Straw Dogs (1971)

While I would not call myself a connoisseur since I have, quite regrettably, only seen a small fraction of the films in his apparently somewhat uneven oeuvre, I have much respect for true western auteur Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) simply on the basis of the fact that he was a rare macho and rampantly heterosexual Hollywood filmmaker that, as both a man and an artist, made John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Clint Eastwood seem like prosaic pussies by comparison.  In fact, I consider Peckinpah to be one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood history that represented the real America as a genuinely fierce fellow that was descended from western frontiersmen and not some semi-Asiatic momma's boy whose ancestors hailed from an Eastern Europe ghetto like so many of the filmmakers and producers in Tinseltown.  Indeed, Peckinpah may have been one of those countless moronic white Americans who made fanciful claims of imagined injun blood and described himself as a “liberal democrat,” but his film unequivocally gush a sort of visceral and unadulterated masculinity that is totally absent from virtually all forms of cinema nowadays. Certainly, if the film world has ever had an Ambrose Bierce, it was most certainly Peckinpah as a sort of ruthless and bitter warrior-poet who was largely molded as both a man and artist as a result of his wartime experiences. When Hebraic intellectual and TV host Clifton Fadiman stated of the sardonic writer, “Bierce was never a great writer. He has painful faults of vulgarity and cheapness of imagination. But... his style, for one thing, will preserve him; and the purity of his misanthropy, too, will help to keep him alive,” he might as well have been talking about Peckinpah, who may have been no Bergman but confirmed his place in cinema history with the unmistakably sincere hatred, contempt, and cynicism for humanity that he captured on celluloid. While I tend to prefer Peckinpah’s more flawed works like his wickedly wayward Wehrmacht flick Cross of Iron (1977), which the auteur notably turned down future blockbusters like King Kong (1976) and Superman (1978) to direct, I have to agree with most people in saying that Straw Dogs (1971) is one of his best, if not his best, film, though I suspect I like it for somewhat different reasons than most people, at least thematically speaking. The oftentimes much maligned story of an exceedingly unlikable, pretentious, arrogant, and pathologically passive-aggressive American mathematician of the small, short, swarthy, and physically weak sort who relocates to the backward rural hometown of his English wife and who is ultimately forced to fight to the death for his and his less than beloved spouse’s life as a result of tensions he largely provoked due to his pompous and passive-aggressive dealings with a motley crew of construction workers that he hired to work on his garage, Peckinpah's wonderfully morbid masterpiece is a film that not surprisingly upset countless left-wing film critics upon its release because it revealed that even smug NYC intellectual types have a capacity for unhinged ultra-violence and bloodthirsty murder.  Indeed, if you have ever wondered how some of the biggest mass murderers of the twentieth-century were weak and frail Jewish intellectuals like Leon Trotsky, Straw Dogs certainly gives some hints, even if that was not Peckinpah's intention, as a truly shocking cinematic work that reveals that puny passive pushovers oftentimes have an uncontrollable fury of seething rage and hatred hidden beneath their pathetic exteriors as a result of having no outlet for all the hatred and aggression that has built up inside of them after a lifetime of cowardice in the face of hostility.

