Average User Rating: 6 Vote(s)
 
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
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by Lee James Turnock
Sam Peckinpah's 'Cornish Western' - a cynical fable whose central theme is that all pacifists are just cowardly thugs under their Liberal exteriors - is alternately fascinating and frustrating. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George are the mismatched couple hoping for peace and quiet on a secluded farm, only to fall victim to a gang of local louts who mock and belittle Hoffman, kill the couple's cat and rape George in a notoriously contentious sequence that remains hard to watch (and even harder to justify) even decades later. Hoffman finally snaps, of course, and begins to relish the apocalyptic violence. Photographer John Coquillion serves the material well with a palette of muted colours (as he would later do with Peckinpah's bloody World War Two thriller Cross of Iron), David Warner is superb as the persecuted local misfit and the twitchy, restless editing adds to the overall atmosphere of impending doom, but in the final analysis, Straw Dogs is nobody's finest hour - now, more than ever, it seems to exist as an exercise in testing the boundaries and upsetting the audience. If that was Peckinpah's intention all along, he undoubtedly succeeded.