Straw Dogs

Rating:
Summary: Peckinpah's masterpiece
Review: "Straw Dogs" is a movie that you are either going to love it or hate it, not a lot of middle ground here. It is the story of a pacifist American math expert who goes to his wife's home town to write a book on math. Whne he arrives he and his wifes are terrorized psycologicly by town bullies. Then he is forced to fight for his home and dignity (and finds he's reather good at violence). Dustin Hoffman plays the reluctant hero well, when he's quiet and meek, we believe it; when he's Rambo incarnated, we believe that too. This is not as violent as, say, "Kill Bill", but it is mostly very suspenseful in a what might happen sort of way. We spend the movie waiting for the conflict at the end. The double rape of Susan George is long and drawn out, very hard watch, very disturbing stuff. It isn't exsessivly gory, but people will swear it is far worse. I gave it 5 stars because it is an important message that we anyone and everyone is capable of violence when pushed too far.

Rating:
Summary: One of Peckinpah's Best
Review: People seem to love or hate this movie. I love it. Dustin Hoffman plays professor on "sabbatical" to write a book on astronomy and computers. There is some allusion to his having been driven to his sabbatical (or from his job) because of his refusal to take a stand over some undefined issue at his place of employment. In any case, he retreats to a farmhouse in rural England with his pretty wife, played by Susan George.

When some of the local underemployed thugs start bullying him--(The script and Peckinpah's direction of the actors hits bull's-eye here; having lived in England, I saw the same sort of behavior--punks all over, I guess, have mannerisms of bullying peculiar to their culture.)

The violent climax to this film is--you hate to say it--beautiful. It certainly isn't gorey by today's standards. This, perhaps, is what makes people so uncomfortable about this movie--their own reaction to the violence. Hoffman conveys wonderfully both the fear and the satisfaction his character is experiencing.

At one level, this film exists as a simple tale of revenge. At another level, the movie affirm's Peckinpah's vision of violence as a rite of manhood. Whether this rite is a regrettable one . . . well, that remains arguable, and this ambiguity is part of what makes this such a watchable, and re-watchable, movie.

Rating:
Summary: Another amazing masculine character study by Peckinpah.
Review: It's not at all hard to see the connection between Peckinpah's two greatest movies: Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch. Both are studies of what it means to be a man, a look at the masculine and sometimes violent male nature. Basically, Straw Dogs is about an extremely timid American intellectual who decides to escape the Vietnam-fueled violence of the USA by moving into the small English town where his wife was raised. However, the man soon realizes that violence is pretty much omnipresent, when the men he hires to fix up his new home begin pushing him and his wife around. I won't give away the ending, but if you know Peckinpah you can probably guess.

of course, most people will probably want to see the movie for its infamous rape scene (which got the film banned in the UK, where it was filmed). Not only is the rape graphic, but the victim actually appears to enjoy it; at least at first. Here I must disagree with the earlier lengthy rant of a prior reviewer when I say that the rape scene is not simply an exercise in mysoginy, but rather helps to show just how immasculinated the main character has become. Throughout the first half of the movie we see his wife slowly flirting with the contractors (at one point even letting them see her topless). This suggests quite obviously that she has become so disgruntled with her husbands lack of backbone that she is actively seducing the very masculine contractors, and the fact that she enjoys the rape is simply the logical extreme of her desire to have a truly "manly" partner. Of course, those who've seen the movie know that eventually she's punished for her covetry of man's aggressive nature.

Overall, I highly recommend this movie. In fact, I'd suggest you get it ASAP, since the Criterion version has been out of print for months now and won't likely be available for much longer. You need a strong stomach to watch it, certainly, and the pace is very deliberate, but those who have patience and put effort into understanding the meaning of the film will be very well rewarded.

