Straw Dogs | | Cast : | Dustin Hoffman, Susan George | | Director : | Sam Peckinpah | | Studio : | Criterion Collection | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | December 29, 1971 | | DVD Released Date : | March 25, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 01, 2005 | | Summary | Straw Men | Content
 | Confrontation, self-doubt, self-knowledge appear to me to be the themes of this very fine movie. What makes a movie great? If it stimulates thought, pushes into the recesses of the mind, remains memorable for decades. What person, not having been tested, knows exactly how they would behave if threatened by an overpowering group of thugs, or how, if a woman, they were raped and what their post-rape reaction might be? The film is extremely unsettling, and, I suggest, we are not entirely sure that we wouldn't behave rather like the Hoffman or George characters in similar circumstances. That is, none of us are as resolute and heroic as we'd like to think we are, or as Hollywood pretends we can be. This film is real --- Bruce Willis and Gary Cooper are romantic fantasies. Like other Peckinpah films, there is nothing feelgood about this story. He works at the cutting edge of the unbeautiful truth of these matters.
The acting is superb. Peckinpah extracts terrific performances from both Hoffman and George. Especially George, perhaps. The build-up of claustrophobic tension is exceptionally well directed. It resembles Polanski's Repulsion, to some extent. A collection of highly flawed personalities, with relationships on the brink of disintegration, each damaging the other's psyche. A good deal more true to life, in my experience, than the masterful command and surmounting of every challenge presented which characterizes the stereotypical Western drama. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 31, 2005 | | Summary | Issues (3 1/2 Stars) | Content
| While the plot of "Straw Dogs" is simple enough to relate in a single sentence, the film itself is a far more complex affair all around. However, even the most wrongheaded viewers are correct in assuming that the film's most notorious scene (the rape) is also its most important. It is obvious in the care that went into the setup and execution of the scene, as well as in the jagged, disturbing flashbacks that haunt the subsequent scenes.
Unfortunately, most people don't have the critical sense to even begin to understand what they are looking at in this movie. Imagine taking a very complex and highly detailed color image and rendering it in high-contrast black and white. Or perhaps giving a six year old a box of eight crayons and having them do a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. This should give a rough idea what is lost when the average viewer is asked to regard critically a work of any real complexity. Most movies these days strive to do everything within that limited range of the average audience's understanding - which is why people of any real intelligence don't bother much with the cinema anymore. It's dead boring. Everything is spelled out, challenges to the viewer are avoided... By the time Hollywood is through idiot-proofing a movie, it is only fit for idiots to watch.
Now, to anyone who can really see, there are a hundred different things going on in that rape scene (to say nothing of the rest of the movie), many of them deliberately ambiguous. The traditional feminist response is, of course, blind and deaf to most of the fine shadings of what Peckinpah was doing. (And what Susan George was doing.) Certainly, he was working over the audience's emotions. There is a nightmarish quality to it (as well as to all of the other scenes dealing with sexual tensions and politics in the film), which is even more distressing given the avalanche of mixed signals and emotions we are given during the scene itself. It is meant to catch the viewer off guard and provoke an extremely complicated emotional response - which it did for me, anyway. While I have seen rape treated more explicitly in other films, this scene has a visceral sliding-over-the-edge-of-the-world quality that makes you feel suddenly vulnerable in ways you never expected. Does she ask for it? Yes, sort of. Does she deserve what she gets? Of course not. And I don't think the film is punishing her, either. It's punishing us - not only by giving us the cringe-inducing experience of her trauma, but its cringe-inducing aftermath, as well.
And do women sometimes stupidly invite trouble and get more than they bargained for in real life? Of course they do! Men aren't the only people on this planet who can act like idiots. I have encountered women who said "no" when they meant yes, and were frustrated when I didn't ravish them on the spot because I was concerned about landing in jail! (Ah, America.) I have seen women get drunk and put themselves potentially in harm's way. I have listened to the horror story the morning after from a friend who was raped - who didn't deserve it, on the one hand, but who knew she could have prevented it, on the other, if she had been exercising even a little common sense at the time. The guilt and shame were powerful, because there was no escaping the fact that (while she was not, in my opinion, a stupid person) she had done something very stupid and hadn't been lucky. While it may be unfair that male sexual forwardness doesn't present the same opportunities for disaster as female sexual forwardness (although, believe me, there are still dangers), the situation is what it is. (I jeer at the implication or the outright accusation that, as a man, it's somehow my fault. This only tells me that some women actually are pretty stupid.) Then there's the fact that some women do, on some level, wish to be dominated or mistreated. How many times have I seen women (often with plenty on the ball - or, so I thought) fall hard for some domineering a$$#0le who treated them like garbage - when they could easily have had their pick of guys who would treat them decently? Feminism has never, ever been able to come to terms with these realities. Just look at the response when someone like Camille Paglia tries to bring a little intelligent critical thinking to a complex subject that feminists have been painting in black and white for years now - upsetting their rabid dogma.
