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Based on Gordon M. Williams's novel The Siege Of Trencher's Farm, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, STRAW DOGS marked Peckinpah's first directorial step outside the Western genre and into a contemporary (and uniquely British) setting. The director had already pushed the movie-making envelope with The Wild Bunch in 1969, provoking furious debate over the prevalence of on-screen violence. Two years later Peckinpah added further fuel to the fire with STRAW DOGS, an unflinching and uncompromising study of primal, barbaric brutality that is generally regarded as one of the strongest statements about violence ever put on screen. Although STRAW DOGS was granted an X certificate in 1971 for its UK cinema release, and was available on video for a brief period during the early 1980s, the disturbing nature of some of the film's imagery resulted in the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) demanding the video be withdrawn under the Video Recordings Act of 1984, pointing out its guidelines were "stricter with scenes of sexual violence on video than film, because of their potential to be played over and over at home". STRAW DOGS was last refused a UK video classification in 1999 because the distributor refused to make the cuts the BBFC required at that time.
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