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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Straw Dogs (1971)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Straw Dogs was Sam Peckinpah’s first non-Western feature, coming just a few years after his groundbreaking 1969 masterwork, The Wild Bunch, a film that sounded the death-knell for Hollywood’s most venerable genre. And while it may appear that Straw Dogs' English countryside is about as far from the American West as you can get, Peckinpah transfers all the elements of the Western. The location has changed but the fundamental notion of Peckinpah’s cinema - that man’s territorial pissings require him, at one time or another, to be tested via the rituals of violent manhood. The result is a film that echoes both Polanksi’s Cul-de-sac and Hawks’ Rio Bravo, a film that is ultimately such a brilliantly composed exercise in violent suspense that one is left literally breathless by the sheer rush of Peckinpah’s filmmaking. |
 Straw Dogs Starring: Dustin Hoffmann Directed by:Sam Peckinpah VHS Tape - $13.99 Not Rated |
Adapted by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman from Gordon Williams’ novel Siege at Trencher’s Farm, Straw Dogs stars Dustin Hoffmann as David Sumner, an American mathematician who has moved to the English country farm home of his young wife Amy (played by Susan George) to write a book and to hide from the violence that had become the American way of life. Sumner has effectively drowned out his fear of taking sides with his work, and he seems to have permanently locked himself in a room with a blackboard.
Amy - sexy, braless and bratty - has a past in the small town however, particularly with Charlie Venner (Del Henney). Venner, along with his pub-crawling buddies Scutt (Ken Hutchinson) and a perpetually giggling rat catcher named Cawsey (Jim Norton), have been hired by Sumner to fix the barn roof. Venner and company are big, brutish, hard-drinking Brits who consider Sumner the epitome of American buffoonery, though they are seething with lust over Amy. Amy seems both delighted and repulsed by their attention; she complains bitterly about their presence, yet stands topless in the window as they leer at her.
One night the Sumners find their pet cat hanging from a light in their closet - a sign from Venner, Scutt and Cawsey that they can get inside the Sumners' bedroom. Amy insists that David confront the men about it, but David, as always, is reluctant to take sides and cause trouble. He decides to "catch them off guard" and accepts their invitation to go duck hunting. Ditching David as soon as possible on the "hunt," Venner goes straight to the house to rekindle his affair with Amy, who resists him. Venner rapes Amy, and then Scutt, whose appearance surprises Venner, brutally rapes her at gunpoint.
Amy doesn’t say anything to David - it’s suggested that she still has feelings for Venner, rape or no rape - but David fires the men for what they did to him. "They stuck it to me out there!" David tells Amy. "We also serve who sit and wait," she replies. But fate has more in store for the Sumners in the person of town loony Henry Niles (David Warner, uncredited, and working as a favor to Peckinpah). At a foggy church social, Niles goes off walking with the flirtatious, micro-mini skirt-wearing Janice, teenage daughter of local tough patriarch Tom Heddon (Peter Vaughn). Tom gets a search party together with Venner, Scutt and Cawsey to find her, but when Niles hears them coming, he tries to hold Janice back with a restraining head lock that chokes her to death. On the foggy drive home, David hits Niles with his car.
David takes Niles home, to the outrage of Amy, who wants him out at all costs, but David insists Niles stay until the authorities get there. He calls the local magistrate, the one-armed Major Scott (T.P. McKenna), who arrives to calm down Tom and his mob, who have arrived and are demanding Sumner turn Niles over to their justice. Tom blasts a huge, slow-mo, Peckinpah-worthy hole in the Major, and the lines are drawn - David Sumner versus everyone: Tom, Venner, Scutt, Cawsey and even Amy. Undaunted by the stream of rocks and rats hurled through his windows, and Amy’s refusal to help, Davis stands firm, and for the first time in his life takes a side: no one takes Niles out of his house.
To go into detail of the films’ last 30 or so minutes would be to rob you of a genuinely riveting piece of filmmaking. As immaculately conceived, filmed and edited as the bravura scenes in The Wild Bunch, and full of the same intensity and suspense, Straw Dogs contains some of the classic traits of the Western - the green outsider hero vs. the bad guys and the community, complete with a town drunk (Niles) and a weak sheriff (the Major). It is a breathtaking piece of work that still seems remarkably gritty. Some of the domestic scenes between Hoffmann and George seem strained with the passage of time, and George’s Amy now seems more of another one of David’s obstacles rather than a fully developed character. Indeed, some of Peckinpah’s female bashing seems crude; not the least of which is the see- she-loves-it attitude of Venner’s rape of Amy. Still, it remains fascinating to watch and worth remembering that this film sparked a heated debate over movie violence. Yet while some films – A Clockwork Orange (released that same year) for example – now seem tame with the passage of time, Straw Dogs is every bit as fierce as when it was when first released. It stands as a not-to-be missed major work from a major American director.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.