Straw Dogs (1971)

'In the eyes of every coward burns a Straw Dog...'

Amy Sumner: You're a coward.

David Sumner: No, I'm not.

Amy Sumner: And I'm a coward, plain and simple.

Do you live in the town? Or the country? Or perhaps you live in the country — but identify with the city, or it's the other way round, even — you live in the town but identify with the countryside? For Britain has a stark (and sometimes alarming) town/country divide. London and Rural Britain are separate entities, like chalk and cheese, with opposing values, aspirations and politics. There is a worrying tension. London is a sprawling, diverse, multicultural megalopolis, sometimes acting — almost arrogantly — as if it were a separate, internationalist city-state. Take Fitzrovia, that up-market area to the north of Oxford Street, within the shadow of the Post Office Tower (as it was known on completion). Order a coffee 'to go' (sic) from a hipster chain, and one might as well be in Manhattan, Toronto or Sydney. And the same might be said for a rich banker's wife buying a Chanel bag in Sloane Street. Yet, drive 16 miles out of London on the traffic-choked A40, to Denham in South Buckinghamshire, and it's to discover a different world: a picture-postcard English village of 18th-century red brick-and-timber, with a duck pond and a Green Man pub. And it's the same with Latimer on the Buckinghamshire-Hertfordshire border, a mere 23 miles from London, with its olde half-timbered buildings, cottage ornées, water pump, war memorial and Tudor green: like a clever set for a Miss Marple movie — or at the very least, a folk horror of the historic persuasion: Witchfinder General (1968) or The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). The Midsomer Murders has been trading on this for years.

‘Straw Dogs (1971): Stag vs Tractor…’

And yet, all this may be an illusion, or more accurately, an English delusion. What was that juicy statistic? That in 1911, 90% of the English population lived in towns or suburbs? Something like that. Which explains why, in reaction, William Morris and the subsequent Arts & Crafts movement became such a significant force in late 19th and early 20th century Britain. It also explains why the Way of the Rural remains a mystery for many Britons. I suspect that many of the people who live in the countryside, despite their quaint cottages (with extended carports), their charming little gardens, and their Cockapoodle-Doodles, their SUVs and trips to Waitrose to buy tubs of heritage yoghurt, actually, hand-on-heart, identify with the values of the town, or more accurately the suburbs. I mean, can these people shoe a horse, let alone ride one? Can they plough a field, wring a pheasant's neck, or snare a rabbit? Or gun down a barn rat? No, they can not. A hearty helping of Rook Pie, perhaps? That’s not on the menu. This is not meant to be a criticism, especially. It's more of an observation. For the British ‘countryside’ has become anesthetised, a place conquered by the squeamish. Far removed from the brutal reality of the real deal, of the practical, harsh realities of rural life — and death— still found lingering, perhaps, in Devon, pockets of Somerset and North Cornwall, the Scottish and Welsh Highlands, parts of the Midlands and the North of England.

Susan George: a brilliant performance…

Which takes us to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971)— a notorious exercise in sex and violence, but yet, at the same time, in my opinion, a superb film — one of the best films of the 70s: brilliantly acted, and, under the influence of the European New Wave, a master class in editing and direction. This is cinema for Grown Ups. The townie's fear of the rural seems to have caught the early 70s zeitgeist. Straw Dogs is set in Cornwall. But it's not the Cornwall of ice-cream vans, pretty fishing villages, palm trees, holiday cottages and the Cornish Riviera Express; it's a Cornwall of bleak, rocky moorland, derelict tin mines, clay pits; dark, dingy, rancid pubs and dangerous, menacing locals. A year later, John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) pits a party of middle-class businessmen against a gang of scary mountain men, hicks of darkest, northern Georgia, and then in 1973, in The Wicker Man, Edward Woodward journeys to a remote Scottish island and discovers somethin' nasty lurking amongst the fruitful orchards of Summerisle. And zoom on in time to 1981, and it’s the paranoia of An American Werewolf in London. Remember The Slaughtered Lamb?

‘…dark, dingy, rancid pubs and dangerous, menacing locals…’

Straw Dogs, I grant you, may not be everybody's cup of PG Tips. It's incredibly violent. The very early 1970s witnessed a sudden spike in films containing scenes of graphic sex and violence. In America, the Vietnam conflict and, in 1968, the abolition of the Hays Code, plus the influence of sophisticated European cinema, had much to do with this. Straw Dogs is based on Gordon M. Williams' The Siege of Trencher's Farm, published in 1969, which, like the film, is set in Cornwall. Williams was horrified by the film, especially by the controversial rape scene, which did not appear in his book. If and when you watch the film — and I do hope that you will — I will leave you to make up your own mind.