A good example of feminism becoming what it hates while falling all over itself to condemn something that seems to threaten its narrow perspective can be found in the customer review here that assumes that Susan George hates this movie. In her interview in the Criterion edition George states unequivocally that she is very proud of this film, and of her work in it - as, well she ought to be! (Angie Dickinson also defends her fine work in that other feminist bugbear "Dressed to Kill" to this day.) Hers is the most complex and difficult character, and George rises to the occasion with the finest and most richly shaded performance in the film. But feminists appallingly often have the ugly habit of speaking for other women and making assumptions as to how all women should think, behave and feel about a given thing - which absolutely defeats the original purpose of feminism, and is a complete betrayal of the women who were supposed to be advanced by it. This is why most of the truly liberated women I know have absolutely no use for it, some of them regarding it with even more disdain than I am showing here.
I suspect that Susan George's character upsets some people to the degree it does not because she is a completely artificial male fantasy, but because she is real in ways that are too disturbing for a lot of us to accept - and because she raises a lot of questions we don't really want the answers to.
But feminists and feminist sympathizers are not the only people whose stunted critical capacity is thrown into relief by something as complicated as "Straw Dogs." Less obviously, anyone who cheers the massacre at the climax is also not seeing the entire picture. I do, however, think that Peckinpah was guilty of a bit of miscalculation here. Well, not just here. Throughout his career Peckinpah tended to give his audience credit for more brains than they actually probably had. This is one of the things that makes his films exceptional and enduring. (His internal conflicts, and his messy onscreen explorations of them, are also a thousand times more fascinating than anything at your local multiplex today.)
The climactic siege is far less effective for me than what has come before. Interestingly, while the rape is given a central position in the film, it is expressly not the catalyst for the climactic violence. For that we get a borrowed plot detour with the David Warner character that wasn't even good when Steinbeck invented it. Hoffman's transformation also seems a little glib and artificial here. He is much better when he is unsure of himself, when his masculinity is being chipped away at throughout the first section of the film. And while Peckinpah's intentions seem clear enough to me, they are muddied by a structure that will inevitably push an audience into rooting-for-the-good-guys mode - which seems like a mistake. Also, this sequence has been re-done so many times since that it may seem rather pedestrian - although at the time it was something new.
The real heart of the movie, and any interest that it has, is in the depiction of a shaky marriage and the sexual fears and frustrations that rustle through the movie like malevolent ghosts. The eerie scene when George flashes the men on the roof (the men look demonic - like something out of Grimm's darkest fairy tales), the little glances that pass between characters as Hoffman's manhood is silently called into question, the nuances that telegraph his inadequacy, George's testing of Hoffman... There is the extreme discomfort that can result when a man unused to having to prove his masculinity is trapped into a Neanderthal p!$$ing match by other sexually threatening males - which Peckinpah mines for queasy dark comedy. This terror of gender roles and biology is the real meat that makes "Straw Dogs" a masterpiece of sexual paranoia. The film is not only beautifully shot and edited, it is shot and edited in a way that reinforces and advances these themes - which is truly remarkable. The visual complexity and the emotional complexity work hand in hand. The ambiance of the film is effectively cold and threatening.
This is not my favorite Peckinpah film by a long shot, though. As I mentioned, the final act is very weak. But still, it has an undeniable greatness, and is well worth seeing. Flaws aside it is a haunting and emotionally complex film with a deceptively simple story.
I was fortunate enough to be able to get the OOP Criterion edition, which is pricey, but has excellent supplements for anyone interested in this troubled and complicated director. There is some flicker in the transfer, but overall the film looks pretty good.
