• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2286 0

her by undermining any number of clichés of the Western genre. In Peckinpah’s west, innocent women and children were inevitably slaughtered, as those in the audience begged silently for it not to happen. The Wild Bunch had a wealth of unforgettable images—the outlaws passing a whiskey bottle back and forth as if it’s a holy chalice; brilliant close-ups, such as the army officer averting his eyes as two parts of a train collide; and Pauline’s favorite, the blowing up of a bridge, with army horses and riders “falling to the water in an instant extended to eternity.” She understood that Peckinpah’s unflinching presentation of violence had a positive purpose: to show how truly horrible war and destruction could be, and the toll that they took on the people caught up in them. At the time of the picture’s release, she spoke of his aim to “take the façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved . . . and then twist it so that it’s not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut.” Her difficulty with The Wild Bunch was that she felt Peckinpah had “got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment became instead an almost abstract fantasy on violence; the bloody deaths repeated so often and so exquisitely, became numbingly remote.”

Peckinpah was provocative and belligerent and a prodigious drinker, and Pauline enjoyed spending time with him, hashing out the imbecilities of the movie industry over bottles of whiskey. She delighted in their friendship and frequently sent him stories or novels she thought he might want to adapt for the screen. One was Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children; Peckinpah got drunk and read it one night and pronounced it so “profoundly depressing, it makes The Wild Bunch look like early Saroyan.” She also championed him as director of the screen version of James Dickey’s Deliverance, which eventually went to John Boorman. Peckinpah became one of Pauline’s pet “lost boys”—the ones she believed to be mistreated by the studio executives—and he in turn courted her assiduously, sending her roses whenever she paid a visit to Los Angeles.

Peckinpah’s latest was Straw Dogs, and Pauline struggled with it more than she had with any other film of the season. With a script by Peckinpah and David Z. Goodman, based on Gordon Williams’s novel Siege at Trencher’s Farm, Straw Dogs was a study of what happens when a man who has purposely distanced himself from conflict is forced to confront his enemies and to defend his home and family—to the death. In the film’s long, terrifying finale, the pacifist hero (Dustin Hoffman) is forced to use his gifts for precise, strategic thinking to kill the men laying siege to his household, one by one. The final siege sequence lasted for nearly thirty minutes, and while many in the audience found the tension and the violence all but unbearable, they were placed in the inevitable position of cheering the death of each of the thugs.

The film’s point of view was troubling both to viewers and, particularly, to the critics who were ever on the lookout for a higher sense of purpose in filmmaking. Peckinpah regarded all such attitudinizing with unconcealed contempt. “You can’t make violence real to audiences today without rubbing their noses in it,” he told William Murray for Playboy. “We watch our wars and see our men die, really die, every day on television, but it doesn’t seem real. We don’t believe those are real people dying on the screen. We’ve been anesthetized by the media. What I do is show people what it’s really like—not by showing it so much as by heightening it, stylizing it.”

There is a heavy, somber, even somewhat cautious tone in Pauline’s review of Straw Dogs that is quite uncharacteristic of her work: Reading it, one gets the sense that writing it did not come easily. In the end she was forced to conclude that one of her favorite filmmakers had created a compelling but deeply offensive machismo fantasy, in which the hero had to become a killer in order to feel like a real man. “The vision of Straw Dogs is narrow