Peckinpah’s most controversial and difficult film depicts the terrible long night suffered by an American mathematician and his wife after they move to her small Cornish hometown. Dustin Hoffman stars as the withdrawn scholar forced into violence by the savagery of locals who threaten his wife and home. Straw Dogs raised a storm of controversy by giving free rein to the cruel misogyny that surfaces from time to time throughout Peckinpah's films. Pauline Kael—herself a champion of Peckinpah and hardly a doctrinaire feminist—nailed the film’s raw power and sour sexual politics by famously dubbing it “a fascist work of art.” Over the years, others have countered by drawing attention to the film's complex vision of suffering and victimization in general and its deep ambivalence toward its protagonists.