Word: peckinpah
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York is violent on violence. He thoroughly sympathizes with the uproar in the press about violence in contemporary cinema. Even the more sadistic scenes in "Cabaret" were hard for him to stomach, but they were excused for the sake of historical authenticity. He doesn't let a director like Peckinpah off so easily. "My God, a line has to be drawn somehow. There are ways and ways of showing man as a violent animal. I was appalled watching Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs." An attitude like that is bloodthirsty: it's dangerous and corrosive for people to watch these things...
...innovative films, while commanding big-studio budgets. No other American director has matched his consistency. John Ford palmed off three sentimental pot-boilers for every gritty piece of goods he managed; for long stretches Huston went for cash alone, and then stopped caring at all; soreheads Welles and Peckinpah get fired often. Kubrick, however, was too headstrong to succumb to yesmen and too foxy for the cashiers...
...second lead, the writer, and in his crucial scenes he's an embarrassment--he drums his fingers and stares wildly ceilingwards like a resurrected Dwight Frye. The officials act like they're in drag, and the thugs are morons, without the gutter wit that makes them interesting in Peckinpah...
...there was Manny Farber, telling me that the problem with film criticism was the hype-type language used. "Everyone has an eye on the big score," he said. "You can put the name 'Van Gogh' in place of 'Peckinpah' in the reviews Straw Dogs got--that's how obscene this obsession with greatness has become...Film is a most complex thing, you can't judge it seriously on one viewing...but after a while no one looks at it closely anymore." This wasn't prepackaged. Farber brooded, the middle of his wizened face wrinkling, and his eyes shielded from...
Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's film of this year. You do the man injustice if you follow plot hints superficially without noting the ambiguities he's planned. Susan George's character is, I think, the key to a generous interpretation, and much more than the hot-assed coed she's been taken for. There are no simple heroes in the film: all are caught in cultural conflicts and personal traumas which Peckinpah doesn't sort out sufficiently. Peckinpah's belief in territorial imperatives works better on a mythic scale than on that of chamber drama. Still...