Word: sumnerism
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...story is basically melodrama, but contains the seeds of something more complex. Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, an American mathematician who marries a stunning Cornwall lass (Susan George) and moves back to a farm in her hometown. It's primitive, this Cornwall; all the girls seem to have married out, and the only workers we see are farmhands and local craftsmen--aside from the minister, the sheriff, and the bartender...
...next night is the town's church social. It is, all in all, a pretty languid afair...until the chippy daughter of the working clan takes the village idiot for a seductive little walk. He kills her by accident: ignorant of the crime, Sumner harbors him. The father and family of the group, including the ratman and the rapists, come to take vengeance on the idiot. David won't give up his man. And, in his defense, and in defense of the sanctity of his own home, he kills them all: with a poker, a rifle, a poacher-trap...
...David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) in Straw Dogs is a man sure of nothing save his own intense vulnerability. An American mathematician, he has come with his wife Amy (Susan George) to her native village on the windy coast of Cornwall, where he hopes to spend a year doing research. He is also attempting to flee the chaotic violence of the U.S. -and to patch up an uneasy marriage. But there is to be no hiding place...
...millionaire industrialists or oilmen have primed Muskie's campaign pump. There are in his camp a number of $10,000-and-under givers, among them Norman Cousins, who resigned last week as editor of the Saturday Review; Martin Stone, board chairman of Monogram Industries; and Sumner Redstone, president of Northeast Theater Corp. Muskie also received a boost last week with the addition of William T. King, a G.O.P. fundraiser, to his financial retinue. That was something of a coup. King, who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in California for Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the G.O.P. since...
...economy is partly to blame for the current slump. But, says NATO's Sumner Redstone, president of an 80-theater Midwest chain, "primarily we're suffering from the most severe lack of quality motion pictures in the last ten to 15 years." Many operators make the familiar complaint that there are too few family pictures. What they are waiting for is Son of Love Story, another Airport or a romantic western like Butch Caasidy and the Sundance Kid. The nostalgia fad is not the only reason why so many old movies like National Velvet and Dr. Zhivago...