A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #182: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs

If ever there is a movie that ful­fills the maxim “Beware the wrath of a quiet man” Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs [1971] [don’t miss the essay from a real film critic] is it. One of the many things Peck­in­pah does well is vio­lence. After all, he is the man who at first shocked, then pop­u­lar­ized mod­ern graphic vio­lence with The Wild Bunch. Sam isn’t one to have vio­lence merely for vio­lence sake, though. It served a higher pur­pose in The Wild Bunch, and it does the same in Straw Dogs, albeit more ambigu­ously. This movie is a tough read. It is no sur­prise to me that it was banned for years in the UK. Spoil­ers cer­tainly past the jump.

Dustin Hoff­man plays the part of an Amer­i­can math­e­mati­cian, David Sum­ner, who has moved to Corn­wall with his hot Eng­lish wife. He is the typ­i­cal uncon­fi­dent, passive-​aggressive, non­con­fronta­tional book­worm type, a nerd. A cow­ard. His wife Amy [Susan George] is also passive-​aggressive and it seems like nei­ther of them under­stand the other. More impor­tantly for the film, Amy “has a past” with one of the local res­i­dents, a Fabio-​type con­struc­tion worker who is help­ing build a garage at their farm. Amy also skips around bra­less and wear­ing those lit­tle late 1960s skirt num­bers. If you watch the begin­ning of the film here: [embed­ded WMP stream, please excuse the Czech sub­ti­tles] you’ll see just how quickly Peck­in­pah cre­ates a sense of men­ace and desire between the men of the town and Amy. It also doesn’t help that Amy flashes the work­men a cou­ple of times…

While this is going on we keep get­ting glimpses about how inca­pable David Sum­ner is. He is quiet, timid, can’t even ham­mer a nail, essen­tially half a man. The film has other half-​men in it as well, the mag­is­trate, Major John Scott [T.P. McKenna], has a dead arm and there is some sort of dan­ger or fear asso­ci­ated with the local halfwit, John Niles [Peter Arne] The other men about are all rather creepy, aggres­sive, leer­ing and sneer­ing, rude, but strong and capa­ble too. True Full Men. Sum­ner is aware of the jokes they make and the hints they drop, but doesn’t under­stand them. He just knows he is being made fun of.

Then some­one stran­gles the cat. And hangs it in the closet. Sum­ner doesn’t want to admit that it was the work­men but Amy says “They wanted to show you that they could get in your bed­room.” The next day he says he’s going to con­front them about it, but bails out. Much like I tend to do when I want to chat up a girl. Instead he agrees to go duck-​hunting with them the next day. He does and they ditch him.

This is the point where what we’ve been expect­ing since we saw the first hard nip­ple in the open­ing sequence: the rape scene. Char­lie Ven­ner [Del Hen­ney], the man with whom Amy “has a past” shows up, she’s sit­ting around in her bathrobe, she lets him in, know­ing full well what he wants, fixes him a drink, lets him pin her against the liquor cab­i­net, kisses him and then decides she’s mak­ing a bad deci­sion. Or maybe she decides to play hard to get. Peck­in­pah walks the razor’s edge here with great skill. Through­out the whole sequence with Char­lie Ven­ner, him slap­ping her, tear­ing her clothes off, and the start of the fuck­ing, she goes back and forth between want­ing him and refus­ing him. Finally she decides that she likes it. I got the feel­ing that this was another strike against David, as if he can’t sat­isfy his wife’s sex­ual appetites. [I found the whole sequence of this in screen­shots online while look­ing for the final screen­shot in the entry, but I’m not link­ing to it because the whole site is ded­i­cated to rape scenes in movies. Fuck­ing sick.]

All of this is inter­cut with shots of David Sum­ner try­ing to shoot a damn duck and miss­ing. He finally kills one, appar­ently at the same time Char­lie bags his own bird. Sum­ner goes to pick up the bird and it is still in its death throes [inter­cut with Amy’s orgasms]. Because he is so gen­tle, he is sad­dened at the death of the ani­mal and hides it.

