Straw Dogs

One of the most comprehensively misunderstood films of all time. An American astro-mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) taking a sabbatical arrives in Cornwall with his native English wife (Susan George). They are treated with a mixture of awe and ridicule by the locals, but after she is viciously gang-raped while he is out hunting, the lecturer realises what is happening to him and shuts himself away preparing to defend his sanctuary against the approaching forces of evil.

With its portrayal of strangers in a strange land and its violence which breeds only violence, Straw Dogs has a lot in common with John Boorman's Deliverance, made a year later. But whereas the protagonists of that film had to fight both nature and redneck and so easily gained our sympathy, Straw Dogs shock in the way it enlists the audiences identification with the central character, who moves alone through a world of corrupt, unstable values, strengthened but isolated by his own moral uncertainty.

Straw Dogs is first and foremost a magnificent piece of film-making and certainly rank as the finest example of Peckinpah's craftsmanship, but references to Susan George's compliance in her gang-rape - and its graphic filming - tend to overshadow the rest of the film, and this is probably why it is still unavailable on video (legally anyway). Peckinpah's battle was not with censors usually but with over-zealous studio heads, and it is surprising that Straw Dogs, the most vicious and brutal of his films was untouched but Pat Garret And Billy The Kid was ripped to shreds.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96