STRAW DOGS Review Pt.3 – Dustin Hoffman, Susan George

Dustin Hoffman in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs

STRAW DOGS Review: Part II

The ending is famed, and justly so. In the car, Henry says, "I don't know my way home" David smiles and says, "That's okay, I don't either." If only the rest of the film had the subtlety and enigmatic poesy of that ending, Straw Dogs would truly be the masterpiece its acolytes proclaim.

It's not, for a number of reasons aside from the trite characters and plot. In fact, not even John Coquillon's cinematography, and the film editing by Paul Davies, Roger Spottiswoode, and Tony Lawson are not up to earlier Peckinpah standards. Jerry Fielding's Oscar-nominated score neither heightens nor distracts, thereby rendering it functional at best.

Something else worth noting is that in Straw Dogs the use of slow motion is not nearly as effective as in The Wild Bunch because it merely extends the lame situations, rather than focus on the pain. For instance, when Venner and David fall down a stairwell struggling over his rifle, there is simply no need for it because:

a) the scene is in the dark,

b) it releases some of the adrenaline the scene has been building before the climax

c) it's simply not filmed that well.

Similarly, when Venner slaps Amy before their sex scene there is no reason for the use of slow motion because it neither detail her pain nor eroticize her body.

The Criterion Collection's two-disc DVD is a good package, but with some clunker features. Disc One has Straw Dogs — a good transfer in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio — plus, for unknown reasons, an isolated music and effects track, and a terrible commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince. Prince's commentary, in fact, may be the worst I've ever heard, even worse than Annette Insdorf's execrable work on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue. It's as if every bad critic of the last several decades has been distilled into Prince's inane monologue.

There isn't a single aspect of Straw Dogs that he does not misinterpret, even when the evidence contradicts him on-screen; Prince is not interested in objective analysis, but in the hagiography of a film he calls a masterpiece. For instance, he parrots Peckinpah's claim that David is the villain of the film. Why? Well, neither director nor critic can explain that, but it sounds provocative and it is the sort of red herring that artists like to toss out to the stolid to feed their interest in art that otherwise does not engage on its own merits. Thankfully, he does reject the idea that David is the Machiavellian cat killer who manipulates all the violence in the film.

Unfortunately, however, Prince does buy into the noxious notion that all art is a biographical corollary to the artist; i.e., that David is somehow a representation of Peckinpah, his own rages and fears of masculinity, and his own ambivalence toward marriage. Likewise, he takes a hard line on Venner's supposed rape of Amy, mouthing the usual banalities and misinterpretations even though, as stated above, what takes place is clearly not rape.

Disc Two is better. It has all the supplements, including the 82-minute documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron; a 26-minute vintage film of Dustin Hoffman on the set of Straw Dogs; behind-the-scenes footage; interviews with Susan George and the film's producer, Daniel Melnick; selected correspondence between Peckinpah and both his viewers and his critics (Time magazine's Richard Schickel and The New Yorker's Pauline Kael); as well as three TV trailers and the film's original theatrical trailer.

The booklet insert comes with André Leroux's 1974 interview with Peckinpah, and an essay by Joshua Clover, which is almost as bad as Prince's commentary. At one point he even claims the following:

One might do best by calling it a war movie; Straw Dogs is unthinkable without recourse to Vietnam. Made in 1971, little illusion left about the nature of America's involvement in Southeast Asia, the movie invokes the conflict namelessly almost from the start. The campus troubles Amy and the "uncommitted" David have left behind can be nothing other than anti-war protests.

This is a patent absurdity. It's like claiming Paradise Lost is a critique of Cromwellian England, while lacking supporting evidence. Merely because David has left the U.S., and is an American in a foreign land does not evoke Vietnam War parallels, for he is not a Colonialist. Well, David has also gotten a grant, which could have had residency requirements; plus he's simply a White Liberal type with a penchant for travel, as we learn. But even if we accept that he came to England to avoid the draft or make a political statement, the rest of the demented violence of the Cornish locals has no direct parallels to Vietnam. None.