One final interpretation that I take issue with. Does David really become a man as a result of the massacre? I don't know how Peckinpah would answer that question, but I would say no. It looked to me like he became an animal. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 25, 2005 | | Summary | Amazing movie with despicable characters | Content
| I find 2 noteworthy ironies in this movie. The first one - this is a movie with only bad characters, yet the director manages to get us interested, disturbed and amazed by it despite of their shortcomings. The second one : this is a movie about revenge. But just as we are not aware initially of the director's sarcasm towards the audience, the main protagonist is also not aware that his actions are in fact acts of revenge towards those who fully deserve it based on events that took place in the past. He may think his actions are based on current threats, but his antagonists and audience know better. What you don't know may still hurt your enemies.
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| Rating | | | Date | July 02, 2005 | | Summary | Extremely Influential | Content
| Caution-possible spoilers ahead: The old Hollywood production code required that justice be rewarded and evil punished, the last genre to hold onto this concept was the Western (and prime time television). Violence was always highly selective; you might see the good guy wounded once in a while, but it was almost always the "deserving" bad guys who got killed. This reflected the U.S. mainstream view of violence and of pre-Viet Nam foreign affairs. What made 'The Wild Bunch' revolutionary was that Peckinpah made violence universal. Everyone stood in the same shade of gray/neutral moral middle-ground and everyone; men, women, children, dogs, and chickens were shot up in the final scene, regardless of their guilt or innocence (not unlike the diverse group of victims at Kent State in 1970).
Then along comes 'Straw Dogs' and Peckinpah makes another violent anti-violence film where the moral distinctions between victims (be they physical or psychological victims) is again ambiguous.
The film opens with a processional of Amy and 'Wannabee Amy' (Sally Thomsett in a dead-on Lolita performance) turning all the male heads as they walk through the village. And this introduces us to the parallel stories that will be taking place during the film. Amy will spend much of her time amusing herself by provocatively arousing a group of young men in the village. Thomsett's character will spend her time flirting with David (the Dustin Hoffman character) and with the village idiot (David Warner doing Lon Chaney's Lennie from 'Mice and Men'). Just one year removed from playing an innocent child in 'The Railway Children' Thomsett is perfect as every father's nightmare of a post-pubescent boy-crazy daughter.
Peckinpah's theme is about personal responsibility (and irresponsibility) and how actions have consequences. Amy and 'Wannabee Amy' will play with fire during the first part of the movie. Amy will tease the young men of the village, will playfully run them off the road with her car, and will fearlessly challenge them about killing her cat. She will even become a willing participant in what starts out as forced sex with her former boyfriend. But Amy will suffer the consequences when this is followed up by an actual rape. 'Wannabee Amy' will seduce the village idiot and suffer the consequences when he panics and accidentally kills her.
At this point Amy wants no more consequences from her irresponsibility. But David stubbornly insists on protecting the village idiot until the authorities arrive. When the magistrate arrives and is killed by the five goons outside their house, David pragmatically concludes that the goons cannot let Amy and him live, even if they turn over the village idiot. Once cornered David must fight and reverts to primitive animalistic behavior.
I think Peckinpah is telling us that we still have an innate instinctual capacity for violence and instinctual responses to violence, that women are still excited and attracted by these displays and may consciously or subconsciously incite them. Call it part of the courtship ritual, it probably has an evolutionary function.
In addition to the parallel story lines that occasionally touch each other before finally coming together and essentially ending, Peckinpah structures the film so that a third storyline then takes over. After Amy's need for excitement has set the events in motion and they have escalated beyond her control, she withdraws and refuses to deal with anything anymore. Her active role is then taken up by the formerly passive David, who until this point has been dodging confrontation. First he is pushed to a point where he stubbornly refuses to back down any further, and finally he is cornered with has no place to back down even if inclined to do so.
I was very impressed with the work of the Production Designer on this film. The countryside, village, and house have a very uniform visual style that fits the storyline of a foreigner dealing with an insular community.
I really have no problems with this film. I found it one of those few films that are riveting from the very start. During my initial viewing I recall hating the scene where David and Amy are arguing while sitting on opposite sides of the fireplace. I was mentally protesting 180-degree rule violations and the disorienting cuts. But by the end I realized that this visually reinforced the unraveling of their relationship; it is a good example of why movie-making conventions can be broken if breaking them advances the story line.
