Movie Review: Straw Dogs (1971)

Genre: Psychological Suspense Thriller Drama

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, David Warner, Peter Vaughan

Running Time: 117 minutes

Synopsis: In rural England, American mathematical researcher David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his English vixen wife Amy (Susan George) have just moved into her ancestral home in a rural English village. The local pub is ruled over by the cantankerous Tom Heddon (Peter Vaughan) and his brood, including nephew Charlie (Del Henney), who has a sexual history with Amy. Tensions rise between the Sumners as he buries himself in work and she feels neglected. The local men resent Amy marrying an outsider, and view the passive David as weak. With Charlie and his friends "helping" build the Sumners' garage, conflict is on the horizon.

What Works Well: Peckinpah invests in a long build-up to draw sharp contrasts between a seemingly meek mathematician and a rough-and-tumble blue-collar community, with Amy falling into the fissure between her past and present. The violence, once it kicks in, is brutally memorable. A cat incident is followed by a rape and finally a siege, exposing the thin veneer of civility and the boiling rage ready to erupt out of every man. The final 30 minutes feature a remarkably staged defend-the-fort epic. Afforded an elaborate role, Susan George has rarely been better, combining loyalty, boredom, flirtatiousness, and self-preservation. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The introduction, while necessary, is slow. The complex rape scene is difficult to watch, and David's transformation into a resourceful warrior is sudden. Charlie and his brethren are barely distinguishable, all surrendering to unkempt shaggy hair and overgrown sideburns. 

Conclusion: A ruthless statement on the timeless barbarity of man.



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Movie Review: Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974)

A minimalist car chase movie, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry has plenty of roaring engines and car stunts, but little in the way of soul.

In nondescript rural USA, Larry (Peter Fonda) and his friend Deke (Adam Roarke) rob a supermarket. Deke holds the manager's wife and child hostage while Larry casually walks in and demands the contents of the safe. They make their escape in Larry's overpowered Chevy Impala, but not before Larry's one-night-stand Mary (Susan George) insists on joining them.

Larry has dreams of joining the NASCAR racing circuit, and needs the money to secure better equipment so that he can compete. Deke is his ace mechanic. Mary is tough as nails and demands to go along for the ride, as the trio escape from a mounting police dragnet. Captain Franklin (Vic Morrow) coordinates the search through the sprawling back country, but Deke's police scanner along with Larry's driving skills and the Impala's pure power allow the escapees to stay one step ahead of their pursuers. Franklin finally takes to the skies in a helicopter, as the chase reaches its climax.

Directed by John Hough as an adaptation of the novel Pursuit by Richard Unekis, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is a typical piece of early 1970s open road counterculture filmmaking, in the vein of Easy Rider and The Sugarland Express. Dirty Mary has no shortage of horsepower, squealing tires, roaring cars, and the occasional cool stunt, as well as a rolling confrontation between likable bandits and state authority. Hough makes good use of the open and sunny landscape, setting the film in endless fields and backroads that could represent the indistinguishable flatlands of Anywhere America. The acres of greenery are only punctuated by the colourful cars roaring towards the promise of a better personal future for Larry, the ends justifying the means.

But there is a limit to how much enjoyment can be derived from hurtling metal down rural roads, and the film starts to suffer due to a lack of a warm heartbeat. Inside the car, there simply isn't enough to root for. Larry, Deke and Mary are limited characters without much to offer, and after establishing their basic identities, the film has little to work with. The running gag of Larry trying to get rid of Mary is quickly predictable (she always finds her way back into the car), and Captain Franklin does little except bark orders down the radio.

Larry is half-crazed, his NASCAR dream providing insufficient motivation to fuel the film's emotion. Deke is more cerebral but also more of a blank slate, while Mary is sharp tongued but just along for the ride, for mostly unexplained reasons The script (by Leigh Chapman and Antonio Santean) is unable to take advantage of the quiet interludes to build depth, and the main protagonists remain broad-brush anti-heroes, with little to say about themselves or the world they live in.

The film is left to lean heavily on motorized confrontations, and these are delivered with plenty of zest. Once the pursuit starts, Larry encounters police cars at regular intervals, and has to outdrive, outsmart or plain outmuscle his hunters, first in the Impala then a bright green Dodge Charger. The horsepower duels are undeniably fun, and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry delivers on its basic premise: character development is blown out of the window, but its pedal to the metal time for vehicular carnage.

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Movie Review: Lola (1970)

An unsettling mix of the plain creepy and the mildly dreamy, Lola is an outright oddity. Charles Bronson in a romantic movie is already an unhinging experience, but the story of a vague relationship between a middle aged man and a perpetually mini-skirted schoolgirl would be bizarre in any context.

In London, Lola (Susan George) and American author Scott (Charles Bronson) seem to be in love, and their relationship is scandalizing Lola's family. She is 16, he is 38, and to make matters worse, he writes schlocky underground porn novels that are banned in the UK. When their affair begins to attract unwanted attention, they decide to get married in Scotland, where 16 year olds can legally wed.

Lola and Scott relocate to New York, where Scott gets into a scuffle with a policeman and earns a short stint in prison for his troubles. While he is behind bars, Lola rents an apartment for them. But once they settle into a life of domesticity, Scott hits a bad patch of writer's block, and Lola's girlishness proves to be a severe nuisance.

Lola (also known as Twinky) works hard to maximize the icky factor. By placing an action star in a romance lead, designating his profession as a writer of low-brow sex-drenched fiction, then focusing on a relationship with a schoolgirl less than half his age and opening questions of whether or not the liaison constitutes statutory rape, the Norman Thaddeus Vane script dances between controversial and cruddy.

For a romance, Lola does a really poor job colouring in the fundamentals of the central relationship between Scott and Lola. Why these two admittedly interesting people should ever have fallen for each other remains a mystery that undermines most of the premise. As a result, the film is neither good enough to warrant any serious examination nor horrible enough to be utterly dismissible, so it just exists in a state of flabbergasting suspended repudiation.

Not being able to punch, shoot, or kill anyone, Charles Bronson (aged around 49 at the time of filming) actually has to act, and he is not bad. His Scott Wardman is initially caught somewhere in the vacuum between lust, love and pity towards Lola. Later she just becomes an irritant distracting him from work with her juvenile behaviour, and Bronson is believable in transitioning his perspective on the relationship.

Susan George (around 19 when Lola was filmed) speaks with an annoying high tone, but is otherwise perfect as the chatty teenager enjoying the thrill of apparent attention from an older man. George conveys Lola's naive but successful independence streak, as she pro-actively pushes the agenda of her life against seemingly long odds. She wears the shortest possible mini skirts in all weather conditions as a symbol of obstinate independence.

In supporting and sometimes tiny roles, an interesting cast includes Honor Blackman as Lola's mom, and British stalwarts such as Jack Hawkins, Trevor Howard, Lionel Jeffries, and Robert Morley. The London and New York locations provide Lola with a breezy swinging sixties personality.

Interesting for all the wrong reasons, Lola is a dreggy curiosity.

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