Sam Peckinpah (1971)
Impressions of Straw Dogs from viewings in the 1970s and 2017 …
Take 1
The violent climax to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs is strong and upsetting largely because it’s a logical climax. In the context of the whole film, it’s legitimate because Peckinpah has the courage of his convictions and the explosive finale has been effectively prepared for. An American academic, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), comes to live in a Cornwall farmhouse, Trencher’s Farm, with his young English wife, Amy (Susan George). Close to Amy’s home town, it’s a quiet location, where David can concentrate on writing a book but where, as the story unfolds, he also loses, gradually and inexorably, his masculine self-esteem. David is derided by the locals doing work on the Sumners’ home. They include Amy’s ex-boyfriend, Charlie (Del Henney). He and his mates leer at David’s deliberately ‘provocative’ wife. Her specky-four-eyes husband is exposed as a coward in her presence, then pressurised into accompanying Charlie and the other men – Chris (Jim Norton), Norman (Ken Hutchison) and Phil (Donald Webster) – on a shooting party. With David abandoned by others out in the country, Charlie goes back to Trencher’s Farm and rapes Amy. Norman follows suit, sodomising her. Peckinpah implies that Amy, after some initial resistance, is promiscuous enough to welcome the first assault but that the anal penetration is more than she bargained for.
A few days later, returning in their car from a church social, David knocks down Henry Niles (David Warner), the village idiot. His injuries aren’t serious but David takes Niles back to the farmhouse and tries to get a doctor for him. Niles is being hunted by a posse that includes, as well as Amy’s attackers, a man called Tom Hedden (Peter Vaughan), whose daughter, Janice (Sally Thomsett), Niles has molested and – although the pursuers don’t know this – strangled. (The killing appears to have been accidental.) Niles’s pursuers try to break into David and Amy’s home. The timid cuckold now fights back, either killing or maiming his adversaries – eventually with his wife’s help. Although one assumes he’ll be prosecuted for the killings, the amazed satisfaction of David’s expression at the end of Straw Dogs suggests that his brutal behaviour has been his salvation as a red-blooded male. The smile that flickers across Amy’s face indicates that she agrees. Sam Peckinpah’s view appears to be that it’s the beast in a man that makes him a man.
The film is strongly misogynist. There are barely any women in evidence except for Amy, Janice and the vicar’s wife. Amy is a glowing, selfish tart – almost the reverse of a golden-hearted whore: her beauty is entirely exterior and she’s spiritually ugly. She not only asks for the sex; she’s willing to let the lynching party into her home if that will ensure her own safety. Janice is a vain, silly girl who wants to get laid and isn’t choosy about who does the job. Together, she and Amy affirm the male chauvinist fantasy that there’s no such thing as rape. On the shocking evidence of Straw Dogs, it seems that Peckinpah subscribes to this fantasy. There’s no female counterweight at all. The vicar’s pretty, naive wife (Cherina Schaer) isn’t even a token ‘decent’ woman: she attracts little more than the scorn of her pseudo-intellectual husband (Colin Welland). The pseudo bit hardly matters, though: Peckinpah treats the genuine brainbox David with no more respect than he does the vicar – until David gets in touch with his inner vigilante. The screenplay, by the director and David Zelag Goodman, is adapted from The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, a 1969 novel by Gordon Williams[1].
[1970s]
Take 2
The extent and explicitness of the sex and violence in Straw Dogs have been exceeded in plenty of movies since 1971 yet this one still shocks, thanks to a combination of Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant film-making and the benighted point of view he uses his art to express. I still agree with the substance of my ‘Take 1’ but a couple of riders to it …
Re ‘one assumes [David will] be prosecuted for the killings’ at Trencher’s Farm … That may have been a shaky assumption. It’s not just that the legal consequences are of only minor importance to Peckinpah. His conception of law enforcement in Cornwall reflects the fact that all five of his cinema features before Straw Dogs were Westerns. I didn’t hear any mention of the Cornish police. When David Sumner tries to get the help of the law in dealing with the would-be intruders, he contacts Major Scott (T P McKenna), the local magistrate and small-town sheriff equivalent. The territorial imperative that drives David to defend his home also seems to have come out of a Western handbook.
Age hasn’t withered Straw Dogs’ misogyny – quite the reverse: it’s hard to think of a big-league director of today who’d dare repeat it. As a twenty-year-old, I didn’t, though, appreciate quite how negative a picture it draws of men too. Amy’s ambivalence towards Charlie’s sexual assault is so hard to ignore that it’s relatively easy to disregard what goes on between Charlie and Norman, when the latter arrives at the farmhouse and demands his turn, a piece of macho one-upmanship that takes Charlie by surprise. In retrospect, the malignant locals of Straw Dogs are a transatlantic foreshadowing of the hillbilly horrors of John Boorman’s Deliverance, released just a few months later. Some of these rustic primitives are primitively played: Jim Norton is a good actor but overdoes Chris’s maniacal cackling; Ken Hutchison was never much cop. But the reliably excellent Peter Vaughan has extraordinary expressive force as the vicious drunkard Tom Hedden.
The Sumners’ marriage makes little sense in realistic terms – Peckinpah is simply after a cerebral man/sensual woman polarity – but Dustin Hoffman and Susan George both do fine work. The unthreatening Hoffman is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Even in the extended, gory finale, David doesn’t simply metamorphose from meek astrophysicist into alpha male. As the worm starts to turn, Hoffman winks in Amy’s direction as if to say, ‘You watch: it’ll be all right’. The moment is almost comical because Hoffman seems so ill equipped to deal with the situation. (It brought to my mind the famous moment in the later Jaws (1975), when Robert Shaw flattens the just-emptied beer can he’s holding and Richard Dreyfuss responds by downing the remains of his coffee in one and crushing the Styrofoam cup.) The glints of humour that Dustin Hoffman retains to the very end keep David’s defence-into-attack continually startling. The offensive conception of her character doesn’t detract from the strength of Susan George’s performance; as well as being, like Hoffman, physically suitable, she conveys Amy’s feelings eloquently and incisively.
The first part of Straw Dogs[2] is menacing build-up of an unusual kind, the sense of danger deriving as much from the tensions between David and Amy as from the more obviously intimidating workmen at the farm. The editing of the film (by Roger Spottiswode and others) is dazzling throughout – especially in the pivotal rape, the climactic slaughter and the intervening church social episode. This comprises imaginative cross-cutting between the children’s games and noise, the amateur acts on the church hall stage, the leering attitudes of Charlie et al, and Amy’s mental flashbacks to the assault (Susan George is especially good here). These different elements coalesce to create an enveloping foreboding. The ending is alarmingly unresolved. It’s not just that we don’t know what will happen next to David. He still doesn’t know that his wife was raped or that the passenger in his car has, albeit inadvertently, killed a girl.
2 June 2017
[1] Afternote: The brief article about the novel on Wikipedia suggests that it is considerably different from the screenplay – with much less mayhem than the film.
[2] I’ve forgotten more than once the source of the strange title. To ensure that doesn’t happen again (and according to Wikipedia): ‘Straw dogs… were used as ceremonial objects in ancient China. … In one translation Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines “Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs”. … Su Zhe’s commentary on this verse explains: “Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them.”‘
