[.ca] Straw Dogs

Additional Features:
Despite its superior tone and a few debatable assertions, the Straw Dogs commentary by Peckinpah scholar Stephen Prince is astutely observant and thematically cohesive, effectively placing the film in its proper sociopolitical context. Prince's articulate reasoning corrects decades of misguided critical analysis while supporting Peckinpah's artistic intentions, including the fact that Dustin Hoffman plays the "heavy," and not the British bullies who provoke him to violence. The superb BBC documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron offers perfect balance from the artist's perspective, as a majority of Peckinpah's closest friends and colleagues reminisce about a difficult man who inspired great extremes of passion. Highlights include anecdotes by Kris Kristofferson and longtime Peckinpah associate and screenwriter James Silke, whose shared memories are heartbreakingly poignant. A 1971 on-set profile of Hoffman offers a fascinating portrait of the actor at the peak of early success, eager to transcend his Graduate persona. Similar British archival clips show Peckinpah at work; teasing glimpses of a gentleman who never suffered fools. The love-hate dynamic that Peckinpah inspired is especially evident in the illuminating 2002 interviews with Straw Dogs costar Susan George and producer Daniel Melnick, both full of anecdotal affection, humor, and pride in their controversial film; it's a pity Hoffman didn't participate. Peckinpah himself is powerfully present in written response to critics and detractors, and in a prickly 1974 interview with French-Canadian critic Andre Leroux. Taken together, these and other excellent supplements convey the depth and sophistication of a self-proclaimed violent man who had noble reasons for elevating the depiction and discussion of cinematic violence. --Jeff Shannon

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

A Remarkable Film Which Stands the Test of Time.:
This is a really interesting film on many levels. It's not perfect; but, few works of modern art are. Nevertheless, this work stands the test of time. Firstly, one of the most remarkable things about this film is the absolutely Hitchcockian editing, which is remotely primitivistic, but strangely compelling: the editing engenders a peculiar ambience to the film right from the beginning brawl scene in the pub. Then, from the denoument sequence--which begins with the equally primitive church function and runs through to the climax and epilogue--the editing is nothing less than fine art. Secondly, the sets of the pub and the farm house are very convincing and interesting in their own right: there's plenty to look at. Also, the outdoor scenes with the ocean in background and the Cornish village all have the verisimilitude of realism. Thirdly, the soundtrack is not at all bad. Fourthly, the acting is good: of course, Hoffman is nothing less than brilliant; Peter Vaughn is excellent as the burly boorish Englishman; and Susan George isn't bad: she begins weak, but by the middle of the film she's quite okay, and from the denoument mentioned above, she's fine. Also, David Warner as the half-witted cripple is excellent--though not given notice in the credits. Lastly, the story is fairly well formed and possibly plausible--though that's no recommendation for fiction! It is possible in realistic or naturalistic fiction that a university professor might get a grant and take a semester or even a year off to do research; and this professor might want to go to some remote European destination where his wife has ancestral property by the sea, to get away from it all to do his thought-work; and it is possible that this professor might have married the woman out of sexual attraction, fully knowing that she had much less education than himself and was his intellectual inferior. But the plot has a quasi-classical form of characters with flawed personality traits; tension and contentious issues; incident follows upon incident resulting in a shattering climax, followed by an ambivalent coda. What more can one say?