 Not unlike Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), Peckinpah was heavily influenced by Robert Ardrey’s classic paleoanthropological texts African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966) while making Straw Dogs, which was somewhat loosely adapted from the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams and co-penned by Jewish screenwriter David Zelag Goodman (Logan’s Run, Eyes of Laura Mars).  Notably, both Peckinpah and Goodman loathed the source novel, which is quite fitting since novelist Williams hated the film because he felt it did not even vaguely resemble his book. While probably not Peckinpah’s conscious intent, Straw Dogs is, in a somewhat esoteric way, ultimately the tale of a pompous Hebraic intellectual who has nothing but contempt for his blonde Aryan wife and is ultimately forced to fight his natural born enemies, a gang of Aryan proles, as a seemingly subconscious result of both neglecting his spouse and treating the Aryan proles like worthless subhuman garbage that are not even fit enough to shine his shoes. Quite infamous for a scene where the female lead is raped by an ex-boyfriend and comes to enjoy it so much that she actually cums in ecstasy, the film also depicts what can happen when a horny woman that is constantly surrounded by masculine and virile men is both sexually and emotionally neglected by her ugly and physically weak pint-sized hubby. Indeed, Straw Dogs depicts in a refreshingly crude, raw, and atavistic way that women have strong sexual needs, including being occasionally violently manhandled by mensch with a mighty sexual prowess who knows what he is doing. A piece of classic Peckinpah in its darkly ironical depiction of an ostensible protagonist that is actually both the villain and the central source of all the problems that plague most of the characters, especially the female lead, the film undoubtedly features Dustin Hoffman in the perfect role as a distinctly unlikable Hebraic intellectual that you could imagine espousing the anti-gospel of Marx were he not an aggressively antisocial math dork. Indeed, Straw Dogs—a work that can be accurately simultaneously described as a rape and revenge flick, British Wild Bunch, and West Country western (as it was described in the doc Mantrap Straw Dogs: The Final Cut (2003))—is, in a sick sort of way, kind of like a fantasy film for physically weak and effeminate Jewish intellectual types like Woody Allen due to its depiction of a beady-eyed Über-dildo discovering that he makes for a deadlier man than a gang of strong and aggressive hicks that work hard with their hands and fuck hard with their cocks. 

 David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) may have an unmistakable British surname but he is undoubtedly the archetypal American Judaic intellectual type and thus it can only end badly when he relocates to a small town in a remote part of Cornwall, England where the locals do not take too kindly to arrogant anally retentive yank nerds who looks down on them because they do not have the luxury of working a job that involves a lot of typing, reading, and abstract paper-shuffling. Somewhat curiously considering his seeming disdain for his spouse's lowly lumpenprole origins, the place that David moves to is the hometown of his wife Amy (Susan George of Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975)) who, unlike the protagonist, is ‘off the people’ and has no problem getting along with the locals, as she grew up with them.  In fact, Amy seems to be more comfortable around the local yokels than her own husband, thus hinting early on in the film that they should have never gotten married in the first place.  Leaving his job at the university under the questionable pretense of receiving a research grant, David’s main motivation for moving to the hillbilly Brit town for the next year is because he is terribly afraid of the race riots that are going on at his college campus and various other places in the United States, thus underscoring the fact that he is a pathetic coward who would rather runaway from a fight than face his problems head on, so it is only perversely ironic that he will be forced to literally fight for his life against five rough and tough working men that could probably effortlessly beat him to death in a fair one-on-one fight. At the very beginning of the film, virtually all of the principal characters are introduced in a scenario where David’s manhood is almost instantly comprised in a fairly glaring way. On top of the fact that David looks like a complete and utter pansy while carrying a box of groceries and prancing around like an autistic dolt in fairly feminine looking white tennis shoes, he reveals his curious apathy for masculine things when he mocks a large antique ‘mantrap’ (which were used against poachers) that his loving wife Amy has bought him for his birthday. During this same scene, Amy is reunited with her ex-lover Charlie Venner (Del Henney) who, despite not having seen in six years, she still seems to be very much in love as if they never broken up in the first place.  Indeed, one certainly immediately questions how Amy could be married to an unattractive intellectual untermensch like Davey boy if she is clearly highly attracted to a handsome and charming yet uneducated working-class chap.  In fact, the sexual chemistry between the two ex-lovers is so obvious that Charlie even has the gall to put his arm around Amy and say to her like a sleazy braggart, “There was once a time, Mrs. Sumner, when you were ready to beg me for it,” though she pushes his arm away as if she is still mad at him for some wrong he committed long ago. Notably, during this entire scene, Amy stands next to Charlie as opposed to her husband David, thus foreshadowing the course the film will eventually take. Of course, caring very little for his wife and her emotions, David barely acknowledges the obvious connection between Amy and Charlie and even hires the charming hillbilly to work on his garage, which will ultimately prove to be his first serious mistake in a series of easily preventable mistakes that eventually lead to rape and coldblooded mass murder. 

