Straw Dogs

2/16/2020

This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house. Straw Dogs is directed by Sam Peknipah and Peckinpah co-adapts to screen play with David Zelag Goodman from the novel "The Siege of Trencher's Farm" written by Gordon Williams. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna, Del Henney and Ken Hutchison. Music is by Jerry Fielding and cinematography by John Coquillon. A young American maths teacher and his English wife move to the rural English village where she was raised and face increasingly vicious harassment from the locals... One of Peckinpah's masterpieces (yes you can have more than one), Straw Dogs is an uncompromising dissection of violence, machismo and boundary pushing of the human condition. Controversy around the fil

10/28/2024

**_How far can a civilized man be pushed?_** A well-to-do couple from America (Dustin Hoffman and Susan George) move back to the wife's hometown near Land’s End in western Cornwall, England, and settle into the vacant homestead. They enlist some roofers whom she knows from her school days, one of them being a former boyfriend (Del Henney). Rivalry is in the air as the laborers try to emasculate Amy’s brainy husband and she questions his manhood. Havoc ensues. Based on Gordon M. Williams’s novel and helmed by Peckinpah, "Straw Dogs" (1971) is a psychological thriller and so there's a lot of drama and subtle suspense build-up; things don't blow-up until the final act, so to speak. Consequently, anyone looking for mindless action should stay away. There are bits reminiscent of "Of Mice

3/22/2026

Time hasn’t been so kind to this tautly directed but actually pretty thin story. Academic “David” (Dustin Hoffman) has moved with his more local wife “Amy” (Susan George) to live in Cornwall where he can continue to work on his astrophysics and where she can, well I wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do aside from wind up her former admirer “Charlie” (Del Henney). On the face of it, “David” is a bit of a wimp and is seen as easy pickings by the villagers led by the odious and drunken “Tom” (Peter Vaughan) and that's soon fairly clearly exemplified when the newly wedded couple arrange for “Charlie” and a couple of his pals to work on a new roof at their property. Just about every man in the place has designs on “Amy” that are only going to be satiated one way. When things eventually do