Another amazing masculine character study by Peckinpah.:
It's not at all hard to see the connection between Peckinpah's two greatest movies: Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch. Both are studies of what it means to be a man, a look at the masculine and sometimes violent male nature. Basically, Straw Dogs is about an extremely timid American intellectual who decides to escape the Vietnam-fueled violence of the USA by moving into the small English town where his wife was raised. However, the man soon realizes that violence is pretty much omnipresent, when the men he hires to fix up his new home begin pushing him and his wife around. I won't give away the ending, but if you know Peckinpah you can probably guess. of course, most people will probably want to see the movie for its infamous rape scene (which got the film banned in the UK, where it was filmed). Not only is the rape graphic, but the victim actually appears to enjoy it; at least at first. Here I must disagree with the lengthy rant of a prior reviewer when I say that the rape scene is not simply an exercise in mysoginy, but rather helps to show just how immasculinated the main character has become. Throughout the first half of the movie we see his wife slowly flirting with the contractors (at one point even letting them see her topless). This suggests quite obviously that she has become so disgruntled with her husbands lack of backbone that she is actively seducing the very masculine contractors, and the fact that she enjoys the rape is simply the logical extreme of her desire to have a truly "manly" partner. Of course, those who've seen the movie know that eventually she's punished for her covetry of man's aggressive nature. Overall, I highly recommend this movie. In fact, I'd suggest you get it ASAP, since the Criterion version has been out of print for months now and won't likely be available for much longer. You need a strong stomach to watch it, certainly, and the pace is very deliberate, but those who have patience and put effort into understanding the meaning of the film will be very well rewarded.

Time to bring this film to justice:
The only thing more gut-wrenching and discouraging than actually watching Straw Dogs is reading reviews, both here and elsewhere, that miss what is wrong with this movie. I'm a guy, and I like being a guy, and I don't object to pornography, and I like action movies and everything, so turn off your anti-feminist radar and just listen to what I've got to say, alright? By the way, in the following discussion the "r" word may be absent or replaced with another word because the site sometimes edits it out of reviews. Why this is, when a movie like Straw Dogs is on sale here, I'm not really sure. Despite the fact that Sam Peckinpah is a genius with the camera in every way, he's a idiotic turdsack when it comes to gender. His women are fantasies that have no relation to real human beings, either male or female. The character of Amy in Straw Dogs (played bravely and with all possible dignity by Susan George) is his most atrocious creation, and his treatment of Amy in the story is appalling. In the rightfully infamous double rape scene, Amy, who's married to the protagonist, is raped by a guy she knew growing up. Her responses during the scene are confused; she's suffering, yet she seems to be enjoying herself. Why Peckinpah chooses to show Amy this way, and why he films the scene with plenty of lurid close-ups that strongly resemble ordinary sex scenes from the same era of film, I don't know, and I don't care why he did it. The effect of the scene is the point, and in this case the effect is to suggest that sexual violation is something that some women (especially the cute ones, one supposes) actually can like. In my opinion his portrayal is like saying that slaves in the antebellum South kind of liked being slaves. It's a sick fantasy that feeds the attitude that a woman doesn't know what she wants until a man tells her so. How nice. In the remainder of the scene Amy is then raped a second time by a second man. This time her responses are totally negative; she cries out and resists. This second violation is somehow supposed to clear things up, but of course it only makes them more confused and ridiculous. The message is: Hey guys, don't rape women when they don't want you to, only rape them when they do want you to! This film has given rise to a whole discussion about whether or not Amy "really" enjoyed the first rape, which is of course like discussing whether or not the cow "really" jumped over the moon in the old nursery rhyme. The whole thing is a contradictory fantasy that suggests that women aren't really HUMAN the way men are, that they don't really have personhood and will and that when they say no, they might as well be saying yes. In short it's a fantasy that is completely and totally (here it comes, everybody) MISOGYNISTIC. Are you sick yet? I hope so, but wait, there's more! After showing us this horrible event, Peckinpah then shifts the focus back to the protagonist, who's kind of an unassuming guy and isn't as virile as most of the men around him. In the film's last half hour we see him finally cut loose, striking, maiming and killing some guys who are trying to break into his house. Along the way, he orders his wife around and hits her a few times. Two of the guys trying to break in are the rapists, but that's kind of in the background and doesn't matter so much to Peckinpah. What matters is that the protagonist (who of course is played brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman) finally has to see how animalistic he can become. And so we move on to the movie's real point: the bestial nature of man! Look what happens when a man gets pushed too far! Here's a thought: who cares? Who cares that we discover that the protagonist is a jerk just like all the other men in the film? Who cares whether he's good or bad? Who cares, even a little tiny bit, what great existential point Peckinpah is making with all the violence? Is it just me or is all this completely and totally beside the point? The point is that this film, by the way it is shot and the story it chooses to tell, is just as violent and disgusting as the men it tries to criticize. Instead of trying to make a rape victim into a real person, it puts her on the sidelines and makes Hoffman's character the central figure. Let's sum up. This movie's main female character is a sick fantasy that justifies violence against women by suggesting that sometimes they like it. Some critics try to say that the movie redeems itself by criticizing men, but the criticism is totally hypocritical. True, the film criticizes men and shows them to be callous and brutal, but the movie itself treats its female characters in the same callous and brutal way. Bafflingly bad as this film is, it's not nearly as puzzling as the ignorance and foolishness that has clouded it for the past three decades. I look forward to a time, hopefully before I die, when people can look at this movie and see it for the misogynistic disaster that it is. Do I want it banned or censored? No way. I want it around forever, so my grandkids (when they're old enough) can see how far our society has come. I hope. Thanks for reading.

