Director: Sam Peckinpah
Year Released: 1971
Rating: 1.5
Absolutely, positively disappointing film, released the same year as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, but without that great film's effective social commentary or probing insight into the mechanics of evil, both physical and sexual. It is noted for its violence - the cover claims it is (was?) banned in the U.K. - but quite tame compared to today's ultraviolent pictures like Tarantino's works or Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Its moral stance and sexual politics are in question, and at the end I wasn't sure what Peckinpah's trying to say. The story has bookworm/mathematician Dustin Hoffman and his British wife (Susan George) settling in a small barn house in some small village in England, only to have the wife constantly leered at and lusted after by the construction workers outside - the town toughs, if you will. This builds and builds and builds, with George eventually being raped in a sequence that is uncomfortable because George's attitude towards the rapist is up in the air - she seemed to be simultaneously loving and hating it. A dopey, awkward subplot ties in with the ending (it feels lifted from either Frankenstein or Of Mice and Men ... perhaps both) and has Hoffman defending a mentally retarded murderer, much to the dismay of the construction workers who want him dead. The handling of the material is more than awkward - it borders on careless - and the film seems to be less about violence than sex. The dopey brutes who terrorize and pick on omega male Hoffman are dull and one-dimensional (as opposed to Alex's "droogs"), and the constant discussion and portrayal of sexuality as embodied by bra-less, flaunting-the-goods George is reckless and gratuitously misogynistic (she walks by, they stare, the camera focuses on her nipples and long legs, one of the guys steals her underwear, the camera tries to peek up her dress, everyone discusses how they "want a piece" over and over again). It's certainly shot well and wonderfully edited (one of the editors was Roger Spottiswoode, who would go on to direct one of the Bond pictures), but hardly as relevant or intelligent as some of Peckinpah's earlier films, and not nearly as important as A Clockwork Orange as a statement on the nature of violence.
