Straw Dogs - Territorial Pissings

May

5

Straw Dogs - Territorial Pissings

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Essential, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Action/ Suspense
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year: 1971

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

It has become fashionable in some circles to claim that Straw Dogs is not a very good movie. One of these naysayers is writer/director Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth, The Last Castle, The Contender), who is remaking the film to take place in, God help us, Louisiana. (Considering the quality of Lurie’s oeuvre, he shouldn’t be throwing stones.)

It turns out that Straw Dogs is the most cerebral of Sam Peckinpah’s movies, as well as one of the most visceral. Straw Dogs is so subtle that it’s easy to make the mistake that it’s misogynistic, for example. An extended rape scene in which the victim is aroused against her will is often cited to make this case, but I find it to be simply honest.

David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), at the urging of his wife, Amy (Susan George), relocates to the rural English community where she grew up in order to write a mathematical treatise. David thinks that this burg will be more peaceful than America. David is a civilized sort, more comfortable with intellectual debate than with direct confrontation.

Unfortunately for him, the hamlet in which he finds himself is savagely working class. The dominating ethos is that you get only by taking, and if a man isn’t willing to defend what he has, it deserves to be taken away from him. That was the way Amy was raised, and she believes it, too.

Amy is troubled by David’s apparent unwillingness to “take a stand” as she calls it, and provokes the local thugs into increasingly invading David’s territory in the hope that he will snap out of his lethargy and defend home and hearth. Eventually, Amy gets what she wants, and she comes to regret it, in more ways than one.

The section in which the buildup of hostilities is depicted is simply flawless. Every line of script is jam-packed with meaning and played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. In critical assessments of the film, Susan George has long received short shrift, I think in part because of her great beauty, but that’s a mistake. She matches Hoffman beat for beat in scenes of exquisite subtlety.

The mechanisms for ensuring the final confrontation feel more rigged and less naturalistic. The character of the village idiot (David Warner) seems to be merely a plot device. And since David and Amy left the church social before the village idiot, how did they end up running into him with their car?

Logistics aside, I also have a problem with some events in the climax. Would the rat catcher (Jim Norton) and his chums really ride around on tricycles, giggling maniacally after someone had been killed, even if they were drunk? Would the village idiot really try to rape Amy, when he knew that the mob outside David’s house was hell bent on killing him? Would Norman Scutt (a greasily effective Ken Hutchison) really plan on raping Amy before killing David and the village idiot?

But to me, these are relatively minor flaws.

Straw Dogs is a breathtakingly rich psychological drama with a brutal, protracted payoff. It’s a minor masterpiece.

Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Jerry Fielding’s wizardly score, which he arranged for horns. It has the feel of an English fanfare, but with modern, dissonant colors, managing to be both majestic and redolent of moral chaos. It was nominated for the Oscar, and considering what the other nominees were, it should have won. The actual best score of 1971 was the music for the French Connection, composed by Don Ellis, but it wasn’t even nominated.