Straw Dogs
The darkest movie of 1971, and perhaps the most disturbing in the career of the great provocateur Sam Peckinpah, begins with what could be considered the year’s silliest joke. We first meet the newlywed protagonists David and Amy Sumner loading a humungous “Man-Trap” into their car like the Flintstones getting dinosaur ribs at the drive through. It’s a Chekov’s gun so colossal it threatens to tip the car over with its metaphorical heft. “Jeez”, we think in jest, “I wonder if that things going to go off in the third act?” Such an overt piece of tension based machinery clues us in right from the start that this film will end, as most of Peckinpah’s do, in cranked up, brutal violence. What gives Straw Dogs such a memorable and controversial legacy is that this time the violence is uncommonly anti-cathartic; it settles none of the tension built up in the ninety minutes prior, only serving to further unmoor the films point of view in a wold without trust, boundaries, or basic social...