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Reviews:
The
Worm Turns: Straw Dogs
Review
Christian
De Matteo
Solid
The first thing you realize about this movie is that it has that
one key element that most American movies from the 1970s have:
It’s slow. But
it’s also intense, brutal, disturbing and highly intriguing.
Directed by Sam Peckinpah (The
Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), this often
disturbing ballad to mankind’s inherent violence is still banned in
the UK (a fact that has provided the advertising campaign for its
release on DVD). Dustin
Hoffman plays an American mathematician who’s moved with his wife to
her childhood home in a small Cornish town.
He’s gone there to theorize and do all the good stuff
mathematicians with grant money do.
He’s not the best husband, often inattentive, and you
understand as the first hour (entirely characterization) progresses that
he is pretty much a coward. His
wife, however, is a flirt, a very bad type of wife for a man who is a
coward.
Feminists hate this film because it contains a graphic rape
sequence wherein Mrs. Sumner (Susan George) tries to fight off her
attacker for the first of half of her rape, and then embraces him and
starts to look like she’s enjoying it.
This is, in fact, why the movie is banned in the United Kingdom
(though the brutal and primitive portrayal of Cornish locals as lust and
murder driven drunks, not even immune to sexual thoughts against their
own sisters probably didn’t help much either).
When the film was released in 1971, Peckinpah was attacked by
feminists and politicians for his “macho depiction” of a rape by
those who said Peckinpah was saying women enjoyed being raped.
Watching this movie in the year 2000, however, my reaction was
quite different. Susan
George does a great job of performing a series of psychological
reactions to horrid situations and basing them off of a previously
established complex female character. Thanks to both an often curt,
quiet script and George’s good acting, the viewer is introduced to a
young woman obviously aware of her sexual appeal. She has moved back to her hometown with her American husband
and is more than aware that her people find him funny and not too much
masculine; a woman who is aware that her husband doesn’t like making a
stand and a woman who is constantly toeing the line between seductress
and little, frightened girl. Her
reaction to the rape and the violently climactic events of the finale,
complete the portrait of a very complex psyche.
I think it is a shame that knee-jerk political reactions have
stopped this from being a movie more studied.
Hoffman does a very quiet acting job, in accordance with the
script— and a good one— as a man either so oblivious to what’s
around him or, more likely, a man afraid to acknowledge his reality,
that you find yourself yelling at the screen not infrequently for him to
do something.
This film could serve as a visual aid for Michael P.
Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of
Man: Tracing the Origins of
Male Violence, further making the case that men’s base instincts
are for violence and destruction, and that that, Peckinpah seems to add,
is what makes a man, for better or worse.
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