New on DVD

Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah attracted controversy as reliably as a dog attracts fleas. Upon their release, each of his films would stimulate new debate about the uses of onscreen violence and his manhandling of women -- among other things and people. Part of it was the times. The Sixties and Seventies, with their televised depictions of the war in Vietnam and the mainstream inroads of the women's movement, were rife with a new candor about these issues. But Peckinpah would also provoke some of the furor: Fighting obstacles was an essential part of his working method. He needed enemies -- be they studios, producers, or outraged viewers -- to stoke his own creativity and outlaw identity. The controversy that met the release of Straw Dogs in 1971 must have dovetailed nicely with Peckinpah's passive-aggressive needs. Even the staunch supporter of Peckinpah's work Pauline Kael used the word "fascist" in her analysis of Straw Dogs. Clearly, the time has come to look at Straw Dogs from a more distanced perspective and Criterion's new 2-DVD release of the movie provides just that opportunity. Straw Dogs is a portrait of a bad marriage and a thrashing of the liberal mindset that thinks itself above violence. Dustin Hoffman is well-cast as the American mathematician David, who moves with his pert young wife, Amy (played by the equally well-cast Susan George), into an isolated stone house in the remote Cornish countryside of England. He seeks a quiet life instead of the uproar rampant in American academia at the time. Yet an undertone of savagery and violence inhabits the couple's new pastoral village, and a current of cruelty and dissatisfaction underlies the pair's relationship with each other. The film climaxes with the controversial double rape of Amy (the DVD includes the footage of the second rape, which was cut from the 1971 release) and David's ultimate decision to fight to the death when his home is attacked. The DVD's commentary track by film scholar Stephen Prince (the author of Screening Violence and Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies) provides an excellent entryway into understanding the film and Peckinpah and places them both in historical contexts. The second disc contains a modified version of the feature-length documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron, as well as other behind-the-scenes material, as does the booklet that also accompanies the DVD. From a distance of 30 years, we can see that Peckinpah was not alone in this dark study of violence and the male psyche: 1971 was also the year that Stanley Kubrick unleashed A Clockwork Orange, a landmark film study of violence that endures 'til this day.