Word: peckinpah
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People have been saying some silly things about Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Some have rated it the man's best work. The united British critical front--including a Variety correspondent who had a fatal heart attack three days after viewing it--wondered why the film was not stopped by the censors for its violence...
...Well, Peckinpah always has received extreme reactions. Actually, his new film is not great, not hideous, but unrealized. The violence in the film is excessive and grotesque, but not wholly gratuitous. And, if it's not Peckinpah's best, and pretty far from it, it does show that he's growing. Only God and Sam can tell in exactly what direction--and that's unfortunate...
...obvious themes are built into the plot, and you can't ignore them. Peckinpah has put a rational, wishy-washy liberal under stress, simply so that he may understand man's violence: that it is inherent in his nature, that sometimes the violent solutions are the only valid ones. But the situations Peckinpah presents are really more involved, if not to any greater extent developed...
...remember a couple of films called Shame and The Passion of Anna, and how their director, Ingmar Bergman, viewed cowardly intellectuals set into primitive and violent surroundings, you can't help but think they're what Peckinpah schooled on for Straw Dogs. Bergman, developing his stories in narrative fragments and bursts of character self-analysis, built up a case for a tragic vision of man: isolated by nature from his fellow man, and by society from his better interests--those unions which can only be achieved through love, no matter how evanescent...
...Peckinpah, in his previous films, has emphasized something quite different: a Thoreauvian belief in a one-to-one accounting of man to man and to his territory. But love, and all personal relationships, are just as tragic as they are in Bergman--if in more idealized ways, and in ways which echo a deeper social disillusionment. Love comes at the purgative ending of The Wild Bunch, when gunslinger Pike Bishop tries to save Mexican rebel Angel from the torture of the Federales--only to be slaughtered in a suicidal attack both epic and glorious. It becomes muted, perhaps sadder...