Amazon.com Essentials:
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
