Straw Dogs is a 1971 psychological thriller film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George.

Although controversial at the time, Straw Dogs is considered by some critics to be one of Peckinpah's greatest films, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music (Original Dramatic Score).

After securing a research grant to study stellar structures, American applied mathematician David Sumner moves with his wife Amy to a house near her home village of Wakely on the Cornish moorland.

Amy's ex-boyfriend Charlie Venner, along with his friends Norman Scutt, Chris Cawsey and Phil Riddaway, immediately resent the fact that an apparently meek outsider has married one of their own.

David meets Venner's uncle, Tom Hedden, a violent drunkard whose teenage daughter Janice flirts with Henry Niles, a mentally deficient man despised by the entire town.

Amy criticises David's condescension toward her and suggests that cowardice was his true reason for leaving a volatile, politicized university campus in America.

"[16] Beau Bridges, Stacy Keach, Sidney Poitier, Jack Nicholson and Donald Sutherland were considered for the lead role of David Sumner before Dustin Hoffman was cast.

[18] Judy Geeson, Jacqueline Bisset, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Carol White, Charlotte Rampling and Hayley Mills were considered for the role of Amy before Susan George was finally selected.

[25] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Peckinpah is able to dispense with extraneous fantasy – no supernaturalism, no dream sequence – and instead set a tone of meticulous realism which relies on the recurrence of vindictive incident, escalating from the comic to the sinister to the shocking, to create a mounting air of menace.

But if Peckinpah has dispensed with explicit fantasy, he none the less employs several techniques to unsettle the spectator's hold on 'reason'; most notably, swift cross-cutting between simultaneous but geographically separate incidents to suggest some causal relationship between them and link them in the same plot momentum. ...

[28] Variety wrote, "The script (from Gordon M. Williams' novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm) relies on shock and violence to tide it over weakness in development, shallow characterization and lack of motivation.

"[31] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 3 stars out of 4, and wrote that, even though he disagreed with Peckinpah's apparent worldview that "Man is an animal, and his passion for destroying his own kind lies just beneath his skin," it was nevertheless "a superbly made movie.

"[32] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "an overpowering piece of storytelling, certain to remind every viewer of the wells of primal emotion lurking within himself, beneath the fragile veneer of civilized control.

"[33] Among later assessments, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 1997 that the contemporary interpretation was that of a "serious exploration of humanity's ambivalent relationship with the dark side", but it now seems an "exploitation bloodbath".

[34] Nick Schager of Slant Magazine rated it four stars out of four, and wrote, "Sitting through Peckinpah's controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination — the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.

Along with Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs stands as a transgressively violent, deeply '70s film; one that still retains its power to shock after all these years.

[39] They were especially disturbed by the scene's intended ambiguity — after initially resisting, Amy appears to enjoy parts of the first rape, kissing and holding her attacker, although she later has traumatic flashbacks.

"[40] Another criticism is that all the main female characters depict straight women as perverse, in that every appearance of Janice and Amy is used to highlight excessive sexuality.

[citation needed] The studio edited the first rape scene before releasing the film in the United States, to earn an R rating from the MPAA.

[42] In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification banned it, in accordance with the newly introduced Video Recordings Act.

[citation needed] In March 1999, a partially edited print of Straw Dogs that removed most of the second rape was refused a video certificate when the distributor lost the rights to the film after agreeing to make the requested BBFC cuts, and the full uncut version was also rejected for video three months later, on the grounds that the BBFC could not pass the uncut version so soon after rejecting a cut one.

This version was uncut, and therefore included the second rape scene, which showed, in the BBFC's opinion, "Amy is clearly demonstrated not to enjoy the act of violation".

The Board took the view in 1999 that the pre-cut version eroticised the rape and therefore raised concerns with the Video Recordings Act about promoting harmful activity.