John Chard
February 16, 2020
10
This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house.
Straw Dogs is directed by Sam Peknipah and Peckinpah co-adapts to screen play with David Zelag Goodman from the novel "The Siege of Trencher's Farm" written by Gordon Williams. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna, Del Henney and Ken Hutchison. Music is by Jerry Fielding and cinematography by John Coquillon.
A young American maths teacher and his English wife move to the rural English village where she was raised and face increasingly vicious harassment from the locals...
One of Peckinpah's masterpieces (yes you can have more than one), Straw Dogs is an uncompromising dissection of violence, machismo and boundary pushing of the human condition. Controversy around the film reigned supreme upon release (and long into the dead part of the video nasty era 1980s), and in fact still today it is still pored over as an abject lesson in audience manipulation. For a s the power struggle between a husband and wife against their abusers reaches boiling point, ultra violence and sexual assault attacks the viewer's senses.
Peckinpah is in his pomp here, making us observers complicit in the ultimate cynical premise. It's not so much that violence begets violence, but that a mild mannered man has to resort to extreme violence - thus repelling his once firm code of morals - in order to defend what should in fact be his right. Hoffman is excellent, layering the character arc to perfection, while George as his wife is sexually suggestive, spiteful and positively superb in bringing to vivid life such a challenging characterisation.
As the director (see what he could do when not pestered by studio execs) pulls the audience's strings, and Fielding lays a haunting musical score over proceedings (Oscar Nominated), we have been privy to one of the best and most caustic observations of violence put on the screen. 10/10
**_How far can a civilized man be pushed?_**
A well-to-do couple from America (Dustin Hoffman and Susan George) move back to the wife's hometown near Land’s End in western Cornwall, England, and settle into the vacant homestead. They enlist some roofers whom she knows from her school days, one of them being a former boyfriend (Del Henney). Rivalry is in the air as the laborers try to emasculate Amy’s brainy husband and she questions his manhood. Havoc ensues.
Based on Gordon M. Williams’s novel and helmed by Peckinpah, "Straw Dogs" (1971) is a psychological thriller and so there's a lot of drama and subtle suspense build-up; things don't blow-up until the final act, so to speak. Consequently, anyone looking for mindless action should stay away. There are bits reminiscent of "Of Mice and Men," like the mentally challenged guy (David Warner) who doesn't know his own strength.
The conflict here is basically brawn vs. brain or Lynyrd Skynyrd vs. Bach. David (Hoffman) is a meek, civilized man of below average stature (almost 5’6”) with an intellectual occupation who is forced to shed all his cultured conditioning and revert back to the barbarism of his ancestors.
The story spurs some questions: Why does a rape-victim keep silent? Why is the local teen hottie interested in the mentally-challenged hunk? But a little reflection will answer these and other questions. I like it when films don't spell everything out and make you think. Certain added bits are interesting, like the subtle rivalry between gang members Charlie (Henney) and Norman (Ken Hutchison).
The flick is sophisticated and sneers at binary good/bad characterizations, rubbing the viewer’s face in humanity’s animalistic (or fallen) nature, which lies just beneath the veneer of civilized proprieties. There’s an effective 2011 remake, which switches the setting to the modern day of the Deep South, America. Anyone who appreciates Rural Gothic or Southern Gothic will likely appreciate either. I should add that there's an unpleasant rape sequence à la “The Wild Angels” and “Last Summer,” not to mention the mayhem of the climax, but it's mostly an intelligent drama that slowly builds tension, obviously influenced by “The Shuttered Room” from four years prior.
It runs 1 hour, 58 minutes, and was shot in southwest England at St Buryan, near Penzance, with studio stuff done at Twickenham Studios in London.
GRADE: B
Time hasn’t been so kind to this tautly directed but actually pretty thin story. Academic “David” (Dustin Hoffman) has moved with his more local wife “Amy” (Susan George) to live in Cornwall where he can continue to work on his astrophysics and where she can, well I wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do aside from wind up her former admirer “Charlie” (Del Henney). On the face of it, “David” is a bit of a wimp and is seen as easy pickings by the villagers led by the odious and drunken “Tom” (Peter Vaughan) and that's soon fairly clearly exemplified when the newly wedded couple arrange for “Charlie” and a couple of his pals to work on a new roof at their property. Just about every man in the place has designs on “Amy” that are only going to be satiated one way. When things eventually do come to an head, the photography and the audio spare us nothing of the violence that we have come to expect from them and that we might be a little more surprised to see from “David”, but I felt as if I were being manoeuvred into being appalled: the couple’s relationship has all the depth of an Ethiopian puddle in July and neither persona is remotely developed and these extremes are presented rather too predictably and bleakly. There can be no doubt that it would have had a shock factor at the time, indeed the censors had great fun with it on both sides of the Atlantic, but now the whole thing seems designed to illustrate a combination of sexual immaturity, even perverion, with a treatise on just what people might do when their more innate survival instincts override their more benign behavioural conventions. Sam Peckinpah does craft something of a gritty boiling-pot of a film, but it seemed to me to take too many generic potshots at rural communities whose mum, uncle and guinea pig were all related and present them with a degree of faux brutal realism designed far more for dramatic effect than to convince.
