STRAW DOGS by Sam Peckinpah
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and stolidly misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs, I’ve yet to encounter it. Films like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey have had more ink spilled over them, but most of the ideas tossed about are on the money, and far less is read into them. Also, those two classics have one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great films.
While Straw Dogs is neither as good a film as its hagiographers claim — for Peckinpah had all the subtlety and psychological depth of a sledgehammer — nor as irredeemable a bit of pornography as it detractors insist, it is above all a dull and mediocre work. Dull is not a word that has likely ever appeared in a review of Straw Dogs, but what else can one call a film that telegraphs its end in the first twenty minutes, and that has all the realistic character development of a Warner Bros. Road Runner cartoon? Excuse me: Let me rescind that. Wile E. Coyote, at least, plumbs some true existential angst.
By contrast, the nearly two-hour-long Straw Dogs is not even that innovative and certainly not ‘naturalistic,’ for the ultra-violence it depicts was done better (and strangely, even more realistically) in Stanley Kubrick’s deeper and darker-humored A Clockwork Orange — released the same year — and earlier by Peckinpah himself in The Wild Bunch; by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde; while its scenes of cretins trying to break into the lead characters’ home are pale echoes of both George Romero’s masterful low-budget Night of the Living Dead and the Vincent Price horror classic The Last Man on Earth (and its remake, the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man).
The revenge theme, for its part, was done more engagingly in Wes Craven’s campy debut film Last House on the Left — sans the guilty pleasure — and with more depth in the film that inspired Craven, Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan / The Virgin Spring. It acted, however, as a springboard for other films showing increasingly stylized violence, including Deliverance (1972), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976), all with different styles and artistic merits.
As well, the politics and psychology found in Straw Dogs are badly dated. This is especially true in the infamous ‘double rape’ scene. Compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, released a few months later, Peckinpah’s motivations seem downright silly, which is especially noteworthy since Hitchcock built a career on Freudian pseudo-scientific motivations for his criminal characters, yet, he abandoned that all for realism in his underappreciated 1972 gem.
Not surprisingly, the misinterpretations of Straw Dogs start with the title. It is commonly assumed that Peckinpah took the title from a passage from the Tao Te Ching:
Heaven and Earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs.
The straw dogs referred to were tiny effigies used in ceremonies that were burnt and discarded at the end. But if this is the true source, the title is rather lame for none of the characters in the film serve any vital role in any ritual. Also, linking mediocre art to greater source material is a standard way that many artists try to cover their failures with a patina of depth. A more likely provenance for the title comes from the simple colloquial American slang that a straw dog is a seemingly frightening thing that turns out to not be so frightening — i.e., a dog whose proverbial bark is worse than its bite. This interpretation gives the title an added irony that seems more in keeping with Peckinpah’s temperament. After all, the bespectacled lead character, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), a mathematician with a grant, ends up having a bite far worse than his almost nonexistent bark.
Yet, even if the title can be seen in a deeper and more ironic light than most critics give it credit for, Straw Dogs fails because Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman’s screenplay — based upon Gordon Williams‘ novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm — is so sloppily written. The tale is larded with one-dimensional caricatures — especially of the cretinous male townsfolk who sing songs of sex with sheep, and are fascinated with rats — implausible actions, and the male fantasy character in the form of David’s big-breasted, nubile, blonde English wife Amy (Susan George).
Worse, the acting does absolutely nothing to liven up the bad writing, as Dustin Hoffman turns in what may be his worst performance until the ridiculously bad Rain Man. As the story goes, Hoffman loathed Straw Dogs and took the part only for the money. That seems quite apparent on-screen. Susan George is just another blonde bimbo, despite some critics’ attempts to make her performance seem notable. While watching Straw Dogs, ask yourself this: Is there any scene in which George appears that one could not imagine any other actress doing as well or better?
The actual plot is very slight. The Sumners have left the U.S. for Amy’s Cornish hometown, but he is resented by the xenophobic locals — the ostensible reason that he is a nebbish American who has bagged a local goddess who spurned a former beau, Charley Venner (Del Henney).