'Straw Dogs' takes place in a Peckinpah world where men must be willing to do life's dirty work and anything else if they wish to survive, and where actions have consequences. This is a world where love has limits and might even be impossible.
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| Rating | | | Date | June 07, 2005 | | Summary | Men, Women, and the Invisible. | Content
| There are few movies that more melodically ring the chimes of discovery than Sam Peckinpah's 1971 classic, Straw Dogs." I made the point of seeing it the other day after coming across a review that condemned its unsavory and animalistic view of human nature. At that point it became a "must see" for me. A few moments past the credits, one comprehends why it so traumatizes our polystyrene (over)sensibilities. There is nothing friendly, forgiving, or welcoming about it. The movie is uncompromising and forces the audience to examine urges which they would deny having. In our age of therapism, such affronts have little appeal, but, for this reason alone, it a film that should be enshrined in our cultural memory.
"Straw Dogs" was crafted by a man who, when moderately sober, was one of the most talented directors of his time. Sam Peckinpah never saw entertainment as being an end in itself. Here, his embellishments create a tale of tremendous anthropological significance. It illuminates our inner drives more thoroughly than any of the books you'll find on display in the self-help section of your local bookstore.
Although, that is not to say that the film only has value due to its theoretical implications as it is strong on the surface. It possesses a clever plot and features characters that easily capture our interest. With the force of a Hummer, it propels us into the personal world of an intellectual, David (Dustin Hoffman), who is isolated in a foreign country and surrounded by hostile forces that modernity has no way to explain or dismiss. His wife, Amy (Susan George), should have been a towline to safety, but, instead, her loyalties are nebulous and her actions seem to willingly exacerbate every problem that arises.
The year 1971 is not remembered as a glorious time, but, back then, a story like this one could still be told. Nowadays it would be self-censored by Hollywood. Life from the vantage point of our ancestral African Savannah is no longer welcome or acceptable to the social engineers of our day. They do not wish us to see it, and, if we do, it is only allowable through the microscopic analysis of bones and rubble.
"Straw Dogs" transcends our diagnostic categorizations and instead reveals the psychology of the tribe. Dustin Hoffman is trapped in a situation where playing a gentleman means that one will be eaten alive. In today's environment, the gelled and feminized metrosexual would be garroted and have their head put on a pole, while those women wishing "to have it all" would quickly find themselves inseminated or dead. The main character's determination to defend himself results in his repressed instincts being released, and this forever changes him. The astrophysicist can never return to his old life. His tasteful, prefabricated self is no more. Indeed, he announces this in the final scene when he informs a guilty man, who was the catalyst for the movie's climax, that he "doesn't know the way home either."
The most revealing, and dare I say "revolutionary", character in the film is the wife. Susan George plays a woman whose agenda could not differ more radically from that of her husband's. George craves Hoffman's attention and does not understand why he would rather work rather than interact with her. To secure his regard, she even goes so far as to sabotage his efforts by changing around the mathematical signs he has written upon a blackboard. She also behaves seductively towards the workmen, and refuses to wear a bra in their presence. When she opens up the car door, she hikes up her skirt so that they can more fully gaze at her legs. Hoffman warns her that her teasing demeanor is partly to blame for their malattentions. By his making such a statement alone, the film would be judged to be beyond the pale by radical feminists. Indeed, in the 1990s when Camille Paglia made a similar statement about female dress, it resulted in a firestorm of feminista ire.
A hallmark of political correctness is to question the psychology behind critics who question the dogma. It is the "let's call you Sakharhov" approach to argumentation. Contradictory positions are never responded to but psychologized instead. Admiration of "Straw Dogs" would be interpreted as an individual's personal affirmation of violence and barbarity, but, of course, it is no such thing and actually the polar opposite. To treasure the film is to value the fragile balance that is our society. The audience embraces Hoffman for his resourcefulness and we are elated when the village louts receive exactly what they deserve. An isolated intellectual in the beginning becomes a symbol for every domesticated man by the end. The film forces us to be grateful for the civilization to which we were born. It is a civilization that protects our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters from predators...and defends us from ourselves. "Straw Dogs" reminds us just how fragile our hold is over the invisible forces within.
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