CÃES DE PALHA
EUA | 1970 | 118′ | Digital

Realização: Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah abandona o western mas traz para o meio rural de Inglaterra, onde decorre a acção do filme, a mesma brutalidade e violência, os mesmos personagens levados a situações extremas. Um jovem e pacífico professor americano é obrigado a enfrentar um grupo de camponeses brutais, acabando por recorrer aos mesmos meios que lhe repugnavam.

 

SHOWDOWN IN CORNWALL – SAM PECKINPAH’S STRAW DOGS
Mike Siegel

´´It is a disturbing film. I mean it has a lot of little lines and themes going through it … One psychiatrist said to me ’’How did you know ??’’ I didn’t answer him … He was my own psychiatrist – whom I hadn’t seen for a long time …“ (Sam Peckinpah, 1984)

Producer Dan Melnick, who had revived Peckinpah’s career in 1967 with the acclaimed ABC TV – movie Noon Wine owned the rights to a trivial novel by Scottish author Gordon Williams: The Siege of Trencher’s Farm. It is the story of an American mathematic professor who together with his English wife and daughter moves to her native country town. The local people encounter the couple with mistrust and hostility. The situation gets out of hand when the couple gives refuge to an escaped child murderer and carnage starts. Peckinpah in the beginning didn’t like the story of the book at all, but the territorial aspects of the story were right down his alley. Actor Strother Martin had made him familiar with the writings of American anthropologist Robert Ardrey: the former screenwriter Ardrey had analysed man’s propensity towards violence in his books ‘African Genesis’ (1961) and ‘The Territorial Imperative’ (1966). His resulting theses soon became controversial, such as his claim that man´s brutality goes back to his animal origins and instincts. Ardrey’s claim that men do fight for territory and not females became one of the motifs for Sam Peckinpah’s sixth feature film. Screenwriter David Z. Goodman (1930 – 2011) had written a first draft screenplay, which Peckinpah immediately started to rewrite. The main characters became younger and childless and the escaped child murder became a rather retarded but innocent shy town idiot who awkwardly kills a young girl by accident. Peckinpah also added the rape scene to the otherwise one-dimensional story he intended to bring to another level by concentrating on the relationship of the married couple David and Amy Sumner. Goodman had already added the anti-war backstory to the script: David Sumner’s main reason to move to England had been the outbursts of violence that by 1970 had reached the American University campuses – which finally led to four students killed and nine severely wounded at Kent State University in May 1970.

In the fall of 1970 Sam Peckinpah moved to England to start pre-production. By then the film didn´t even have a working title. Peckinpah already had rejected certain ideas by the studio, one of their suggested titles being ‘The Square Root of Fear’. Once arrived in England Peckinpah cast British actors and hired his crew – due to English laws he wasn’t allowed to bring along long time co – workers such as DP Lucien Ballard or his trusted prop master Bob Visciglia. But as support he brought his friends Frank Kowalski, who wrote on a screenplay called Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Walter Kelley. It was Kelley who quoted Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu for Peckinpah: ‘Heaven and earth have no mercy. They treat everything as straw dogs. The sage has no mercy. He treats everyone as straw dogs.’ The expression provoked Sam Peckinpah’s sense of injustice and he had found the title for his first non-western feature film: Straw Dogs.

Filming started January 28th, 1971 in St. Buryan – a small village in Cornwall, the southwest coast of England. To give the location a more backward look, Peckinpah insisted on having the antennas taken off the rooftops as well as the road marks removed from the streets. To serve a western film approach, with the exception of cars, modern technology was absent and vintage weapons like a shotgun, a knife, an antique man-trap and a poking stick were written into the script which could have been rewritten as a western quite easily: a stranger comes to town and is met with hostility by the local people. He meets his antagonists, a conflict evolves and it all ends in a showdown. Out of this rather simple outline Peckinpah managed to create one of the most disturbing, controversial and intensely discussed films of all times. But at first, once the first cameras started rolling end of January 1971, it rather looked like the film would not be made at all.