Back to Amy. Char­lie is cud­dling with her, post-​coital, when Chris Cawsey, another of the work­men comes in and wants a piece of the action too. Char­lie is unwill­ing, but since he’s got a shot­gun in his face, lets the slime­ball shuck his knick­ers. Amy is almost asleep, but looks to see what is hap­pen­ing and def­i­nitely doesn’t want it to. But it does. Of course, by the time Sum­ner gets home they are long gone and a bruised face Amy doesn’t tell him. He doesn’t even ask why her cheeks are all raw or why she looks like death warmed over. He starts smooching all over her and Peck­in­pah cuts back to the ear­lier rape scene and shows that he’s framed the shots almost iden­ti­cally. He feels manly because he killed a duck with a shotgun.

Sum­ner fires the men the next day because they ditched him. That night he and Amy go to the church social where she can’t stop think­ing about the rape [well duh] and it is mar­vel­lously inter­cut with the lame magic tricks of the vicar. Jan­ice Hed­den [Sally Thom­sett] has a big olé crush on David Sum­ner and keeps try­ing to get his atten­tion, for all that she is 14 or so. Spurned by him, she decides to use John Niles, the [maybe rapist?] halfwit to get some. She sneaks off with him and when their absence is noticed all the men wig out. They claim they are try­ing to find Jan­ice, but give them­selves the lie because they only ask after John Niles. John gets scared when he hears their calls, acci­den­tally stran­gles Jan­ice and takes off for the hills. David and Amy are head­ing home when he hits John Niles. They drag him into the house and David calls the pub for help. Bad idea, since all the Full True Men are there drink­ing some liq­uid courage so they can do what they’ve been want­ing to do for years, kill John Niles. They grab a cou­ple more bot­tles of liquor and head on up to the Sumner’s for a lit­tle bit of the old ultra-​violence. [Inci­den­tally, this film was released the same year as Dirty Harry and A Clock­work Orange]

They mus­cle their way indoors and make Sum­ner look like a sissy again, although he does defend Niles and man­age to talk them back out­side, until they’ve had a bit more to drink. Then they start break­ing win­dows. Now Sum­ner decides to make his stand. Finally. Christ. Amy just wants to toss John Niles out to them. She doesn’t care what hap­pens to him. When David real­izes this we also real­ize that his strength is his gen­tle­ness, the very thing we’d derided him for through­out most of the movie. The mag­is­trate shows up, tries to dis­arm the drunken louts and gets a shot­gun through his chest for his trou­ble. A one-​armed man, no mat­ter how brave, can’t beat five dudes, one with a shot­gun. David sets traps, has to keep Amy from let­ting the men inside, finally gets her to do as he says and gets all reck­less [a very sligh dutch angle when he turns on some blar­ing bag­pipes, while grip­ping an iron poker is prob­a­bly the sweet­est shot in the movie]. Boil­ing oil, a bear trap, a shot­gun to the feet, David man­ages to kill everyone.

Then he takes John Niles home, leav­ing Amy with all the dead bod­ies. I can’t really blame him, she called out for Char­lie [the guy who held her down while she got raped!] instead of David while they were fight­ing each other.

Straw Dogs is a great title, basi­cally say­ing that the man­li­ness shown in the movie is like a vicious dog, but ulti­mately one with no stead­fast­ness, no root, eas­ily blown burned or con­sumed. It has its prob­lems, namely the treat­ment of Amy through­out, but David treats her as an equal, as more than some­thing to shag, even though that wasn’t empha­sized quite so much. Still, Amy’s inher­ent igno­bil­ity, more a mat­ter of per­son­al­ity than wom­an­hood, can’t help but be spread about to include all women, at least in the movie’s terms. I keep waver­ing back and forth on that point, it is an obvi­ous weak­ness, but the movie isn’t about women. One of the major objec­tions to it in Britain was that it por­trayed rural British as inbred and vul­gar. Some­body has to be the bad guy. I’m ram­bling. I’ve gone on too long as it is. Just get your hands on a copy of this and come to your own conclusions.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Joshua Clover.