S//STRW//DDGS PART 8 [18+]

Loosely based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon Williams, Sam Peckinpah's controversial revenge drama is a brutal study of a liberal man being pushed to committing acts of violence. Available on video for a brief period during the unregulated early 1980s, the nature of the film's ambiguous rape scene resulted in the British Board of Film Classifications chief censor James Ferman demanding the video be withdrawn under the Video Recordings Act of 1984.
Quiet American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his British-born wife Amy (Susan George) relocate to Amy's rural Cornish village in an attempt to escape the Vietnam-era social unrest brewing in the US and for David to find tranquillity in which to write a book. Life in the rural farmhouse merely illustrates how the marriage between the Sumners is breaking up; the aloof and repressed David struggling to find common ground with his young and vibrant wife who desires affection and support. However, when David hires four locals, including a former boyfriend of Amy's, to repair his barn roof, the couple find themselves being subtly harassed and bullied by the workmen.

Amy's former boyfriend, Charlie Venner (Del Henney) is eager to revive their early love affair and ridicules her husband, Amy, in turn, seems to encourage their attentions with a degree of teasing. The pacifist David will not stand up to the men, and the more he ignores the problem the more the harassment intensifies. After David is lured away on a shooting trip, Venner goes to the farm to seduce Amy - a situation that degenerates into a horrifying rape scene; which controversially turns to lovemaking during the degrading assault. Amy keeps her ordeal secret and becomes almost a fifth columnist in her own household. When driving home from a church social function they accidentally knock down Henry (David Warner), a mentally handicapped local. Unaware that Henry has just strangled a young girl, they take the injured man back to their farmhouse. When a vengeful mob arrive and lay siege to the farmhouse, David is finally forced to defend his home and his life, recognising a frighteningly vicious characteristic within himself as events escalate towards a bloody and climatic siege. Despite pushing each others tolerances and their relationship to breaking point, David must rely on Amy to shoot one of the assailants.