 David decides to hire Charlie to build his garage because the guys currently working on it, Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison of Ralph Nelson’s The Wrath of God (1972) and Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke (1985)) and ‘rat man’ Chris Cawsey (Irish character actor Jim Norton of Francis Lawrence’s Water for Elephants (2011)), are “taking forever.” Charlie also brings his friend Phil Riddaway (Donald Webster) to work on the project, thus making for a quartet of boorish Brit hicks that will be constantly hanging at Charlie’s new home Trencher's Farm, which is where Amy grew up and which is clearly a place that is far too rustic and folksy for a cosmopolitan intellectual like David. When David asks Amy if she and Charlie were lovers in the past, she naturally lies and states, “Venner tried to get fresh once. Nothing happened.”  Of course, you can tell just when they are together that Amy gets wet anytime she thinks about country hunk Charlie, but eternal coward David prefers to ignore this.  Stuck in a clearly loveless and largely sexless marriage with a seemingly emotionally vacant dork, Amy will ultimately use Charlie and his comrades as a dubious and ultimately highly deleterious means to channel her sexual frustration and resentment towards her negligent hubby. Indeed, it is quite apparent that Amy seems far comfortable around Charlie and the gang than her own husband. When David asks her regarding Charlie and his friends, “What was so funny with them?,” Amy replies, “They just think you’re strange” in a fashion that reveals that she feels exactly the same way about him.  While David might have a great intellect when it comes to science and mathematics, he is somewhat socially retarded and seems to use his unwavering arrogance and cynicism as a mask so that he can disguise his quasi-autistic qualities and fragile psyche, but of course it is only a matter of time before the masks falls off.  Trapped in a virtual prison as result of living on a remote property and constantly being in the presence of an outstandingly arrogant and unsympathetic husband that incessantly treats her like a badly behaved child and even yells at her anytime she attempts to show him affection, Amy not surprisingly transfers most of her love and affection to a cat, so naturally it quite upsets her when David mistreats the kitty and even threatens, “If she’s in my study, I’ll killer her.”  In fact, when Amy is not around, David even goes so far as jovially kicking and throwing objects at the cat, thus revealing that he has a sadistic side that he will come to fully embrace by the end of the film. 

 When David yells at her, “Get the garage makers and the rat catchers – Get them to all finish! Oh, and, and fix the toilet and clean up the kitchen […] I love you, Amy, but I want you to leave me alone,” Amy tears up and replies, “Ok, I’ll leave you alone with your blackboard.” After intentionally agitating David by putting a piece of gum on his chalkboard in what seems to be a desperate attempt by the character to get her self-absorbed husband to pay attention to her, Amy goes for a drive and when she gets back she intentionally exposes her bare legs and panties to Charlie and his friends as a means to both assert her badly wounded womanhood and to get back at her unloving hubby. After intentionally showing her flesh off like a scheming Lolita on the prowl, Amy then proceeds to absurdly complain to David regarding Charlie and his friends, “They were practically licking my body,” but she does not get the response she intended as her less than empathetic spouse is hardly jealous and instead rebukes her for not wearing a bra, stating, “You shouldn’t go around without one and not expect that type to stare.” Considerably agitated at this point, Amy mocks David’s glaring lack of masculinity by stating, “Look…if you could hammer a nail, Venner and Scutt wouldn’t be out there” and then proceeds to go to the second floor of the house under the dubious pretense of taking a shower, strips off her shirt, and then shows off her bare breasts to Charlie and the gang while they are busy working on the roof. Needless to say, Charlie naturally sees Amy's seductive behavior as a direct invitation that he will take full advantage of later in the film.  After all, when a married woman has the gall to randomly show you her bare bazongas, it is probably because she is in desperate need of being sexually ravaged because her husband is not getting the job done.

