But to me, Peckinpah is the most viscerally eloquent director who ever lived. No mere "Bloody Sam," he was the master of capturing character and emotion in action -- multifaceted character, booby-trapped emotion. That's why James Dickey wanted him for "Deliverance," and Joan Didion wanted him for "Play It as It Lays." His instinctual brilliance gave his great films an unfathomable power. You can watch his 1969 masterpiece, "The Wild Bunch," repeatedly without getting to the bottom of it. When you do, you not only know Peckinpah better, but also yourself.

At the time of "A Clockwork Orange" and "Straw Dogs," Kubrick was seen as an artist-intellectual, conducting a moral inquiry into human nature. Peckinpah was pictured as his antithesis, a gifted Neanderthal whose machismo led him to create heroes who proved themselves through rites of violence. One British critic praised Kubrick at Peckinpah's expense precisely because Kubrick treated his characters as "lab animals," maintaining the distance necessary for an artistic rendering of violence.

Actually, in "A Clockwork Orange," Kubrick's plan to be formally innovative and also to deliver a statement drained away all the juice and humanity from the story; the result was at best a pretentious pop art fresco, at worst "Free Will for Dummies." On the other hand, in "Straw Dogs," Peckinpah became so immersed in mood, atmosphere and feeling that the film went beyond being a fable about violence. It's more about sex and marriage than it is about gore or masculine prowess.

In fact, what drew me to it recently wasn't thinking of "A Clockwork Orange" but of "Eyes Wide Shut." "Straw Dogs" is also about a superficially happy couple at the brink of marital catastrophe. In "Straw Dogs," too, the wife (Susan George) is an erotic magnet, the husband (Dustin Hoffman) a complaisant bozo with a professional detachment toward life (he's an "astromathematician," not a doctor). In Peckinpah's taut, miniaturized epic, as in Kubrick's attenuated, sprawling one, a civilized man picks his way through a psychological battlefield -- the barbaric underside of picturesque Cornwall, England, not the heights of Manhattan decadence -- before he can gain an understanding of himself. The pivotal scene in "Straw Dogs" is not an orgy, like in "Eyes Wide Shut," but a terrifying orgiastic rape. And it, too, caused a rating controversy -- catalyzing a trim (for an R rating) that severely compromised the scene's meaning and impact.

No critics' groups raised a stink over the cutting of Peckinpah's film the way they have over Warner Brothers' use of digitalized figures to block the rutting couples in "Eyes Wide Shut." For even then, at the height of his celebrity, Peckinpah was too disreputable, his extremes seen as excesses or indulgences. But flip "Straw Dogs" into the VCR after dozing through Kubrick's valedictory and it registers like the shock pads on failed hearts in medical shows -- suddenly, you can feel again. What William S. Pechter wrote of "Straw Dogs" in 1972, vis à vis "A Clockwork Orange" also applies to it vis à vis "Eyes Wide Shut": "Peckinpah's film is no less stylized than Kubrick's -- it's just that the style of 'Straw Dogs' isn't effete and preening. Kubrick coldly lectures us that we're living in a hell of our own making. Peckinpah writhes in the flames with us, burning."

By the time "Straw Dogs" opened, Peckinpah's most characteristic movies -- not just "The Wild Bunch," but also "Ride the High Country" (1962) and "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970) -- had instilled a reverence in me that has not been shaken. But I idealized Peckinpah more and appreciated him less than I do now. I recognized that "Straw Dogs" marked new growth for the director. I saw that the movies it deserved to be compared to were Ingmar Bergman's "Shame" and "The Passion of Anna": similarly harrowing tales of unformed intellectuals set down in primitive surroundings. But I undervalued "Straw Dogs" because I disdained its combination of vitality and despair; I was looking for the mad romantic transcendence of the self-immolating warriors in "The Wild Bunch." I wasn't prepared for a film about the limits (and perhaps the impossibility) of love.

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