making belies the lurid subject Eerie and disconcerting from the very first frame. Director/Co-Writer Peckinpah creates a strange alternative universe where people act on their base impulses. A stuffy professor (Dustin Hoffman) and his gorgeous young wife (Susan George) are thrown into this world and almost destroyed by it. Peckinpah creates a rich tapestry of characters and brilliantly explores the subtle and occasionally explosives shifts in power between them. The high-minded sophistication of film-making belies the outwardly lurid nature of the subject - "Deliverance" springs to mind as another example of this. Stunning in every department - acting (especially by Hoffman and George), editing, writing, music, cinematography, and of-course direction. In many ways Peckinpah's best film.
The DVD version I have (Region 4) also features: - Interviews - Commentaries - Standalone musical score
I guess it hasn't aged well Two thoroughly unappealing characters are for some reason married to each other and take up residence in her UK home town which is seemingly populated by even less appealing, drooling, drinking thugs. The whole thing just runs on for way too long. How George and Hoffman ever ended up together is a mystery that perhaps only Lolita could understand. There is a fairly grpahic "sort-of rape" which is never brought up between the husband and wife after it happens. David Warner plays a version of Frankenstein monster that brings everything to a head when the drooling thugs converge on the Hoffman/George house. Since you really find it hard to care for any of these people, the violent conclusion is not worth waiting for. Maybe in its' day ...
Mediocre If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and stolidly misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs, I've yet to encounter it. Yes, films like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey have had more ink spilled over them, but most of the ideas tossed about are on the money, and far less is read into them. Also, they have one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great films. While Straw Dogs is not nearly as good a film as its hagiographers claim- for Peckinpah had all the subtlety and psychological depth of a sledgehammer, nor is it as irredeemable a bit of pornography as it detractors insist, it is, above all, a very dull and mediocre film. This is not a word- dull, that has likely ever appeared in a review of the film, but what else can one call a film that telegraphs its end in the first twenty minutes, and has all the realistic character development of a Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoon? Excuse me: let me rescind that. Wile E. Coyote, at least, plumbs some true existential angst. By contrast, the nearly two hour long Straw Dogs is not even that innovative and certainly not `naturalistic,' for the ultra-violence it depicts was done better (and strangely, even more realistically) in Stanley Kubrick's deeper and darker humored A Clockwork Orange- released the same year, and earlier by Peckinpah, in The Wild Bunch, by Arthur Penn, in Bonnie And Clyde; its scenes of cretins trying to break into the lead characters' home are pale echoes of George Romero's masterful low budget Night Of the Living Dead, and even the Vincent Price horror classic, The Last Man On Earth (and it's remake, the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man); and the revenge theme done more engagingly in Wes Craven's campy debut film Last House On The Left- sans the guilty pleasure, and more deeply in the film Craven was inspired by, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. It acted, however, as a springboard for other films showing increasingly stylized violence, such as Deliverance (1972), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976)- films with different styles and artistic merits. As well, the film's politics and psychology are badly dated. This is especially true in the infamous `double rape' scene. Compared to Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, released a few months later, Peckinpah's motivations seem downright silly, which is especially noteworthy since Hitchcock built a career on Freudian pseudoscientific motivations for his criminal characters, yet abandoned that all for realism in his underappreciated 1972 gem.... In short, being controversial does not always equate with quality, and Straw Dogs seems more and more like a puerile attempt to simply shock (which it no longer even does), yet one with pretensions of something deeper- it is an ok B film with a better pedigreed director and A film production values. Ironically, that very lack of pretense is why a film like Last House On The Left works better, and a film like Night Of The Living Dead touches far deeper into the human psyche and far richer into true art. Shock filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club), a manifest Peckinpah acolyte, once said, `I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.' Well, aside from his love of a rather routine and trite Steven Spielberg thriller (though the director seems to have gone all downhill since then), Fincher's dictum is not met here, for even the controversy of the alleged `double rape' and the violent ending seem, nowadays, to be much ado over very little, as not a single image sticks out in viewers' minds, not even the film's blurred opening of kids in a playground, which quotes Peckinpah's earlier The Wild Bunch. When an artist cannot even equal his earlier glories it's a sure sign of a lesser work of art. That's what Straw Dogs is, no matter how one interprets its inner workings.
