Straw Dogs

A young American and his English wife come to rural England and face increasingly vicious local harassment.

• Director:Sam Peckinpah
• Genre:Drama | Thriller
• Runtime:118 minutes

Cast

Dustin Hoffman : David Sumner
Susan George : Amy Sumner
Peter Vaughan : Tom Hedden
T.P. McKenna : Major John Scott
Del Henney : Charlie Venner

David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), a timid American mathematician, leaves the chaos of college anti-war protests to live with his young wife Amy (Susan George) in her native village in Cornwall in the south-west corner of Great Britain. Almost immediately, there is tension between the couple as David becomes immersed in his academic work while ignoring Amy. Craving attention, Amy begins to flirt with several of the town locals (Jim Norton, Ken Hutchison, Donald Webster) doing repair work on the couple’s isolated farmhouse. One of these locals is Amy’s former lover Charlie Venner (Del Henney).

Amy’s flirtations and David’s intellectual reserve create resentment and the workmen begin to taunt and harass them. David discovers their pet cat strangled and hanging by a light chain in their bedroom closet. Amy claims the workmen did it to prove they could get into their bedroom and to intimidate David. She presses him to confront the villagers, but he refuses. David tries to win their friendship, and they invite him to go hunting in the woods the next day. During the hunting trip, the workmen take him to a remote forest meadow and leave him there with the promise they will drive the birds towards him. Having ditched David, Charlie Venner returns to the couple’s farmhouse where he confronts Amy. He rapes her in a controversial scene where Amy begins to enjoy the rape due to feelings she still has for Charlie. After they’re finished, a second villager, one of the workmen who had left David in the field, arrives, forces Venner by shotgun to hold Amy down, and rapes her.

After several hours, David realizes he’s been tricked and returns home to find a disheveled and withdrawn Amy. She does not tell him about the rapes. Later that week, they attend a church social where Amy becomes distraught after seeing the men who raped her. David and Amy leave the social early and while driving home through thick fog they accidentally hit the village idiot Henry Niles (David Warner). They take the injured Niles to their home and David phones the local pub about the accident. Unbeknownst to him, earlier that evening Niles accidentally strangled a young girl from the village, and now her father and the workmen are looking for Niles. Read more

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