Film Review: Straw Dogs (1971)

As the 1960s bled into the 1970s, Western society grappled with the aftershocks of a decade defined by radical upheaval—civil rights, sexual liberation, and anti-war protests. The question lingered: how much of this progress would survive the inevitable conservative backlash? Cinema emerged as a battleground for this cultural reckoning, with filmmakers testing the limits of newfound creative freedom. Many works from this era, such as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), became infamous for their unflinching brutality and moral ambiguity, sparking censorship battles and enduring controversy. A psychological thriller masquerading as a rural nightmare, Straw Dogs remains Peckinpah’s most polarising work—a masterclass in tension and a lightning rod for debates about violence, sex, and the fragility of civilisation.

Adapted from Gordon Williams’ 1969 novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, Straw Dogs transplants its narrative from the Scottish Highlands to the claustrophobic Cornish village of Wakely. Peckinpah, then a director in Hollywood exile following the commercial failure of The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), initially dismissed Williams’ novel as a “rotten book.” Yet, alongside co-writer David Zelag Goodman, he reshaped its premise into a searing exploration of masculinity and moral decay. Out went the novel’s rural class tensions; in came a transatlantic dynamic, with American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his Cornish wife Amy (Susan George) embodying the clash between intellectual elitism and primal tribalism.

The film follows David, a meek academic seeking solace in Wakely to escape the political turmoil of 1970s America. His presence irks the locals, particularly Amy’s ex-lover Charlie Venner (Del Henney), whose gang of labourers—hired to build the Sumners’ garage—exude barely concealed hostility. Peckinpah meticulously layers microaggressions: lewd stares, veiled threats, and the symbolic emasculation of David, whose glasses and bookish demeanour mark him as an outsider. The tension crescendos when Amy is gang-raped by Charlie and his cronies while David is lured into a hunting trip—a sequence rendered with harrowing ambiguity, as Amy’s resistance blurs into complicity.

The violence, when it erupts, is both cathartic and grotesque. After local simpleton Henry Niles (David Warner) accidentally strangles a flirtatious teenager, Janice (Sally Thomsett), David shelters him from a lynch mob led by Janice’s father, Tom (Peter Vaughan). What follows is a siege of escalating brutality, as David transforms from pacifist to primal avenger, dispatching attackers with makeshift traps and a chilling grin: “Jesus, I got ’em all.”

Peckinpah, best known for revisionist Westerns like The Wild Bunch (1969), subverts expectations here. Straw Dogs leans less on action than on psychological dread, its pacing deliberate, its violence deferred. Jerry Fielding’s Oscar-nominated score mirrors the narrative’s simmering unease. When bloodshed finally erupts, it’s visceral but never gratuitous; each act of violence—a bear trap to the leg, a fireplace poker to the face—serves as a narrative exclamation point.

The director’s signature themes—honour, betrayal, the corruption of innocence—are refracted through a modern lens. David’s arc—from coward to killer—underscores Peckinpah’s nihilistic worldview: civilisation is a veneer, easily shattered by base instinct. Yet the film’s irony cuts deeper. David doesn’t unleash hell to avenge Amy’s rape but to defend a stranger’s life—a perverse nod to civic duty that questions the morality of violence itself.

Dustin Hoffman’s performance as David stands as a career pinnacle. Initially, David is all nervous tics and passive aggression, his marriage to Amy a battleground of unspoken resentments. Hoffman portrays this inertia not as weakness but as a calculated retreat. Yet, during the siege, Hoffman peels back layers to reveal a feral core. His transformation—triggered not by heroism but survival—culminates in a grin of perverse triumph, a moment as unsettling as it is inevitable.

Off-screen tensions mirrored this duality. Hoffman clashed with Peckinpah over the character’s passivity, yet their friction birthed a performance of raw authenticity. David isn’t a hero but an everyman pushed to the brink—a reflection of Peckinpah’s belief that savagery lurks within us all.

No aspect of Straw Dogs has drawn more ire than its portrayal of women. Amy, oscillating between victim and provocateur, is blamed for inciting violence through her flirtations—a trope exacerbated by Janice’s sexualised demise. The rape scene, filmed with queasy ambiguity, sparked outrage for suggesting Amy’s arousal. Feminists condemned this as victim-blaming, a charge amplified by Peckinpah’s reputation for misogyny.

Yet Susan George defended the role, arguing it exposed male entitlement rather than endorsed it. “Amy is a product of her environment,” George noted, “a woman trapped between liberation and subjugation.” This reading, while valid, doesn’t absolve the film’s prurient gaze—a tension that ensures Straw Dogs remains a Rorschach test for audiences.

Upon release, Straw Dogs was met with moral panic. The British Board of Film Censors banned it until 2002, while critics dismissed it as exploitative. Yet time has softened its reception. Modern scholars praise its unflinching portrayal of masculinity, with David’s rampage reinterpreted as a deconstruction of the “male saviour” myth.

Peckinpah, ever the iconoclast, would likely scoff at such reappraisals. For him, Straw Dogs was less a social critique than a mirror held to humanity’s dark heart—a vision too brutal for its time but impossible to ignore. The 2011 remake, a tepid retread by Rod Lurie, only underscores the original’s singular power.

Straw Dogs endures not despite its controversies but because of them. Peckinpah’s genius lies in his refusal to offer easy answers, forcing viewers to confront their own complicity in the violence they deplore. Is David a hero or a monster? Is civilisation a safeguard or a delusion? The film’s title, drawn from Taoist philosophy—“straw dogs” are ritual objects discarded after use—hints at Peckinpah’s answer: humanity is both sacred and expendable, noble and savage. In an age of renewed cultural fracturing, Straw Dogs remains a cautionary tale—a reminder that the line between civility and chaos is as thin as a knife’s edge.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)

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