Straw Dogs
STRAW Dogs is 50. Despite its vintage, however, Sam Peckinpah's bloody 1971 revenge thriller still ratchets up the tension to impressive levels and boasts a slow-burning intensity that continues to impress in 2021.
It also provides one of the finest leading man performances from Dustin Hoffman's entire career. Not bad when you consider the actor, no fan of violent films apparently, admitted later he only took the job for the considerable pay packet it offered.
Hoffman is David Sumner, a meek mathematician and astrophysicist who moves to a small town in rural Britain to get away from the rampant violence he sees engulfing his native America.
Once he arrives at the quaint cottage he and his attractive young wife Amy (Susan George) are to call their new home, he comes up against the nasty locals who mock him and begin a campaign of intimidation against said home that escalates into a full blown assault with very bloody consequences.
Timid, nerdy and way out of his comfort zone, Hoffman is note perfect in the role.
Given his history for helming bloody-minded macho tales of males standing their ground in the wild unwelcoming west, it's perhaps unsurprising that Peckinpah structures Straw Dogs as less of a traditional thriller and more of a tightly wound revenge western.
The early sequences as David arrives and tries to settle are played out slowly, the mouth breathing and predatory locals sketched effectively as brutish thugs who fear what they don't understand and set out to drive away this foreign interloper on their land.
The tension mounts until the inevitable, and very bloody, final third of the film when David starts to defend his territory and, in the parlance of the time and doubtless of Peckinpah himself, 'mans up'.
Along the way we witness the slow, lumbering drone of rural life from the fields to the pub and back again, explore the strained relationship between the mathematician and his English wife – Susan George doing well in a difficult and fairly thankless role that Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren were also originally considered for – and watch as the locals encroach on the privacy of the Sumner household with ever-growing arrogance.
Famously, there's an extended scene of sexual assault against Amy which provoked a huge public outcry and the ire of the censors, with many accusing Peckinpah of glamourising rape by suggesting George's character may actually be enjoying the violation at one point.
It garnered the film such notoriety it remained unavailable on video or DVD in the UK until 2002.
Despite the moral panic, Straw Dogs is far from a low rent video nasty. Watched today, that scene remains massively unpleasant and very difficult to stomach even though it's in keeping with the film's overbearing tone of debasement and humanity gone rotten.
A study of the fragile male psyche from a director well versed in such subjects, a precursor of the home invasion thriller and an expertly wound up tale of society at its most brutish and nasty, Straw Dogs has lost little of its primal bite despite the passing decades.