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Film Which Stands the Test of Time.
Review: This is a really interesting film on many levels. It's not perfect; but, few works of modern art are. Nevertheless, this work stands the test of time. Firstly, one of the most remarkable things about this film is the absolutely Hitchcockian editing, which is remotely primitivistic, but strangely compelling: the editing engenders a peculiar ambience to the film right from the beginning brawl scene in the pub. Then, from the denoument sequence--which begins with the equally primitive church function and runs through to the climax and epilogue--the editing is nothing less than fine art. Secondly, the sets of the pub and the farm house are very convincing and interesting in their own right: there's plenty to look at. Also, the outdoor scenes with the ocean in background and the Cornish village all have the verisimilitude of realism. Thirdly, the soundtrack is not at all bad. Fourthly, the acting is good: of course, Hoffman is nothing less than brilliant; Peter Vaughn is excellent as the burly boorish Englishman; and Susan George isn't bad: she begins weak, but by the middle of the film she's quite okay, and from the denoument mentioned above, she's fine. Also, David Warner as the half-witted cripple is excellent--though not given notice in the credits. Lastly, the story is fairly well formed and possibly plausible--though that's no recommendation for fiction! It is possible in realistic or naturalistic fiction that a university professor might get a grant and take a semester or even a year off to do research; and this professor might want to go to some remote European destination where his wife has ancestral property by the sea, to get away from it all to do his thought-work; and it is possible that this professor might have married the woman out of sexual attraction, fully knowing that she had much less education than himself and was his intellectual inferior. But the plot has a quasi-classical form of characters with flawed personality traits; tension and contentious issues; incident follows upon incident resulting in a shattering climax, followed by an ambivalent coda. What more can one say?

Rating:
Summary: Peckinpah's masterpiece
Review: "Straw Dogs" is a movie that you are either going to love it or hate it, not a lot of middle ground here. It is the story of a pacifist American math expert who goes to his wife's home town to write a book on math. Whne he arrives he and his wifes are terrorized psycologicly by town bullies. Then he is forced to fight for his home and dignity (and finds he's reather good at violence). Dustin Hoffman plays the reluctant hero well, when he's quiet and meek, we believe it; when he's Rambo incarnated, we believe that too. This is not as violent as, say, "Kill Bill", but it is mostly very suspenseful in a what might happen sort of way. We spend the movie waiting for the conflict at the end. The double rape of Susan George is long and drawn out, very hard watch, very disturbing stuff. It isn't exsessivly gory, but people will swear it is far worse. I gave it 5 stars because it is an important message that we anyone and everyone is capable of violence when pushed too far.

Rating:
Summary: One of Peckinpah's Best
Review: People seem to love or hate this movie. I love it. Dustin Hoffman plays professor on "sabbatical" to write a book on astronomy and computers. There is some allusion to his having been driven to his sabbatical (or from his job) because of his refusal to take a stand over some undefined issue at his place of employment. In any case, he retreats to a farmhouse in rural England with his pretty wife, played by Susan George.

When some of the local underemployed thugs start bullying him--(The script and Peckinpah's direction of the actors hits bull's-eye here; having lived in England, I saw the same sort of behavior--punks all over, I guess, have mannerisms of bullying peculiar to their culture.)

The violent climax to this film is--you hate to say it--beautiful. It certainly isn't gorey by today's standards. This, perhaps, is what makes people so uncomfortable about this movie--their own reaction to the violence. Hoffman conveys wonderfully both the fear and the satisfaction his character is experiencing.

At one level, this film exists as a simple tale of revenge. At another level, the movie affirm's Peckinpah's vision of violence as a rite of manhood. Whether this rite is a regrettable one . . . well, that remains arguable, and this ambiguity is part of what makes this such a watchable, and re-watchable, movie.

Rating:
Summary: Time to bring this film to justice
Review: The only thing more gut-wrenching and discouraging than actually watching Straw Dogs is reading reviews, both here and elsewhere, that miss what is wrong with this movie.

I'm a guy, and I like being a guy, and I don't object to pornography, and I like action movies and everything, so turn off your anti-feminist radar and just listen to what I've got to say, alright?

By the way, in the following discussion the "r" word may be absent or replaced with another word because the site sometimes edits it out of reviews. Why this is, when a movie like Straw Dogs is on sale here, I'm not really sure.

Despite the fact that Sam Peckinpah is a genius with the camera in every way, he's a idiotic turdsack when it comes to gender. His women are fantasies that have no relation to real human beings, either male or female. The character of Amy in Straw Dogs (played bravely and with all possible dignity by Susan George) is his most atrocious creation, and his treatment of Amy in the story is appalling.

In the rightfully infamous double rape scene, Amy, who's married to the protagonist, is raped by a guy she knew growing up. Her responses during the scene are confused; she's suffering, yet she seems to be enjoying herself. Why Peckinpah chooses to show Amy this way, and why he films the scene with plenty of lurid close-ups that strongly resemble ordinary sex scenes from the same era of film, I don't know, and I don't care why he did it. The effect of the scene is the point, and in this case the effect is to suggest that sexual violation is something that some women (especially the cute ones, one supposes) actually can like. In my opinion his portrayal is like saying that slaves in the antebellum South kind of liked being slaves. It's a sick fantasy that feeds the attitude that a woman doesn't know what she wants until a man tells her so. How nice.

