Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Audience Rating: Unrated Binding: DVD EAN: 9786305297284 Format: Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 6305297282 Label: Anchor Bay Entertainment Manufacturer: Anchor Bay Entertainment Number Of Items: 1 Picture Format: Letterbox Publisher: Anchor Bay Entertainment Region Code: 1 Release Date: January 19, 1999 Running Time: 118 minutes Sales Rank: 19775 Studio: Anchor Bay Entertainment Theatrical Release Date: December 29, 1971
Amazon.com essential video: One of Sam Peckinpah's most controversial efforts, this film came out at a critical moment in the early 1970s, released in the same month as both Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange, causing a furor over film violence. Based on a little-known British novel, the film casts Dustin Hoffman as a bookish American mathematician on sabbatical in rural England, in the town where his young bride (Susan George) grew up. He finds himself forced to defend his home against an assault by local toughs, and discovers a frighteningly feral and vicious side to himself. Though Straw Dogs has a reputation for graphic violence, it actually looks tame by contemporary standards. Instead, the violence is psychological, and the suspense and shocks are induced by the editing--you're more terrified by what you think you see than by what you are actually shown. --Marshall Fine
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Average Rating:
Rating: - Incredibly sophisticated film-making belies the lurid subject
Eerie and disconcerting from the very first frame. Director/Co-Writer Peckinpah creates a strange alternative universe where people act on their base impulses. A stuffy professor (Dustin Hoffman) and his gorgeous young wife (Susan George) are thrown into this world and almost destroyed by it. Peckinpah creates a rich tapestry of characters and brilliantly explores the subtle and occasionally explosives shifts in power between them. The high-minded sophistication of film-making belies the outwardly lurid nature of the subject - "Deliverance" springs to mind as another example of this. Stunning in every department - acting (especially by Hoffman and George), editing, writing, music, cinematography, and of-course direction. In many ways Peckinpah's best film.
The DVD version I have (Region 4) also features:
- Interviews
- Commentaries
- Standalone musical score
Rating: - I guess it hasn't aged well
Two thoroughly unappealing characters are for some reason married to each other and take up residence in her UK home town which is seemingly populated by even less appealing, drooling, drinking thugs. The whole thing just runs on for way too long. How George and Hoffman ever ended up together is a mystery that perhaps only Lolita could understand. There is a fairly grpahic "sort-of rape" which is never brought up between the husband and wife after it happens. David Warner plays a version of Frankenstein monster that brings everything to a head when the drooling thugs converge on the Hoffman/George house. Since you really find it hard to care for any of these people, the violent conclusion is not worth waiting for. Maybe in its' day ...
Rating: - Mediocre
If there has ever been a more over-interpreted and stolidly misinterpreted film than director Sam Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs, I've yet to encounter it. Yes, films like Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey have had more ink spilled over them, but most of the ideas tossed about are on the money, and far less is read into them. Also, they have one big thing going for them that Straw Dogs does not. They are great films. While Straw Dogs is not nearly as good a film as its hagiographers claim- for Peckinpah had all the subtlety and psychological depth of a sledgehammer, nor is it as irredeemable a bit of pornography as it detractors insist, it is, above all, a very dull and mediocre film. This is not a word- dull, that has likely ever appeared in a review of the film, but what else can one call a film that telegraphs its end in the first twenty minutes, and has all the realistic character development of a Warner Brothers ... Read More
Rating: - A Cave Man is a Brave Man!
In this disturbing and violent film, Sam Peckinpah proposes that even
the meekest wimp has the makings of a ruthless killer, and that a flirty
woman, with the right man, could enjoy being raped. This Cave Man-level
theory is acted out by a strong cast in rural Cornwall, England.
The Dustin Hoffman mathematician can't cope with the primitive, rough
men of his sexy wife's hometown. They are lazy, shiftless, conniving,
alcoholic cat-killers, but Peckinpah deep down likes them, just like he
liked the "Wild Bunch." They are handsome, masculine young bucks who
are fond of laughing, singing rowdy folksongs, and hoisting beer mugs.
There's also a nasty, aggressive old drunk who is a bad influence on them.
Dustin channels HIS aggression by making the young vicar and his wife
squirm, playing loud bagpipe battle music (to be repeated later on),
Read More
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- Incredibly sophisticated film-making belies the lurid subject
- I guess it hasn't aged well
