Straw Dogs (1971)

☆ ☆ ☆

Straw Dogs (1971) – S. Peckinpah

Holy hell, what happened here?  I suppose I knew what I was getting myself into, given the rating and notoriety – but Sam Peckinpah’s look at rural England is darker and more violent than I expected.  Dustin Hoffman, a math/astrophysics researcher, and his English wife Susan George, travel back to her hometown when he gets a grant that allows him to study independently.  He may be fleeing something (workplace politics, perhaps) but the locals do not make him welcome either.  Worse, there seems to be an increasing barrier between Amy (George) and David (Hoffman), reinforcing his separateness as an American outside of his own culture.  A bunch of handymen hired to put a roof on the garage start to menace them, including one who knew Amy in the past.  They kill the cat and then there is a horrible, even worse than usual, rape scene.  Peckinpah came under fire for this and there doesn’t seem to be any justifiable reason why one would film it.  Certainly, it increases the tension – but it isn’t clear that Hoffman ever finds out and thus the threat to his masculinity (which must be Peckinpah’s theme) isn’t clear either.  Except these local rapists really do taunt him and her and also an intellectually disabled man (David Warner) who is possibly a pedophile – their desire to lynch the latter sets the final showdown in motion when David seeks to protect this problematic character from the gang.  Then further intense brutality ensues as they lay siege to the house and David must find his masculinity (including slapping Amy around) to fight them off.  Given Peckinpah’s reputation for drinking and womanizing, it is hard not to think that he approves of this change in David.  But let’s hope that, close to 50 years later, this championing of a “masculinity contest” (there is new social psych research on this) can be seen as the catastrophe it really is.  It can’t solve interpersonal problems and the consequences for society can only be dire.  Peckinpah doesn’t stick around to show us.