Amy is a terminal flirt who wears no bras, struts her stuff in front of the local Neoliths, including flashing her lovely breasts out a window at Venner’s workmen pals, hired by the Sumners to fix their garage roof out in the countryside. If she is a local, should she not know that they are lustful monsters? Does this not suggest that she wants their attentions, and the violence concomitant with it? Or is she really as dumb as she seems?
David seems to be a wimp who has no convictions on politics — such as the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War — which the locals query him on. Those locals include Venner’s cretinous pals Cawsey (Jim Norton), Riddaway (Donald Webster), and Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), and the patriarch of a sick family, named Tom Hedden (Peter Vaughan), whose teen son Bobby (Len Jones) and teen daughter Janice (Sally Thomsett) are incestuously involved, and like voyeuring on the Sumners.
Janice also apes Amy’s over the top sexuality, by showing off her younger charms, and trying to seduce the local idiot, Henry Niles (an unbilled David Warner) who was once guilty of molesting young girls, and whose brother John (Peter Arne) has avoided institutionalizing him. Tom Hedden loathes the Niles clan, even though his family is as sick. In fact, all of the English villagers are sick, in some way, including Amy, and this fact shines through the film in her claims to hate being ogled, yet does everything to encourage it. The lone exception to this seemingly genetic inbreeding is the town constable, Major John Scott (T.P. McKenna).
Amy tries to spur David to act more manly, and this is especially true after the locals kill the Sumners’ cat, and hang it in their closet. Some critics claim David killed the cat, but it’s clear from his initial reaction to it that he is wholly unaware of it, for it is the same visceral reaction he had to earlier violence at the local bar. She subverts his attempts to corner the workmen into admitting their deed, and in reaction, he accepts their invitation to go bird hunting the next day. This is when Venner goes to the Sumner home and the infamous ‘rape scene’ occurs. Unfortunately, the character of Venner does not rape Amy, just as there is no rape scene of Tippi Hedren by Sean Connery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie.
It is a classic violent sex/seduction act. She says no, but her body says yes, as she leans up against Venner, and rubs against him. When he rips her robe, and he tosses her to the couch, she simply lays there and makes pouty lips at him, before writhing her body to him to accept his thrust, long before one could declare such an action a mere physical response to orgasm. She does not scream nor resist, and gets even more passionate as the violence rises. Feminists may not like it, but many women do get turned on by rough sex in which a man dominates them, especially after they’ve put up token resistance.
When he penetrates her she has visions of sex with David, and when he comes they lay side by side, cuddling. This is not a rape. She loved the sex, and only hated her loving it, for Venner is more overtly manly than David — right down to his brawny chest hair. When he is done, however, he becomes an accessory to rape when his buddy Norman wields a gun and Venner holds Amy down as Norman doggies and sodomizes her. Only during this scene is she being fully resistant. But, we have seen her at her worst — the eternal cock tease and harridan who loves emasculating her husband, the faithless wife who invites violent sex to ‘get back’ at David’s impotence (if not sexually than emotionally), and then the bitch who gets her comeuppance when Venner assists his crony in sodomizing her. Of course, all the men in the film will get far worse than Amy does, but Feminists apparently stopped watching the film at this point, content that they had ‘proof’ of the film’s and director’s intent.
There are some brief scenes which show her laden with guilt and shell-shock, when the Sumners go to a church outing, after David intellectually destroyed the local preacher, but that leads into the final scenes, where Henry is taken out and seduced by Janice after she, yet again fails to attract David’s attentions. There, in a barn, she is accidentally strangled by Henry, reminiscent of the scene from John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, where the brutish idiot Lenny accidentally kills a girl. Running away, Henry is hit by David as he drives Amy home in the foggy night. They take him to their home where the lynch mob of cretins longs to string him up over the disappearance of Janice.
David succeeds, at first, in tossing them out- ironically defending the idiot against the two men who he does not know assaulted Amy, and who are even more loathsome than the idiot pedophile, but Tom Hedden has his boys begin an assault to get back in. Finally, Major Scott arrives, but Tom Hedden accidentally kills him in a rage, and the rest of the cretins, having nothing left to lose, do their best to get into the home.
