Peckinpah: Primitive Horror

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.

Straw Dogs is a brilliant feat of movie making. Peckinpah, working outside America and outside the western genre for the first time, uses the brooding monochromes of the Cornish countryside to construct a self-contained universe of indifferent terrors, in which, according to Lao-tze: "Heaven and earth are not humane. They regard all things as straw dogs." (Straw dogs are Chinese artifacts of the 3rd century B.C., first worshiped, then sacrificially burned.)

Hoffman's performance is nervously cerebral and superbly realized. Susan George, all teasing, feline sexuality, carries off a difficult role extremely well, and David Warner makes even his small part (which he did as a favor to Peckinpah and for which he receives no credit) memorable in every detail. But it is Peckinpah who dominates and controls his material. His vision in Straw Dogs is so cold, so unsparing, that our natural impulse is to resist it. Character motivation is sometimes cloudy, the level of coincidence is rather too high, and the film perhaps is more cynical than realistic. But if this is not the way things are, then it is a measure of Peckinpah's skill that in giving voice to his own despair, he came to make this nightmare seem like our own. "I want to rub their noses in the vio lence of it," says Sam Peckinpah of Straw Dogs. A white-haired, roughhewn man of 46, he grins slyly, disguising his habitual anger. "I regard all men as violent, including myself. I'm not cynical. I still believe, and I still want everything to work out, but it never does. When you see the degree of violence in men, you realize that we're still just a few steps up from apes in the evolutionary scale."

Peckinpah himself likes to hunt game, "not for sport," but skinning and eat ing his catch. He has also been known to end an argument by using his fists, even against women. Disputes with producers and colleagues earned him such a reputation for cantankerousness that the big studios finally boycotted him for seven years. Peckinpah's enemies describe him as "weird" and "dictatorial," but he doesn't seem to mind. "I'm not a fascist," he says, "but I am something of a totalitarian."

An ex-Marine who served in China during World War 11, Peckinpah worked his way into the movie business by acting and directing in small theaters, then writing and directing westerns. In writing Straw Dogs, based on a novel called The Siege of Trencher's Farm, Peckinpah kept little from the original except the climactic siege itself. He then spent weeks searching for a town with the primitive and isolated quality he wanted.

Once the seven-week shooting period started, he drove himself and his crew to the limits of endurance, once keeping them up half the night to make all the costumes dirtier and more ragged for a scene the next morning. One or two laggards got fired, as usually happens on a Peckinpah film, and when Susan George balked at playing the rape scene all the way to the end, the director simply brought in a double and kept going.

Actor Brian Keith says: "Peckinpah is creative and original but not artistic. Not if 'artistic' means camera tricks, every shot a nostril shot. He wants honesty, reality as he sees it. He works on instincts. If something smells phony, he doesn't want it."

This instinct for realism has led him to graphic displays of violence. "It was a phony Hollywood fallacy to have people get shot and not seem to be dead at all," he declares. "I don't mind saying that I myself was sickened by my own film. But somewhere in it there is a mirror for everybody. If I'm so bloody that I drive people out of the theater, then I've failed."

Divorced once from one wife, three times from another, Peckinpah is presently unmarried, restless, dissatisfied. Trying to characterize the man, a friend recalls that Peckinpah once kept a pet boa constrictor in his office. One day, the friend found Peckinpah staring at the cage, which contained the snake and a petrified white mouse.

"Who do you think will win?" Peckinpah asked his friend.

"You will, Sam," said the friend.

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