Word: peckinpah
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Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's first film without a hero. It is indeed his first film to challenge the very ideal of heroism around which his work so far has been built. In Ride the High Country (1961), his main characters were two aging lawmen who could not, even when they tried, abandon their own code of honor. By the time of The Wild Bunch (1969), the main characters had turned into a ragged troop of bandits, but the code persisted. It was their adherence to a suicidal notion of dignity that made these outlaws heroes despite themselves...
Such ingredients are the stuff of melodrama; Peckinpah transforms them into the relentless geometry of fate. David returns home, finds Amy nearly hysterical in bed, but does not understand-or chooses to ignore-her veiled references to the attack. Instead, out of his own sense of humiliation, David fires...
...classic heroic response to a virtually feudal situation. Yet David, in defending himself against the threat to what Robert Ardrey would call his territorial imperative, soon becomes as bestial as the attackers. Peckinpah asserts with gripping, merciless logic that any man, no matter how cold or cowardly, is capable of committing the most appalling violence -and of enjoying it. "You never took a stand," Amy accuses David early in the film; when he finally does, he acts not from any sense of honor but from animal instinct. The assault on the cottage and his defense of it produce...
Jodorowsky borrows heavily from many other directors--notably Bunuel, Fellini, Peckinpah, and Leone. In trying to outdo his forebears with greater bloodshed, deformity and perversion, he fails to realize anything more subtle, anything transcending what he shocks you with. El Topo is intensity for the sake of intensity. Jodorowsky's attempts at anything but horror are sad failures: a scene of Mara discovering the world outside of her monastic confinement looks like a bad Tampax...
...recently ended "new era" did bring forth films which realized the promises of unmuzzled creative vision. The films of Arthur Penn. Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick honestly reflected surrounding chaos. Even if The Wild Bunch, 2001 or Little Big Man finally emphasized-through the criticism of portrayed societies-viable standards of intelligence and honor by which man could construct a sane world, they were at base level iconoclastic, determined to shatter set cultural conventions and destroy them utterly...