Susan resists David’s attempts to save the idiot, and betrays him by trying to let the cretins in, until David acts ‘manly,’ slaps her, and she falls into line. He explains that they have nothing to lose, after the death of the Major, and that if they get in they are both dead, along with Henry. Still, she does everything she can to undermine David, who resorts to household appliances and boiled oil to fend off the cretins.
Soon, they get in, and David and Amy lock themselves away further into the house- just as in Night of the Living Dead. David ends up killing all of the men, and when he tangles with Venner, daring Amy’s ex to shoot him after he’s beaten another man to death, Amy calls out for David and Charley when Norman tries to rape her again. David and Venner run upstairs and confront him. Norman suggests that Venner kill David and the two of them do Amy again. Instead, Venner shoots and kills Norman, he and David wrestle, and David kills Venner by nearly decapitating him with a steel bear trap.
Then, in the tritest fashion, just as David thinks they are safe, a final cretin attacks him, and after much fear and deliberation, Amy finally shoots the last of them. The triumphal David- as if there was ever any doubt?, picks up his cracked eyeglasses, leaves Amy alone, and drives Henry off to the authorities. The ending is famed, and justly so. In the car, Henry says, ‘I don’t know where I live.’ David smiles and says, ‘That’s all right, neither do I.’
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 predictable and trite characters and plot. The cinematography by John Coquillon, and the editing by Paul Davies, Roger Spottiswoode, and Tony Lawson is not up to earlier Peckinpah standards.
In Straw Dogs, the use of slow motion is not nearly as effective as in The Wild Bunch because it extends the triteness and lame situations, rather than focusing on the pain. When Venner and David fall down a stairwell struggling over his rifle, there is simply no need for it because a) it is in the dark, b) it releases some of the adrenaline the scene has been building, before the climax, and c) it’s simply not filmed that well. Similarly, earlier, when Venner slaps around Amy, before their sex scene, there is no reason for it because it does not detail her pain nor eroticize her body. Similarly, when Venner penetrates Amy, we see shots from her point of view, which are clearly filmed in an attractive fashion — another point which argues against her supposed horror at being raped. This is all onscreen and not too difficult to miss…unless you are a critic merely aping others or popular sentiment and not really watching the film. The score, by Jerry Fielding, neither heightens nor distracts, thereby rendering it functional, at best.
The two-disc DVD by The Criterion Collection is a good package that has some clunker features in it. 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 may be the worst I’ve ever heard, even worse than the insipid Annette Insdorf’s execrable commentary on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs: Bleu / Three Colors: Blue. It’s as if every bad critic for the last three-plus 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 as he speaks, for 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, he does buy into the noxious notion that all art is a biographical corollary to the artist, that David is somehow a representation of Peckinpah, his own rages and fears of masculinity, and his own ambivalence toward marriage. Thus, he sees the Sumner marriage as a bad one, although we see that theirs is actually the only successful male-female relationship in the whole film, even more so than a brief snippet of the local preacher and his wife. Simply because they argue and snipe does not mean the marriage is bad, which only begs the obvious — has Prince ever been married? For, if not, it would explain much of that misinterpretation’s provenance.
At film’s end, when Amy takes a few moments before shooting the last assailant, who is attacking David, Prince sees this as evidence for their bad marriage, when it’s clearly the character’s fighting through her trauma to try to act. When David also brings Henry in, rather than comfort Amy, Prince also sees this as their marriage unraveling, yet David is also shell-shocked, as well as betrayed by Amy a number of times. To expect him to act normally, in the abnormal reality of the film, is simply silly. Likewise, he takes a hard line on the supposed rape of Amy by Venner, mouthing the usual banalities and misinterpretations, even though — as stated earlier — what takes place is clearly not rape. Much of his ‘analysis’ is of the sort where an egghead reads some deep significance into an eye gouge in a Three Stooges comedy short.
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 his critics (Time magazine’s Richard Schickel and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael) and viewers, as well as three TV trailers and the original theatrical trailer for the film.
The booklet insert comes with a 1974 Canadian print interview with Peckinpah by André Leroux, and an essay by poetaster Joshua Clover, which is almost as ridiculously bad as the commentary by Prince. 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, yet lacking anecdoture for support. 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. But look at the feeble attempts of Clover to justify his claim.