A nerve-shredding, palm-sweating thriller.......and drama:
This film is one of the best works of Sam Peckinpah this movie deals with the true humanitarian phenomena, human nature for sexual orientation and needs and the most human seduction and temptation. This movie thrills you from the start to the end and the most magnificent aspect of the movie is its ambiguity and confusing nature of climax. "Straw Dogs" is an intense thriller that shows what can happen when you push even the mildest mannered man too far. In here, Dustin Hoffman plays a mathematician who temporarily moves to a house in a rural village in England with his wife, a former resident of the town, played by Susan George. The two withstand incessant needling from several of the townsfolk until George is raped and assaulted and Hoffman is pushed over the edge. Incidentally, right after watching this film I found a documentary on cable about filmmakers from the late '60s to late '70s and one of the directors profiled was Sam Peckinpah. I had always considered his films to be violent and vaguely shocking, which never surprised me, knowing that he was a hard-living maverick who did things his way - an element that is resplendent in most of his films. A brief mention of Straw Dogs was included in this documentary, where they described it as a "sexist film". There are obvious scenes in the film that could support this criticism, but I think that is overanalyzing the film with a political correctness that is out of place. While the two female characters are both victimized, Susan George also has her moments of empowerment. I may be a female, but I don't consider Peckinpah's tendency to make testosterone-driven films any more sexist than anything that Tarantino puts out, and I'm a big fan of his work as well. It's a dangerous line to draw when one labels a film due to what is *not* included in a film. What this film does contain is much more stellar - Hoffman is beyond incredible in this film. His character development is amazing to experience. One criticism of the film that I heard from a friend who saw it before me was that it "dragged." I couldn't disagree more. The development of the story until the extremely violent climax is a perfect pace because it made me feel like I was sitting in a dentist chair, knowing that this low boil could explode at any time. After the dust settles, the viewer is left to decide whether Hoffman's character made the right decision, and left to speculate on the ramifications of the choices made. This is by far one of the best films I've seen in recent months and from this director.

HORRIBLE!!!:
I agree with another reviewer in that you'll either love this or hate it. But I think most people will hate it. (Note: I have nothing against violence in films, and I liked the Kill Bill movies.) The main problem here is that almost every character in this film is utterly unlikable, and terrible things happen to the two characters who are likeable. But even that wouldn't be so bad, if the film had a message. Dustin Hoffman's character is a whiney, wimpy, and mean spirited person who, when he finally decides to act, he does so for all of the wrong reasons & defends the wrong person. I end up hating him MORE than the bad guys. I rank this as the most unwatchable movie I have ever seen, even below "Short Cuts". However, if you liked "Short Cuts", you'd probably like this, and vice versa.