 When the local holy man Reverend Barney Hood (actor and screenwriter Colin Welland, who is probably best known for penning Chariots of Fire (1981) and his role in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969)) comes by Trencher’s farm, David acts quite smug by immediately handing him a ‘church donation’ and playing loud and obnoxious bagpipe music, which Amy rightly immediately turns off (notably, David will later turn on the same exact music as a way to agitate the senses of men that are trying to kill him). Of course, David is no less hostile when talking to the good Reverend than he is with everyone else, as he is a little man that respects no one and probably suffers from a somewhat subtle form of megalomania. Indeed, when Reverend Hood asks him in regard to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, “You’re a scientist. Can you deny the responsibility?,” David replies in an insufferably arrogant fashion, “Can you? After all, there’s never been a kingdom given to so much bloodshed as that of Christ,” but the man of god proves to the protagonist that he is not as stupid as he thinks by immediately replying, “That’s Montesquieu, isn’t it?” and then opting to leave. That night, David is in for quite a shock when he opens his bedroom closet and discovers the corpse of his wife’s kitten, which has been missing all day, hanging from clothesline. Completely oblivious to his wife’s feelings, David merely walks away from the closet and passively watches as his wife investigates and suffers the shock of discovering her lifeless kitty cat hanging from a rope. When Amy blames “Scutt or Cawsey” for the kitty-lynching and tells David that they did it, “To prove to you they could get into your bedroom,” David proves he is a pathetic pussy by nonsensically replying, “I don’t believe that” and then preposterously arguing that “anybody passing” could have lynched the feline, even though their house is located in the middle of nowhere. While David finally agrees to question the workers about the cat, he ultimately pussies out upon talking to the men and instead agrees to go hunting with them the next day, thereupon unwittingly setting up for his wife to suffer a most brutal assault that could have easily been avoided had he had the testicular fortitude to confront his tormentor(s). 

 As the viewer somewhat suspects, the workers have ulterior motives for taking David to the moors to hunt as Charlie plans to pay his ex-lover Amy a visit while she is conveniently home alone. Indeed, the men leave David to hunt birds by himself while Scutt secretly watches the physically weak mathematician try in vain to properly aim and shoot his shotgun at a target. Rather revealingly, when Charlie shows up at her home unannounced by himself, Amy does not think twice about inviting him inside, even though she is dressed fairly scantily. When Charlie proceeds to passionately kiss her, Amy kisses him back for a couple seconds but then eventually complains, “Please leave me.” At this point, Charlie warns her, “Don’t tease me, Amy. Please,” but Amy decides to get somewhat physically violent, so he slaps her around and then drags by her hair to a couch where he strips off her clothes and warns her while preparing to penetrate her puss, “I don’t want to reave you, but I will.” At this point, Amy barely resists and even softly says “no” while activity kissing Charlie.  Indeed, while Amy practically rubs her wet pussy in David's face in a desperate attempt to get her husband's attention and still ends up getting rejected, Charlie wants her cunt so bad that he is literally willing to fight for it to the point where it could result in having to serve a prison sentence.  One suspects Amy's initial resistance was just a means for her to not only pretend like she had no intention of cheating on her husband, but also to experience what it feels like to be desperately wanted by a masculine alpha-male.  Interestingly, when Charlie takes his shirt off, the scene notably cuts to a brief shot of David taking his shirt off as if to highlight that Amy is finally getting the opportunity to be sexually ravaged by a real man as opposed to her small and physical frail hubby. Ultimately what started out as a rape results in truly passionate lovemaking of the mutually orgasmic sort, with Amy even moaning to Charlie, “hold me.”  Notably, at the same moment their carnal session reaches its climax, David manages to shoot and kill a bird. Unfortunately, things take a considerably ugly turn for the worst when Charlie notices the barrel of a shotgun being pointed at his face while he is lying next to Amy. Indeed, scumbag Scutt has turned on Charlie and forces his friend to watch while he brutally buggers Amy while she screams in abject horror. Luckily for Amy, Scutt only lasts a couple seconds, though the emotional pain and trauma seems permanent. As the viewer suspects, the entire situation probably would have been nearly immaculate for Amy had savage hick Scutt not showed up and ruined everything with his primitive sexual habits. 

