Word: peckinpah
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...seven-week shooting period started, he drove himself and his crew to the limits of endurance, once keeping them up half the night to make all the costumes dirtier and more ragged for a scene the next morning. One or two laggards got fired, as usually happens on a Peckinpah film, and when Susan George balked at playing the rape scene all the way to the end, the director simply brought in a double and kept going...
Straw Dogs is a brilliant feat of movie making. Peckinpah, working outside America and outside the western genre for the first time, uses the brooding monochromes of the Cornish countryside to construct a self-contained universe of indifferent terrors, in which, according to Lao-tze: "Heaven and earth are not humane. They regard all things as straw dogs." (Straw dogs are Chinese artifacts of the 3rd century B.C., first worshiped, then sacrificially burned...
Hoffman's performance is nervously cerebral and superbly realized. Susan George, all teasing, feline sexuality, carries off a difficult role extremely well, and David Warner makes even his small part (which he did as a favor to Peckinpah and for which he receives no credit) memorable in every detail. But it is Peckinpah who dominates and controls his material. His vision in Straw Dogs is so cold, so unsparing, that our natural impulse is to resist it. Character motivation is sometimes cloudy, the level of coincidence is rather too high, and the film perhaps is more cynical than realistic...
...Peckinpah himself likes to hunt game, "not for sport," but skinning and eat ing his catch. He has also been known to end an argument by using his fists, even against women. Disputes with producers and colleagues earned him such a reputation for cantankerousness that the big studios finally boycotted him for seven years. Peckinpah's enemies describe him as "weird" and "dictatorial," but he doesn't seem to mind. "I'm not a fascist," he says, "but I am something of a totalitarian...
...Marine who served in China during World War 11, Peckinpah worked his way into the movie business by acting and directing in small theaters, then writing and directing westerns. In writing Straw Dogs, based on a novel called The Siege of Trencher's Farm, Peckinpah kept little from the original except the climactic siege itself. He then spent weeks searching for a town with the primitive and isolated quality he wanted...