Peckinpah’s previous film The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1969) had suffered from terrible weather conditions: in a desert area near Las Vegas, where it was said to never rain, rainstorms and low temperatures caused endless delays and serious illnesses among cast and crew. The winter of 1970 / 71 was a hard one in England and soon the situation recurred: due to storms and rain the company was forced to film the pub scenes for two weeks and Dustin Hoffman was not satisfied with any of the creative progress Peckinpah made, who had concentrated merely on the townspeople in the pub rather than on his leading actor. After problems with the camera department had been resolved, Peckinpah’s drinking too occurred to become a major problem. Due to the bad weather a bad case of flu caused health problems among many members of the Straw Dogs production team while Peckinpah’s idea of staying in shape was a nightly drinking excursion with actor Ken Hutchison to Land’s End, England’s extreme westerly point, from which both men returned soaking wet and undercooled. Distracted by the daily work at first nobody took the ‘health issue’ too seriously, but after few days Dustin Hoffman and Dan Melnick felt the footage Peckinpah produced wasn’t up to his standard. At first the blame was put on Peckinpah’s usual heavy drinking only, but soon he was diagnosed with a bad case of pneumonia, resulting from an untreated flu and his Land’s End episode. Peckinpah immediately was sent to hospital and the project was in serious danger. ABC’s Martin Baum and Dan Melnick had to consider the possibility of replacing Peckinpah or even shut the whole production down and go with the insurance money. But both men did not want to lose neither their talented filmmaker, nor a promising film and decided to close down the production for two weeks to give Peckinpah the chance to recover and get in shape. The British doctors were able to cure Peckinpah after a week and filming progressed – with much better results.

While most of the action sequences were to be filmed near the end of the filming schedule as interiors at Twickenham Studio, Peckinpah knew that the believability of Straw Dogs’ characters depended on the effect the performances had at the beginning of the film. Although the film starts with a marriage that is already on the rocks, Peckinpah felt that his leading actors should have spent a few weeks together in a hotel prior to shooting to make the relationship more real and experienced. Method actor Dustin Hoffman welcomed the idea immediately, while Susan George at first regarded it as a waste of time since her emotional and immediate approach to acting was the mere opposite of method acting. But soon it became evident that Peckinpah’s method became one of the foundations of Straw Dogs ultimately becoming one of the very few action – driven films that can compete with the very best written and directed dramas in world cinema. Writer Goodman accompanied the ‘couple’ for two weeks and made notes that were incorporated into the final shooting script. Many scenes and moments between David and Amy Sumner, such as the scene in which Amy puts a chewing gum on David’s chalkboard, were rather improvised by the actors based on real moments they experienced while spending a lot of time together prior to filming.

Peckinpah’s relationship with his actors was not without its own problems: he got along great with David Warner and the British actors portraying the film´s heavies and villagers. But Peckinpah’s and Dustin Hoffman’s working methods were contrary: method actor Hoffman loved to discuss every scene and motivation of the character while Peckinpah worked on instinct and gut-feeling. The great performances actors like William Holden, Joel McCrea, Warren Oates and Steve McQueen gave in Peckinpah’s films are among the best in 1960s and 1970s cinema. Peckinpah often achieved these results by provoking performances, he was a filmmaker who was looking for the truth and he often could not verbalize up – front what he wanted to see on the screen. Yet he had the scarce gift of being able to print reality on film based on real emotions. Hoffman’s intellectual approach to his character almost annoyed Peckinpah in the early days of filming as witnessed by Dan Melnick: ‘‘During one of the earliest takes Dustin again and again went to Sam to discuss the scene and the motivation of his action. Sam just looked at him and said ‘Just get in there and do your number kid.’ And Dustin looked at me and said ‘Do my number ??’.’’

But after a while the two men adjusted to each other, based on mutual respect for the other man’s talent. Both had a sense of humour that helped compensating the film´s serious subject: to make each other laugh Hoffman would occasionally suck on a tripod or rehearse a scene with his pants on the floor while Peckinpah loved to loosen Hoffman up with wisecracking from behind the camera. Hoffman already had won Peckinpah’s respect with an unusual provocation of his fellow actors early in the filming: Peckinpah had wanted a certain expression on the villagers’ faces when David Sumner enters the pub for the very first time. When Peckinpah was not satisfied after certain takes, Hoffman entered the pub without his pants. The resulting shot of a perplex Peter Vaughan looking down on David Sumner, Peckinpah then intercut with a close shot of his American sneakers. For Susan George the intense subject of the film and especially her scenes became more problematic. To bring out the best possible performance out of the young actress, Peckinpah and Hoffman decided to manipulate her until she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Producer Dan Melnick soon felt sorry for his leading lady: ’’The film was shot mostly in continuity and in the beginning Sam and Dustin treated her like David Sumner treated his wife Amy. They were nice and charming to her. But as the story progressed, they started to treat her with more and more disdain and hostility until she couldn’t take it anymore. I said to Sam ‘You can’t treat a human being like this!’ and he just said ‘I’m getting the performance.’ I added ‘There’s got to be another way Sam!’ And she almost quit the film …’’