 Totally oblivious to the fact that his wife has just been sexually pillaged, David comes home while Amy is smoking in bed and bitches in a pathetic fashion where he is clearly putting on airs of masculinity, “I’m firing Scutt and Venner tomorrow […] Because they stuck it to me on the moor today,” to which she snidely replies, “They also serve [those] who sit at home and wait.” When David asks her what she means, Amy rightly replies, “Nothing. If you’d have said something to them ages ago…about the cat, this would never have happened. None of it.” While David does actually fire Charlie and his friends the next day, it only pours gasoline on the fire in terms of the working men’s hatred for him which will eventually reach its peak in a final showdown that could have been easily avoided were it not for the protagonist’s unwavering arrogance and seemingly pathological passive-aggressiveness. Indeed, during an annual church event held by Reverend Hood that is attended by every single person in town, including David and Amy (who suffers traumatic rape flashbacks as a result of all the noise and rambunctious behavior that she is bombarded with at the event), a local teenage girl named Janice Hedden (Sally Thomsett) goes missing after foolishly leaving with a local retard named Henry Niles (half-Hebrew David Warner of Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron and Donner’s The Omen (1976)) who is known for being a child molester.  Notably, Janice's unwise decision to leave with Henry is a direct result of David treating her with apathy, as the ignorant teen craves male attention and decided to seek it elsewhere after the protagonist rudely snubbed.  Ultimately, Henry accidentally strangles Janice to death in a barn while desperately trying to keep her quiet after some people that are looking for the titillating teen walk by the building and call her name. Janice is the daughter of a rough, tough, and perennially unemployed dipsomaniac brute named Tom Hedden (Peter Vaughan, who is probably best known for his role as Maester Aemon on HBO's Game of Thrones (2011-2015)) who is Charlie’s uncle and who acts as a sort of greatly respected patriarch for all the local young men, even though he is a jobless ex-con who spends most of his time lurking in the local bar. When Tom sees David at the beginning of the film, he looks at him in complete and utter disdain after noticing that the exceedingly effeminate protagonist is sporting a perfectly clean pair tennis shoes as opposed to the sort of work boots that every other single man in the town wears. Needless to say, when Tom and the rest of the men discover that David is harboring child molester Henry, they decide to wage a sort of total war against him, especially after the protagonist dares to refuse to handover the mentally feeble pedophile. 

 Upon driving back from the church event at night, Drive accidentally hits Henry with his car, so he decides to bring the mentally challenged pervert back to his house to recuperate until he can get in contact with a doctor, even though Amy does not want the retard in the house because she knows of his unsavory reputation. Since he cannot get in contact with anyone since they are all still at the church event, David makes the mistake of calling the local pub where Tom and the boys are hanging out. When the bartender informs Tom and the men that Henry is at David’s house, they grab two bottles of liquor to gain “liquid courage” and immediately head to the protagonist’s humble abode. While Tom sits by his car at the recommendation of the younger men, Charlie, Scutt, and Cawsey force their way into David’s house and violently demand that the protagonist handover the retard.  Seeming more interested in being a passive-aggressive prick than actually caring about Henry's safety, David somewhat unbelievably becomes annoyingly idealistic about the retard's responsibility and adamantly refuses to hand him over, even though Amy also wants the pedo out of her house.  While David eventually manages to talk them into leaving so they can go find Janice, Tom refuses to leave without Henry, so the men walk back to the house and begin attempting to break the door down.  Although the local magistrate, Major John Scott (T. P. McKenna of Joseph Strick’s botched Joyce adaptation Ulysses (1967) and Milos Forman’s Valmont (1989)), eventually shows up and attempts to get Tom and his men to leave, they refuse to budge and instead proceed to berate the lawman for not having the retard institutionalized a longtime ago when he first gained his reputation for being a dangerous kiddy-fucker. When Major Scott is accidentally violently killed after getting in a struggle with Tom over his shotgun, the members of the redneck lynch mob immediately realize that they have nothing left to lose and commit to a full-blown hillbilly siege against David. Indeed, after Scutt declares, “Accessories, we are” and Charlie replies, “That is the law,” the men, who are obviously quite inebriated at this point, proceed to attack the house with full force by cutting the phone line, knocking out at all the windows, and dropping live rats inside the building while screaming crude obscenities at David. Of course, it is quite apparent that these country boys delight in destroying the house and taunting the petrified protagonist and his wife. In that sense, the somewhat seem like a rural equivalent to the Droogs of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, albeit vaguely less nihilistic (after all, they have come to kill a child rapist, even if a couple of them are rapists themselves).  The one advantage that David has over the country boys is that, aside from being sober, he is more serious and methodical and less emotional when it comes to combat, or so the viewer discovers as the protagonist gets in touch with his killer side and dispatches each character one-by-one.

