STRAW DOGS Sam Peckinpah

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Direction: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T. P. McKenna, Del Henney, Jim Norton, Donald Webster, Ken Hutchison, Len Jones, Sally Thomsett, Robert Keegan, Peter Arne

Screenplay: David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah; from Gordon Williams’ novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm

Oscar Movies

Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Straw Dogs

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 drama Straw Dogs, I’ve yet to encounter it. 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.

Co-written by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman from from Gordon Williams‘ novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, 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. Above all, it is 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 ending 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; it’s certainly not "naturalistic," either, for the ultra-violence it depicts was done better — and more realistically — that same year in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and earlier by Peckinpah himself in The Wild Bunch and by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde. Additionally, the Straw Dogs 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 (later remade as the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man).

The revenge theme, for its part, was done more engagingly in Wes Craven’s campy feature debut Last House on the Left and with more depth in the film that inspired Craven, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Straw Dogs, however, would be followed by other films showing increasingly stylized violence, among them Deliverance (1972), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976), all with different styles and artistic merits.

Not helping matters, the politics and psychology found in Straw Dogs are badly dated. This is especially true of the infamous "double rape" scene. Compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, released a few months later, the motivations offered in Peckinpah’s film seem downright silly — something especially noteworthy since Hitchcock built a career on pseudo-scientific Freudian motivations for his criminal characters, but abandoned all that 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 for 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 be not all that 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 film’s bespectacled lead character, the mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), 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 is much too sloppily written. The tale is larded with one-dimensional caricatures — especially the cretinous male townsfolk who sing songs of sex with sheep and are fascinated with rats — implausible action, and a male fantasy character in the form of David’s blonde, nubile, big-breasted English wife Amy (Susan George).