The hardest scene to film for Susan George, of course, was the notorious rape scene. Peckinpah mentioned several times he wanted to ‘shoot the greatest rape scene ever filmed’ but prior to filming he had refused to discuss the scene in detail with Susan George and soon the actress became more and more nervous about the actual content of the takes to be filmed as the filming of the scene neared. Again she approached Peckinpah to tell her what she would have to do in front of the camera and asked him to write it down for her. When he refused but told her that she would be naked and raped by one man and buggered by another she panicked and walked off the film: ’’Find yourself another Amy!’’ Losing the leading actress midway into production would have meant tremendous problems for the film as well as for Susan George, who was well on her way to break her contract. Dan Melnick and her agent finally talked her into seeing Sam again and discuss the matter. Peckinpah realized that her fears had overwhelmed her and agreed to discuss with her exactly what he wanted to shoot. She was horrified, it was even more horrendous than what she had prepared herself for. To avoid these explicit scenes, Susan George begged Peckinpah to give her acting talent a chance: she would do most of the scene through her eyes. And if Peckinpah would not be satisfied by what she had to offer, she would do it his way. Filming the scene on a closed set took several days and when Peckinpah saw the rushes with Susan George’s stunning performance he took her hand and said: ’’You’ve got it, kid.’’

By then the company had moved to Twickenham Studios outside of London for the filming of the interior scenes. Leaving the uncontrollable weather conditions behind him, Peckinpah was able to concentrate on his actors and the upcoming action scenes. Continuity proved to become a difficult task because all exterior night shots of the attack of the farmhouse had to match the studio scenes with interior sets built much larger than the size of the actual farmhouse in Cornwall. With The Wild Bunch Peckinpah had found his very own method of achieving cinematic greatness: the enormous amount of setups and his method of covering important scenes, especially action scenes, with a multitude of angles meant that Peckinpah showed little regard for continuity and matching action. For an outsider his way of working looked like chaos or insecurity, but the opposite was the case. Besides the fact that Peckinpah had a talent for getting the best out of his actors, no matter the method, the brilliance of his films was added in the editing room. The ‘church-social scene’ in Straw Dogs could serve as a perfect example for students of film editing as well as examining Peckinpah’s directorial style. In the scene David and Amy Sumner join the villagers for their yearly church social evening. Seeing the men who had raped her, Amy Sumner suffers from flashbacks until the couple finally leaves the event. The choices of setups, camera angles, the intense performances and soundtrack effects made sure for a superbly executed scene, but its hard-to-match quality and the crescendo – like impact was achieved during editing. As this article is written, the scene is 50 years old but more dramatic, unnerving and seemingly faster than almost any other scene one can see in contemporary cinema. And we’re talking about a married couple at a church event, not the destruction of yet another world metropolis.

In 1968 the Wild Bunch had killed dozens of people in just a few minutes screen time – with the help of a Browning machine gun and some grenades, but in Straw Dogs Sam Peckinpah took his time killing foes. While death in The Wild Bunch happened rather quickly, even in slow motion, the ‘siege of Trenchers’s farm’ went on for over an hour in the film´s rough cut. In the release version of Straw Dogs the climax of the film still runs for almost half an hour. David Sumner’s fight with the five intruders reminded of the only great scene in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), in which Paul Newman had to experience the difficulties of how to kill a man (Wolfgang Kieling) without a gun. At first Sumner’s brains help him to keep the drunken gang out of his house, but with no guns in the house he soon has to invent weapons, making use of what is available to him. Filming the physically challenging scenes for weeks took its toll on the crew and especially the actors. Watching the scenes today it seems astonishing that only minor wounds and injuries resulted from the dangerous tasks required from Dustin Hoffman and his British colleagues on a daily base.

