Upon its 1971 release, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs obviously offended Roger Ebert, who issued a scathing review. Where he found purpose and even poetry in the grisly violence of Peckinpah’s prior film The Wild Bunch, when Peckinpah translated that western violence to a bucolic English village and, more uncomfortably, into the domestic sphere, Ebert drew the line: “Peckinpah’s theories about violence seem to have regressed to a sort of 19th-Century mixture of Kipling and machismo.” Straw Dogs offended many on its release and continues to offend nearly fifty years since, though it has also become a well-regarded, confrontational classic. Even Ebert, in 2011, admitted that “something within me has shifted,” and recognized “how close to home the movie strikes.”
Is this film offensive? Yes! Is it a rich masterpiece worthy of our prolonged estimation, and perhaps even our esteem? Yes! We should be offended by much of what happens and why and how,...
Is this film offensive? Yes! Is it a rich masterpiece worthy of our prolonged estimation, and perhaps even our esteem? Yes! We should be offended by much of what happens and why and how,...
- 6/30/2017
- by Trevor Berrett
- CriterionCast
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