Straw Dogs (1971)

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs arrives from 1971 with the confidence of a film that has nothing to apologize for and no interest in being liked. Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, an American mathematician who relocates to his wife's Cornish village and slowly discovers that the locals regard him as livestock. The escalation is methodical, the climax is a siege, and the film's reputation rests largely on two rape scenes that were censored by multiple rating boards and condemned as misogynistic. We note this not as a flaw to be corrected but as the film's actual content. Whatever Straw Dogs is arguing, it is not arguing for the dignity of women. It is the film that later critics would cite as the negative image of a feminist sensibility.

The cast is entirely white and the film has no comment to make about that, or about race at all. Its anxieties are territorial and marital. There is no environmental conscience, no economic critique, no interest in body diversity, and no advocacy on behalf of the neurodivergent, though the character of Henry Niles is mentally deficient and serves as the fuse for the final act. That is a plot device, not a platform. The film's women exist to be looked at and imperiled, its men to prove something ancient about themselves. Nothing in the screenplay gestures toward the social concerns that would occupy the following half century. It is a cold, ugly, superbly constructed piece of work, and it means every unpleasant thing it says.

To classify Straw Dogs is to classify a fossil. Its politics are pre-modern in the specific sense that they predate the vocabulary we now use to discuss them. The film offers no lecture, no lesson, no invitation to improve ourselves. It ends with a man muttering to himself in a wrecked house, surprised by his own capacity for carnage. There is no messaging here, only aftermath. We score it accordingly, with the sober respect owed to an artifact that predates the questions entirely.