Filming finally wrapped in April 29th, 1971, only 5 days behind schedule. Considering the bad start of principal photography, illnesses and bad weather, the company had given their best to control the film’s budget. ABC was completely satisfied with the results Melnick and Peckinpah had achieved in England and the studio was eager to announce the next major film by the man ’’who unleashed The Wild Bunch’’, as the narrator of the teasers and trailers stated.

The first preview versions were ready for screenings in autumn 1971 and from the start it became obvious that Straw Dogs would have a similar impact as The Wild Bunch had had two years earlier. Audiences and reviewers were divided between those who praised the film as another Peckinpah – masterpiece and as a cinematic experience beyond expectations, and those who couldn’t cope with the subtle messages of the film and its violent content. Again Peckinpah had successfully provoked his audience and given room for endless discussions. Amy’s emotional journey during the first rape became one of the most discussed scenes in movie history and made Peckinpah the target of another attack by film critics. As for this writer, he never had problems accepting the presentation of the emotional content as shown by Peckinpah. For some reviewers the remorseless second rape suggested, in opposition to the first rape, that Peckinpah was telling us that ‘there is good rape and there is bad rape’. But the main criticism was targeted on the first rape scene in which Amy stopped resisting her rapist after a while and slowly started acting like a lover, not a victim. The outcry that the film (or rather Peckinpah) had suggested ‘women can enjoy being raped’ can still be heard today. Allow this film historian to express his shortened personal opinion for once, writing about a controversial subject such as Straw Dogs a break in style may be something to get away with right now: I regard most critical attacks as simplification, especially the ‘good rape / bad rape’ accusation.

Peckinpah spent most of the film´s running time to show us as much as possible about Amy’s character and her problematic relationship with David. By the time she lets Charlie Venner into the house (a mistake, of course) she is so mixed up, she hardly knows her own life. Her husband shows no interest in her whatsoever, she’s bored and alone and although she is back in an environment well – known to her, everybody, including herself, is behaving unfamiliar because of her marriage to an American intellectual. David has no intentions of displaying his masculinity even once in a while and is totally incapable of protecting her. When he discovers the dead cat in the closet, he doesn’t even warn her before she opens the door to avoid the shocking effect on her. Ignorant of what is going on and the fact that his wife is by no means a grown – up experienced woman yet, David is just a bystander while Amy faces a façade breaking down. Peckinpah tried to make the first rape more understandable by making Charlie Venner her ex – boyfriend who still has feelings for her. His masculinity and a certain protective behaviour at certain times make him sexually attractive to her to a certain extend. So once the first shock of his physical attack is over, her desperation and needs melt together for a short time of lovemaking. Peckinpah later expressed his surprise that people found Amy’s behaviour so unusual or even impossible: ‘Christ, don’t they know anything about sex, dominating and being dominated?’ Personal experiences also change the way one judges scenes like this and I always wondered why people reacted so fiercely against Straw Dogs and not countless other films where far more outrageous sexual practices are portrayed. Maybe because Straw Dogs was considered a more ‘serious film’ starring Dustin Hoffman. Maybe because Sam Peckinpah was such a great filmmaker who had the rare talent to draw audiences into a fictional film and who ‘writhes in the flames with us, burning’ as critic William Pechter wrote in Commentary.

Over the years I enjoyed many theatrical screenings of Peckinpah’s first non – western. Standing amongst the excited, happy and talky movie crowd, I always had to suppress a diabolical grin that would have expressed my unspoken thoughts: ’’Enjoy yourself as long as possible, you won’t be that light-hearted when the show is over tonight!’’. At such screenings people often expect to see ‘a 40 year old movie’. But when the curtain closes down after two hours and the lights go on, one can observe a silent gloomy shaken crowd leaving the theater. Few of them speak and even less want to listen to anything or anybody. Before the screening had started there was talk of maybe going to parties or bars afterwards. But after seeing Straw Dogs on the big screen, it seems that nobody wants to enjoy party life that night any longer. Almost everybody just wants to go home. It takes some time for them to think about what they just saw on the screen and to finally readjust. But they will digest and they will remember a great film they saw that night, a unique cinematic experience. It is because of films of that quality that I dedicate my life to moving pictures.