A Cave Man is a Brave Man! In this disturbing and violent film, Sam Peckinpah proposes that even the meekest wimp has the makings of a ruthless killer, and that a flirty woman, with the right man, could enjoy being raped. This Cave Man-level theory is acted out by a strong cast in rural Cornwall, England.
The Dustin Hoffman mathematician can't cope with the primitive, rough men of his sexy wife's hometown. They are lazy, shiftless, conniving, alcoholic cat-killers, but Peckinpah deep down likes them, just like he liked the "Wild Bunch." They are handsome, masculine young bucks who are fond of laughing, singing rowdy folksongs, and hoisting beer mugs. There's also a nasty, aggressive old drunk who is a bad influence on them.
Dustin channels HIS aggression by making the young vicar and his wife squirm, playing loud bagpipe battle music (to be repeated later on), and putting down religion. But with real tough guys, he's hopeless.
When Dustin shelters a deceptively mild but actually quite dangerous moronic sex offender, the drunken layabouts storm his stone farmhouse like it was The Alamo. The intellectual professor, through escalating acts of violent defense, becomes a Cave Man, slapping around his younger wife when she's being unhelpful. He starts to enjoy his command of the situation, and his new-found domination of his immature spouse. By the wrap-up, Dustin knows there is no going back.
Here's a plot-hole: after the nasty old drunk blows off half his own foot, he is summarily forgotten. Did his younger buddies let him bleed to death? This is funny: when the hooligans are working for Dustin, they feign mildness and call him "Sir," then wave him past their truck and almost get him killed, laughing uproariously. When Dustin finally gets a knife to the throat of one blackguard, the guy is back to calling him "Sir!"
What a bunch of English wankers.
Straw Dogs is a good film, but one that causes me to look down on limeys. Usually, Englishmen are respectable enough. However, I find myself losing respect for them after watching this film. Perhaps Sam Peckinpah was somehow inaccurate in his portrayal of limeys as depraved animals. Even in British director Peter Greenaway's films, notably The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the characters aren't usually all bad. In Straw Dogs, all the Englishmen are depraved.
Take the Hedden family, for instance. Headed by the old, filthy drunk Tom (Peter Vaughan), they are a bunch of neer-do-wells who spent most of their time crawling about the local pub and screwing their own sister. The daughter in this case is Janice (Sally Thomsett), who is treated as a sex object both by her father and her teenaged brother, Bobby (Len Jones). Hell, even Bobby seems to be portrayed as a scumbag with all his incestuous yearnings and misogynistic attitude toward his own sister.
Then there's the trio of workers hired by David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), to make repairs on his home. One guy, Cawsey (Jim Norton) steals a pair of Amy's (Susan George) knickers for his own amusement. The other two men, Venner (Del Henney) and Scutt (Ken Hutchison), invite David on a hunting trip, only to sneak back to his cottage and rape Amy in a most brutal scene. The first rapist, Venner, isn't entirely without feelings but is still an animalistic scumbag. Scutt is an utter degenerate.
Speaking of perverts, there's also child molester and one-time pedarast Henry Niles (David Warner), who, despite warnings from his older brother John (Peter Arne), continues to go about his perverted ways with Janice. Her eventual fate causes all hell to break lose. The only other main English characters in the film, including Major Scott (T.P. Mckenna) and Reverend Hood (Colin Welland) aren't given much to do besides drink and ogle Amy.
Most of these parties eventually meet to culminate in a half-hour siege on the Sumners' home, where David kills all his attackers in an orgy of bloodletting. Thus, ending a quite decadent movie full of animals and sexual perverts.
Sure, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch featured its share of loathsome degenerates, but Straw Dogs isn't set in America. That's the difference. I feel Straw Dogs would've worked better if Peckinpah did some research on Cornish rednecks in general and not portray them as such monsters in the film.
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