In the remainder of the scene Amy is then raped a second time by a second man. This time her responses are totally negative; she cries out and resists. This second violation is somehow supposed to clear things up, but of course it only makes them more confused and ridiculous. The message is: Hey guys, don't rape women when they don't want you to, only rape them when they do want you to!

This film has given rise to a whole discussion about whether or not Amy "really" enjoyed the first rape, which is of course like discussing whether or not the cow "really" jumped over the moon in the old nursery rhyme. The whole thing is a contradictory fantasy that suggests that women aren't really HUMAN the way men are, that they don't really have personhood and will and that when they say no, they might as well be saying yes. In short it's a fantasy that is completely and totally (here it comes, everybody) MISOGYNISTIC.

Are you sick yet? I hope so, but wait, there's more! After showing us this horrible event, Peckinpah then shifts the focus back to the protagonist, who's kind of an unassuming guy and isn't as virile as most of the men around him. In the film's last half hour we see him finally cut loose, striking, maiming and killing some guys who are trying to break into his house. Along the way, he orders his wife around and hits her a few times. Two of the guys trying to break in are the rapists, but that's kind of in the background and doesn't matter so much to Peckinpah. What matters is that the protagonist (who of course is played brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman) finally has to see how animalistic he can become. And so we move on to the movie's real point: the bestial nature of man! Look what happens when a man gets pushed too far!

Here's a thought: who cares? Who cares that we discover that the protagonist is a jerk just like all the other men in the film? Who cares whether he's good or bad? Who cares, even a little tiny bit, what great existential point Peckinpah is making with all the violence? Is it just me or is all this completely and totally beside the point? The point is that this film, by the way it is shot and the story it chooses to tell, is just as violent and disgusting as the men it tries to criticize. Instead of trying to make a rape victim into a real person, it puts her on the sidelines and makes Hoffman's character the central figure.

Let's sum up. This movie's main female character is a sick fantasy that justifies violence against women by suggesting that sometimes they like it. Some critics try to say that the movie redeems itself by criticizing men, but the criticism is totally hypocritical. True, the film criticizes men and shows them to be callous and brutal, but the movie itself treats its female characters in the same callous and brutal way.

Bafflingly bad as this film is, it's not nearly as puzzling as the ignorance and foolishness that has clouded it for the past three decades. I look forward to a time, hopefully before I die, when people can look at this movie and see it for the misogynistic disaster that it is. Do I want it banned or censored? No way. I want it around forever, so my grandkids (when they're old enough) can see how far our society has come. I hope. Thanks for reading.

Rating:
Summary: Ken Hutchison
Review: I liked this movie but only saw it because I try to see as many of the movies Ken Hutchison appears in as possible. He plays Norman Scutt and is great as usual. He always elevates the material of whatever movie or show he is in. Where is he now??? Really dark humor - cracks me up when David whines "They're breaking all my windows!" and when Norman just says "Bottle" before going off to wreak havoc. Poor little kitty cat. Very impressed by Susan George. She really pulls off a tricky role. Good for you, Susan! But Hutchison is the reason to watch it again....and again.

Rating:
Summary: Great film with a message that is still true today!!!
Review: Even though this film was released in the late 60's the message is still very modern. Hoffman gives what I think is one the best performances of his career as a mathmatician who's pushed to the edge when confronted by a band of hooligans who've not only raped his wife but are also trying to invade his home. Great film, and great DVD release by Criterion make this a worthwhile purchase for anyone interested in seeing a master's (Peckinpah & Hoffman) at their pinnacle.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific Hoffman, Brilliant Film...
Review: David (Dustin Hoffman) and Amy Sumner move from the United States to the isolated parts of England from where Amy grew up in order for David to work on his mathematical research in peace. However, the locals are attracted to Amy's sometimes inviting outfits, which snowballs into a larger mess due to David's self-restrained and defensive behavior. The subtle actions of each individual leads to a huge crescendo in the end when David must take a stand. Straw Dogs is a dark and clever film that has tremendously rich character development. In addition, it offers much food for the mind in regards to values and morals, which in the end leads to a great cinematic experience.