 Although a pathetic pansy, David realizes at this point that, as a result of Major Scott’s death, both he and wife’s lives are on the line, as Tom and the boys cannot afford to have any living witnesses if they expect to escape a lengthy prison sentence. When the hillbillies begin breaking smashing every window in the house while yelling less than clever things like “dirty yank bastard,” David finally decides to take action, stoically declares Amy to, “This is my affair,” and then forces his wife to go upstairs and turn on all the lights so that it is hard for the invaders to see inside the home. When Amy declares, “If you don’t let them have what they want, then I’m going” and then proceeds to open the door to let Charlie in, David decides to scare her into submission by grabbing by her hair and smacking the shit out of her just like her rapist did earlier in the film. When David states to her, “We’re dead if they get in,” Amy seems to finally begin to realize the severity of the situation and starts fighting back in her own fairly pathetic way. As the homicidal hicks begin invading the house while laughing and jeering like demonic redneck jesters at a satanic hoedown (at one point, Cawsey, who is wearing a prosthetic clown nose, rides a tricycle through a shed door), David temporarily stuns them by throwing buckets of boiling water in their faces. Of course, it is not long before the men once again attempt to Blitzkrieg the house, but when Tom takes the lead and attempts to make his way through a window, David ultimately causes him to blow off his foot with his own shotgun after hitting the weapon with a fire-poker. After that, David finds Chris Cawsey standing in his living room and the two get in an intense standoff that somewhat implausibly concludes with the meek mathematician bashing the rat catcher’s brains in with a fire-poker. After David kills Cawsey, Charlie enters the home with Tom’s shotgun and the protagonist encourages him to shoot him because he thinks the gun is empty.  Luckily for David, Charlie does not decide to shoot him because the shotgun is actually loaded.

 When David and Charlie hear Amy screaming on the second floor, they both proceed to run up the stairs to the bedroom where they find sexual sadist Scutt attempting to rape the heroine. Demonstrating that he actually probably does genuinely love Amy and that he certainly cares more about her than his comrade, Charlie shoots and kills sick fuck Scutt. At this point, David and Charlie start brawling and the two men soon find themselves rolling down the stairs together in a climatic slow-motion fight sequence that concludes in a completely unforgettable way. During this scene, Amy seems especially emotionally conflicted to the point where the viewer somewhat suspects that she wants Charlie to triumph over David (after all, with most of his friends dead, Charlie will no longer have any negative influences in his life and can now dedicated himself to her). Notably, when David grabs the mantrap, Amy cries, “No, Charlie!,” but it is already too late. Indeed, in what is one of the most brutal death scenes in cinema history, David manages to unleash the mantrap over his rival’s head, thus causing Charlie to die a somewhat slow grisly death as the teeth of the trap bite into his now quite literally red neck. After killing Charlie and taking a sort of short victory tour around the downstairs of the house, David brags to himself while in a state of almost disbelief, “Jesus. I got ‘em all,” but he ultimately speaks too soon as Phil Riddaway enters the home and begins effortlessly beating the shit out of the puny protagonist. Although she hesitates for a fairly longtime as if she would not mind to see her hubby die (after all, he is the man that just killed her one-time lover Charlie), Amy eventually grabs a shotgun and shoots and kills Phil right before he beats David to death. In the end, despite everything that has happened, David makes Amy feel vulnerable by curiously leaving her at the house while he drives retard Henry back to town. During the car ride, Henry pathetically mumbles, “I don’t know my way home” and David replies to him in an almost gleeful manner while smirking, “That’s ok. I don’t either,” thus underscoring the fact that the protagonist has reached a point of no return in both his life and marriage. 

