Good, bare-bones documentary on both Straw Dogs the movie, famous and
infamous for the double-rape sequence of the ingenue played by Susan
George, an active part here, and especially of director Sam Peckinpah,
who many... including Dustin Hoffman... wanted replaced... Thank
God that didn't happen, because Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's greatest
movie, and imaging someone else doing it would be like imaging The Wild
Bunch with another director...
And while there's a kind of quick
feminist viewpoint of the double-rape sequence, in the movie's actual
story, the girl character, Susan George's Amy, wife of Dustin Hoffman's
David, had once loved the first man, and always despised and hardly knew
the second man... And that second man was played by British bad boy
actor Ken Hutchison, the scariest and meanest of this British wild
bunch, and seeing him old in 2003, drinking and smoking, is neat because
not only did he quit acting in 1999, but he was such a great actor, and
doesn't even have a cult status at this point, and really should; while other interviewees included are Del Henney, the first man, who Amy once loved... and
veteran actors then-and-now Peter Vaughan and TP McKenna... And plenty
of memories of Dustin Hoffman himself, a very deep, thoughtful, artistic
man, you can tell: The only downside is towards the end, when
they start to psychoanalyze Peckinpah to a ridiculous fashion,
insinuating that the violence of his movies (especially Straw Dogs)
reflected his own deep-rooted hatred toward the women in his life:
something they NEVER do to violent movie directors like Quentin
Tarantino or a slew of others who Peckinpah influenced... Thankfully, at this navel-gazing point of the doc, it's all finished: they basically saved the worst for last.
Grade: B