Well, we know that 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 cretinous Cornish locals has no direct parallels to Vietnam. None.
In his defense, the stolid Clover is not the only critic who has butchered their interpretation of the film. The infamous Pauline Kael loved the film, but mislabeled it ‘fascist,’ as if a band of local loonies are the equivalent of a nationwide junta, and many of her female acolytes condemned both the film and the director for ‘misogyny.’
Even the powerful Roger Ebert muffed his criticism of the film. While he correctly thought it one of Peckinpah’s weaker films, especially when compared to The Wild Bunch, his reasons were unfathomable. Ebert wrote: ‘The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.’ The very thing that sticks out about Straw Dogs, however, is that it is amoral. The characters are shown doing crazy and violent things, but with little consequence for their behavior. That is not hypocrisy, it is anarchy.
Overall, Straw Dogs is well crafted, but lacks any real depth — and it is especially wan considering all the decades of intervening cinematic treatises on violence. In truth, Peckinpah was simply not that profound a filmmaker. In a sense, he was a more barbaric version of Alfred Hitchcock, who was similarly fascinated with violence — though Hitchcock’s films were generally less scattershot in quality than Peckinpah’s. Neither man, however, had the depth to truly plumb artistic greatness. If they ever achieved it, however briefly, it was by sheer happenstance, not by design.
Straw Dogs, for its part, is plagued by a simple-minded script, unrealistic characters and situations, thus wallowing in gray mediocrity. Worse yet, lesser films on violence are almost invariably dull. Straw Dogs proves the rule. In fact, its own self-importance is what makes Straw Dogs far less enjoyable than, say, Last House on the Left or Night of the Living Dead. The former is so silly and unpretentious that its images and violence lodge in the viewers’ mind — such as the infamous fellatio-biting scene — while the latter is simply relentless pedal to the metal violence that is inexplicable.
Straw Dogs should have been more grounded in reality, or more campy, or more straightforward in its naked bile for mankind. As it is, it sits on the fence, and it is so predictable that it becomes tedious. There’s not a moment where a viewer can get into any of the characters and identify with them — let alone care for what happens to them. Note that Peckinpah will show the beginning of acts of violence, but never the results — e.g., we see no real penetration of Amy, and we do not see David’s actual violence. The camera always looks away — even when he is tossing grapefruits at his cat. While this may seem commendable on the director’s part, it also neuters the visceral effect of the violence, so that we get in effect a serial killer of a film tidied up for children, showing all the "fun" of violence with none of the consequences. Thereby, Peckinpah’s set-up is not a statement of ethics, merely an unjustified and poor artistic choice.
In short, being controversial does not always equate with quality, and Straw Dogs feels increasingly like a puerile attempt to shock viewers (something it no longer does), despite its pretensions of offering something deeper. Ultimately, it no more than a passable B-movie with a pedigreed director and A-movie production values. Ironically, the very lack of such pretensions is what makes something like Last House on the Left work better, while a film like Night of the Living Dead touches far deeper into the human psyche.
Shock filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club), a manifest Peckinpah acolyte, once said, ‘I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.’ Well, aside from his love of a rather routine and trite Steven Spielberg thriller (though the director seems to have gone all downhill since then), Fincher’s dictum is not met here, for even the controversy of the alleged ‘double rape’ and the violent ending seem nowadays to be much ado about very little. Indeed, not a single image sticks out in this viewer’s mind, not even the film’s blurred opening of kids in a playground (which quotes Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch).
When an artist cannot even equal his earlier glories it’s a sure sign of a lesser work of art. That’s what Straw Dogs is, no matter how one interprets its inner workings.
© Dan Schneider
Straw Dogs (1968). Director: Sam Peckinpah. Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George.
Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”
Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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She says ‘no’ but her body says ‘yes’? You know I’ve heard that before. When a rapist is trying to defend their actions. When they use physical reactions that no victim has no control over for manipulation. Sure some woman like it rough but rape is rape and no means no. Had that been picked up on this could have been the best review about ‘Straw Dogs’ I read.