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The nerd on sabbatical is a vision of war, and a riposte to Lawrence's dictum about "the essential American soul." (The unreality of the Cornish village is reflected in a local's imagined New World: "Can't walk down the streets, they say.") The Yank (Dustin Hoffman) is an "astral mathematician," married to an avid blonde (Susan George) who keeps changing equations on his precious blackboard. The English fresh air he seeks is polluted with hostility and bluster, the beastly paterfamilias (Peter Vaughan) reigns in the pub, shattering cups in his hand. Among the louts working at the farmhouse is the wife's former beau (Del Henney), who makes a point of proving he can sneak into her bedroom. A Neanderthal worldview, "rats is life," the kitty is the first casualty. The fancy-pants tricked into a hunt is a darkening elaboration from Minnelli's Home from the Hill, his contemplation of the flapping fowl he's just gunned down is intercut with the missus violated twice over. The brutish instinct is instilled, or was it merely reawakened? "I'll have an answer, or I'll have blood!" Sam Peckinpah on the cerebral and the visceral, an ugly little thesis expanded by electric filmmaking. Mental images prick the heroine in the wake of her ordeal, the whole and the splintered are illustrated at the church social by the vicar and his torn-newspaper trick, an aria from Rigoletto follows. The hero's closest alliance is not with Woman but to the half-witted giant (David Warner) wanted by the soused mob, thus the medieval siege of the climax. Scaldings, jagged glass, steel jaws: "I can handle this." A complex system of impressionistic fragments, also Peckinpah's wicked travesty of The Quiet Man. Cracked specs and vacant smile after the apocalypse. "Hooray for you, tiger." Boorman has a useful response the following year with Deliverance. Cinematography by John Coquillon. With T.P. McKenna, Jim Norton, Donald Webster, Ken Hutchison, Peter Arne, and Chloe Franks.
--- Fernando F. Croce |