Cinema: Peckinpah: Primitive Horror

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Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's first film without a hero. It is indeed his first film to challenge the very ideal of heroism around which his work so far has been built. In Ride the High Country (1961), his main characters were two aging lawmen who could not, even when they tried, abandon their own code of honor. By the time of The Wild Bunch (1969), the main characters had turned into a ragged troop of bandits, but the code persisted. It was their adherence to a suicidal notion of dignity that made these outlaws heroes despite themselves.

David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) in Straw Dogs is a man sure of nothing save his own intense vulnerability. An American mathematician, he has come with his wife Amy (Susan George) to her native village on the windy coast of Cornwall, where he hopes to spend a year doing research. He is also attempting to flee the chaotic violence of the U.S. —and to patch up an uneasy marriage. But there is to be no hiding place.

The quiet country town is almost palpably evil, a microcosm of the easy enmity and casual brutality that David and Amy hoped to leave behind them. It is a place isolated, almost abstracted, from the rest of the world. The villagers regard David with a cordial disdain. Amy is seen as one of their own who has deserted them and returned with slightly lofty airs. Some of the men of the village, while helping fix up a rented farmhouse for the couple, make casual sport of ogling Amy and discussing her attractions.

Gradually their attitude becomes more threatening. Amy's pet cat is found strangled in the bedroom closet. "They did it to show you they could get into your bedroom," Amy yells, but David does nothing. Soon after, when the men have almost run David off the road on his way into town, he confronts them in the local pub. David, with a twitching grin, just buys them all a drink. Several days later, the workmen lead David off on a snipe hunt, and while he sits in a field, holding a shotgun, two of the men sneak back and rape his wife.

Such ingredients are the stuff of melodrama; Peckinpah transforms them into the relentless geometry of fate. David returns home, finds Amy nearly hysterical in bed, but does not understand—or chooses to ignore—her veiled references to the attack. Instead, out of his own sense of humiliation, David fires the men.

They will soon return. Against Amy's wishes, David gives shelter to the village simpleton Henry Niles (David Warner), who has accidentally killed a young girl. The men come looking for him, but David refuses to surrender the fugitive. He has been pushed too far. "This is my house," he says. "I will not allow violence against my house."

A classic heroic response to a virtually feudal situation. Yet David, in defending himself against the threat to what Robert Ardrey would call his territorial imperative, soon becomes as bestial as the attackers. Peckinpah asserts with gripping, merciless logic that any man, no matter how cold or cowardly, is capable of committing the most appalling violence —and of enjoying it. "You never took a stand," Amy accuses David early in the film; when he finally does, he acts not from any sense of honor but from animal instinct. The assault on the cottage and his defense of it produce one of the most horrifying scenes of prolonged violence ever filmed.