Straw Dogs (1971 film) Straw Dogs (1971 film) Straw Dogs is a 1971 psychological thriller film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George. The screenplay, by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman, is lightly based upon Gordon M. Williams's 1969 novel, "The Siege of Trencher's Farm". The film's title derives from a discussion in the "Tao Te Ching" that likens people to the ancient Chinese ceremonial straw dog, being of ceremonial worth, but afterwards discarded with indifference. The film is noted for its violent concluding sequences and a complicated rape scene. Released theatrically in the same year as "A Clockwork Orange",
The Gladiators (novel) 65BC to explore the search for the just city, the inevitable compromises of revolution, the conflict of ends and means, the question of whether and when it is justifiable to sacrifice lives for an abstract ideal." The novel is generally not as well-known to English-speaking audiences as the later American novel on this topic, "Spartacus" (1951), by Howard Fast, a bestseller adapted for Stanley Kubrick's award-winning 1960 film of the same name, which reached wide audiences and stimulated sales of Fast's novel. The Gladiators (novel) The Gladiators (1939) is the first novel by the author Arthur Koestler; it portrays the