In the Face of Every Coward Burns a Straw Dog.
David Sumner, a mild-mannered academic from the United States, marries Amy, an Englishwoman. In order to escape a hectic stateside lifestyle, David and his wife relocate to the small town in rural Cornwall where Amy was raised. There, David is ostracized by the brutish men of the village, including Amy's old flame, Charlie. Eventually the taunts escalate.
- Sexual violence
- Graphic violence
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Character
Grave, earnest, overwhelming and bleak.
- gravecomic
- earnestironic
- cooloverwhelming
- warmbleak
- classical in formformally daring
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“Is this Sam Peckinpah's best work?”
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Reviews on TMDB
Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Curator Co.'s numbers.
- John Chardon TMDB · Feb 202010/10
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 film reigned supreme upon release (and long into the dead part of the video nasty era 1980s), and in fact still today it is still pored over as an abject lesson in audience manipulation. For a s the power struggle between a husband and wife against their abusers reaches boiling point, ultra violence and sexual assault attacks the viewer's senses. Peckinpah is in his pomp here, making us observers complicit in t
Read the whole review on TMDB - Wuchakon TMDB · Oct 20247/10
**_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 and Men," like the mentally challenged guy (David Warner) who doesn't know his own strength. The conflict here is basically brawn vs. brain or Lynyrd Skynyrd vs. Bach. David (Hoffman) is a meek, civilized man of below average stature (almost 5’6”) with an intellectual occupation who is forced to shed all his cultured conditioning and revert back to the barbarism of his ancestors. The story spurs some qu
Read the whole review on TMDB - CinemaSerfon TMDB · Mar 20266/10
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 come to an head, the photography and the audio spare us nothing of the violence that we have come to expect from them and that we might be a little more surprised to see from “David”, but I felt as if I were being manoeuvred into being appalled: the couple’s relationship has all the depth of an Ethiopian puddle in July and neither persona is remotely developed and these extremes are presented rat
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Cast
- Dustin HoffmanDavid Sumner
- Susan GeorgeAmy
- Peter VaughanTom Hedden
- T. P. McKennaMaj. John Scott
- Del HenneyCharlie Venner
- Jim NortonChris Cawsey
- Donald WebsterRiddaway
- Ken HutchisonNorman Scutt
- Len JonesBobby Hedden
- Sally ThomsettJanice Hedden
Crew
- Sam PeckinpahDirector
- David Zelag GoodmanScreenplay
- Sam PeckinpahScreenplay
- Gordon WilliamsNovel
- John CoquillonDirector of Photography
- Jerry FieldingOriginal Music Composer
- Tony LawsonEditor
- Roger SpottiswoodeEditor
- Paul DaviesEditor
- Daniel MelnickProducer
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