Film Studies: Paranoid and violent - Peckinpah comes back to haunt us

"I want to shoot the best rape scene that's ever been shot," Sam Peckinpah promised his actress, Susan George. Sometimes nothing is more crushing in our proud film directors than their deepest ambitions offered with merciless sincerity. And Susan George said she would do it, because it was a part of her contract on Straw Dogs (1971). But as the filming proceeded, and as Peckinpah's drunkenness seemed inflamed by the violence of the project, and as he carried on abusive physical affairs with different women at the same time, so Ms George faltered.

She dreaded the rape scene and the gap between the script's bare indications and what she thought Peckinpah might want of her. So she complained to the producer that she needed the details written down.

Peckinpah sighed and snarled, and let everyone register one more instance of how you can never trust women. Then he wrote out what he wanted. Now Ms George was really scared. Peckinpah turned on her – she had said she would do it. And the actress broke down: "I lied. I lied because I wanted to get the role and the rape scene was in the picture, and now I'm not sure if I can do it." Well, that rape scene is just being released on video in Britain (after an 18-year ban), and it raises many ugly questions. For whereas, essential horrific scenes from the 1970s – Regan's revolving head in The Exorcist; John Hurt's indigestion in Alien – have become curiosities and examples of how quickly squeamishness dates, the rape scene remains horrible and disturbing. I don't propose to honour Peckinpah's odious sense of contest, or to describe the scene in any detail, but it is still as unsettling as it was in 1971. Let's give Peckinpah that much credit: if he meant to convey the turmoil of feelings in a rape situation then he succeeded. At the same time, it's still hard not to feel for Susan George (and all the other actresses who have yielded to the pressure of doing such a scene or losing the job) – especially if you know that the rape (just three people and one sofa) took a week to film. Someone could write a great story about what can happen to an actress in a week like that.

Yes, there is more than the rape to Straw Dogs, but it's one of the film's many stupidities that the rape is so contrived and so urgent that it towers above the rest. There is a story, and it's not without promise: an astral mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) has come to Britain from America, to avoid the famous violence of that land, with his young English wife (George). They have returned to her native village (actually in Cornwall), to a kind of gothic social scene not far removed from Cold Comfort Farm and an indelible proof of the raging paranoia in Peckinpah – and maybe many Americans. The magistrate has one arm; Peter Vaughan commands the local pub with his grossest over-acting; there is a village idiot (David Warner); and there are horny young men around who knew Susan once when she was a kid and reckon that no American boffin deserves her nice titties.

Those breasts are very prominent: in almost the first shot of the film, the nipples glare like earnest sub-text beneath her white sweater; and there will come a moment when a frustrated Susan exposes herself to the locals as they work on her house. It is, in short, an essential part of this rape that naughty Susan has half-provoked, and half-enjoys it, and is not worthy of the learned American who will resort to appalling if unaccustomed violence in the climactic throes of revenge.

You have been warned: Peckinpah's helpless taste for violence and for mistrust of women may work in locales he loves and knows – the American-Mexican border. But in the English countryside, this is a very over-heated stew, and would be a very silly film but for the tension with which it is made and the agony of the rape scene.

It's vital to stress how far Peckinpah identified with Hoffman's character. And it follows that he does not like, let alone sympathise with, the wife: what remotely interesting young woman is going to go back to this desperate rural world after she has known the kind of city where Hoffman must have worked in America? Peckinpah hasn't considered that, because he doesn't take the wife's capacity for thought seriously. All he's interested in is how a brilliant but timid man at last discovers the necessary violence in his being. As I said at the outset, nothing more cripples some movie directors than the height of their ambition.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Straw Dogs' is available to buy on DVD and VHS from 7 Oct