In director Sam Peckinpah’s first non-Western film, Dustin Hoffman plays a mild-mannered American mathematician who settles with his wife in her native Cornish village. Encountering hostility and then violence from the local community, he is ultimately forced to react. A relentless and unflinching examination of violence and machismo, Peckinpah’s film is shocking not only for its explicit gore but for the degree to which it manipulates audiences’ “civilized” expectations. In this disturbing (and, for many, questionable) parable on the path to “manhood,” Hoffman delivers one of his most layered film performances.