 With the pathetic and somewhat disconcerting western trend of beautiful women getting involved in unhappy marriages with physically weak and unattractive yet wealthy men due to the fact that technology, bureaucracy, and various other factors have made it fairly easy for certain clever effeminate men to become rich and powerful while at the same time strong and masculine males are becoming more and more obsolete, Straw Dogs has only become all the more relevant, if not politically incorrect, since its release nearly half a century ago. Indeed, women instinctively tend towards hypergamy and thus nowadays they finds themselves in the curious situation of marrying weak and pathetic office bureaucrats that their female ancestors would have never even considered touching with a ten-foot pole, thereupon resulting in unnatural and distinctly dissatisfying marriages where the wife naturally finds herself longing for the kind of man that would spontaneously bend her over a kitchen table and begin plowing her cuntkin into oblivion.  Surely, Straw Dogs is a rare kind of film in that it acts as a sort of antidote to the countless revolting romance scenarios featured in Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Noah Baumbach, Henry Jaglom, and Seth Rogen flicks where a physically grotesque and singularly obnoxious Jew-boy of the nauseatingly nebbish sort somehow magically hooks up with a hot blonde babe, as if it is somehow a normal and desirable occurrence that should be celebrated by everyone lest they be labelled a heartless antisemite.  Of course, no sexually sound Aryan babe could ever find their cunt getting wet to the sound of Dustin Hoffman's nasally monotone voice, but Hollywood has spent at least half a century trying to prove otherwise in its incessant campaign of cultural cuckolding via celluloid.  Of course, aside from the fact that her quasi-rapist also happens to be an ex-lover, one of the main reasons that the female heroine of Straw Dogs finds it so pleasurable to be vaginally pillaged is because it had been such a long time since she had been at the complete will of a strong and capable man that makes her feel like a woman, which is something that a Hebraic fellow like Herr Hoffman is just not capable of (after all, it is no coincidence that he gave one of his greatest acting performance in drag in Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982)). Indeed, somehow I suspect that if the average frigid feminist where routinely manhandled by a real man, they would probably be cured of their metaphysical affliction and political retardation. 

Notably in response to a 1971 review featured in The New Yorker where she described Straw Dogs as a “fascist” film, Peckinpah wrote a letter to Pauline Kael where he stated, “I read your review. Its ambivalence was complete, although I was distressed that you didn’t pick up that David was inciting the very violence he was running away from. After the killing of Cawsey, he realizes exactly what he has done. I appreciate your concern and involvement, but I don’t appreciate the description of the film as a fascist one because it has connotations which to me are odious […] How you can identify any element of my work in terms of fascism is beyond my belief and a red flag.” Of course, being a left-wing Jewess, Kael probably could not fathom how Hebraic Hoffman’s character could have been in the wrong against a group of barbaric English Nordic hillbillies, just as she probably could never consider that anti-Jewish pogroms were often the result of the goyim getting fed up with passive-aggressive money-lending tactics and the active support of genocidal anti-Christian communist movements that was quite common among certain members of the Judaic tribe during the early twentieth-century, among other things, but I digress. As a man descended from Nordic frontiersmen that immigrated from the Frisian Islands to the United States during the mid-19th-century and played a role in taming the hostile territories of the great American West, as well as an ex-soldier who witnessed the barbaric behavior between the Chinese and Japanese while stationed in China during WWII as member of the United States Marine Corps, Peckinpah undoubtedly knew more about the nature of mankind and his violence than the average Hollywood filmmaker and especially some frigid old Hebrewess, hence the singular importance of his oeuvre as a sort of Nietzsche of the Western genre. Notably, Peckinpah was apparently not too fond of the attitudes of certain arrogant Judaic types and according to Straw Dogs producer Daniel Melnick in the doc Passion & Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah (2005) directed by Mike Siegel, he was not afraid to put high-minded Hebrews in their place and saying things to them like, “You're just a goddamn New York intellectual Jew.”  Of course, that is also what I usually think when I hear some hopelessly sheltered left-wing film critic denounce a film as being “fascist,” “reactionary,” “problematic,” or any of the other sad, pathetic, and predictable outmoded buzzwords that they love to throw around, as the use of such meaningless labels ultimately reveals to me that the writer is a completely compromised grade A pussy whose opinion has about as much as intrinsic intellectual merit as a large pile of steaming horse shit.

