Straw Dogs
1971, R, 118 min.
Directed by Sam Peckinpah, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.p. Mckenna, Peter Arne, David Warner.

This eight-part film series dedicated to a reassessment of Sam Peckinpah’s career is curated by local access TV’s Show With No Name and runs through Dec. 16. Also featured in the series are rare screenings of some of Peckinpah’s TV work and a monograph put together for this series by some of the top writers on Peckinpah in the country. The $5 book is available at all the screenings or at the AFS office (3109 N. I-35). Straw Dogs remains the most controversial of all Peckinpah’s films. Dustin Hoffman plays an effete mathematician whose pacifism is tested when his baby-doll wife Susan George is attacked by marauding Neanderthals. Feminists, espousers of non-violence, and self-defense activists have been battling out the meaning of this morality play for nearly 30 years now. The time may have arrived for a fresh re-examination.

This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.