sam peckinpah

STRAW DOGS

STRAW DOGS Retrospective: Sam Peckinpah’s Masterful Character Study On One Of Cinema’s Unlikeliest Heroes

It remains one of my favourite films, and made me a fan of Sam Peckinpah, prompting that sudden realisation as to why his work is so highly acclaimed in modern cinema. And yet it wasn’t his more famous ‘The Wild Bunch’ that courted my fascination with his work. Rather it was this psychological thriller from 1971 that made me pursue more of his catalogue, and fully realise the extent of his genius. Straw Dogs is an uncompromisingly violent tale of a meek American mathematician named David Sumner, played by the ever reliable, Dustin Hoffman. Sumner and his attractive wife Amy (played by Susan George) relocate to a sleepy English village, where Amy is originally from. Immediately, this sets up a conflict where the locals take a disliking to David and make no secret of their resentment of him. A class structure is established, pitting the more masculine yet boorish locals […]

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John Woo: ‘My Dream Is To Make A Western’

It’s almost surprising that acclaimed action auteur John Woo hasn’t found himself in the throes of a Western film production yet. It’s not for lack of trying either considering his willful transition in the early 1990s to work on Universal Pictures’ Hard Boiled and enduring through a great deal of bureaucracy to release his cut of the film; It’s imaginable that this could have been a stepping stone toward that goal at the time for Woo in his post-Hong Kong career, although relocating to China after several productions in the U.S. made it pretty clear that at least tentatively, it wasn’t meant to be. With any luck though, those long-awaited dreams of doing a Western may eventually come to pass. Woo revealed such an interest in an in-depth interview published at The Hollywood Reporter on Friday by Pete Keeley. The interview connotated the 25th anniversary of the release of Woo’s […]

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