 Naturally, I was not surprised to discover upon somewhat reluctantly watching it that Israeli filmmaker Rod Lurie’s 2011 Straw Dogs remake is a piece of terminally prosaic cinematic blasphemy that lacks any of the aesthetic and philosophical qualities that made Peckinpah’s original film so damn great. Indeed, somehow Lurie felt that putting glasses on a semi-handsome guy like James Marsden and getting a Swede like Alexander Skarsgård to portray a Mississippi hillbilly would make for plausible characters. Of course, Lurie's remake is nothing more than a retrograde bargain bin Hicksploitation flick on monetary steroids that was directed by a typical Hebraic hack who has an irrational hatred of Southerns and racially schizophrenic infatuation with dumb blonde shiksas. Personally, I think a more practical update of the film would involve a white liberal pansy moving to the Deep South hometown of his high yellow black wife and ultimately causing a violent attack as a result of saying various stereotypical patronizing white bleeding heart liberal things to his spade spouse’s friends about how he “doesn’t see color” and has a “black bff” while they openly call him a cracker and take turns plundering his lady's main vein, but of course that would never happen, as the culture-distorters of Hollywood loathe reality and are all about creating propagandistic fantasy realms that they hope audiences will eventually mimic in real-life.  Of course, one of the things that makes Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs so potent is that it does feature a relatively realistic scenario where a weak and frail Hebraic intellectual type with poor social skills is married to a Nordic beauty who he treats like a child. After all, Swedish beauty Britt Ekland jumpstarted her career by marrying hardly handsome Hebrew Peter Sellers in the mid-1960s and such mismatched hypergamy-based marriages have only become all the more common today. Working in Hollywood for a good portion of his life, there is no doubt that Peckinpah—a real man that, quite unlike the typical studio hack, dared to depict the true depravity of humanity, as well as the manipulative and sometimes masochistic nature of womankind—oftentimes encountered these sham relationships and revoltingly insufferable passive-aggressive Dustin Hoffman types, so it is only fitting that he would direct a film like Straw Dogs that demonstrates that even pussy pacifists, who pride themselves on their ostensibly civilized behavior, are just as every bit capable of bloodthirsty murder as the extroverted hicks that they look down on. Indeed, as producer Melnick, himself a member of the chosen tribe, rightly stated of Peckinpah in Passion & Poetry, “I always felt that he was perhaps the last man making movies who had both guts and integrity.”  Of course, guts and integrity are even harder to find in Hollywood—a patently phony place that prides itself in lying, cheating, stealing, and whoring—than genuine artistic talent, which says a lot. A sort of less arcane father film to the criminally underrated Anglian pastoral arthouse piece Requiem for a Village (1976) directed by Lindsay Anderson's editor David Gladwell, Straw Dogs is ultimately a sort of post-Heimat quasi-horror-thriller that asks many hard questions and thankfully does not offer any safe or easy answers to any of them, though the film unquestionably demonstrates that seeing a stunning young woman in a loveless relationship with a swarthy little dork ultimately makes for a more revolting and unnatural sight than seeing her being passionately manhandled by a strong and attractive man that actually loves her.  After all, it is no mere coincidence that most women (translation: all women) have rape fantasies and, as Straw Dogs reveals, not all rapists are equal in the eyes of a woman..

-Ty E