The murder of a 15-year-old boy at the center of Alpha Dog is rendered all the more tragic because it is so totally, utterly senseless. While the teenagers who populate the story fancy themselves as street-smart, they appear to be engaging in make-believe until it is too late – a bunch of self-styled tough guys barreling toward a bloody climax no one is quite smart enough to foresee.

Writer/director Nick Cassavetes fiddles with some names, dates and locations, but essentially Alpha Dog follows a real-life drama that played out in L.A.’s West Hills, late in the summer of 2000. California prosecutors allege that drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood ordered the kidnapping and slaying of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz after the boy’s older brother failed to pay a $1,200 debt. Four young men were convicted in the shooting death, but Hollywood, then 20, skipped out of the country and subsequently became one of the youngest people on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list before his eventual capture.

In the tale’s jump to film, Hollywood becomes Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch); Markowitz becomes Zack Mazursky (Anton Yelchin); and Zack’s no-good older brother, the one who gets on Johnny’s bad side, is Jake (Ben Foster). We’ve seen variations of this story many times, of course; delinquent youths and senseless violence have been fueling movies since before Glenn Ford picked up a piece of chalk in The Blackboard Jungle. But Alpha Dog does a tidy job of illustrating characters who feel authentic and defy expectations.

Johnny Truelove is a prime example. Although his suburban home is decked out with high-tech gadgetry and such gangsta accoutrements as a blown-up photo of Al Pacino’s Scarface, the diminutive Johnny is a decidedly confrontation-averse kingpin. As tensions escalate, Jake breaks into Johnny’s home and leaves a turd on the living room carpet. An armed Johnny silently watches the intruder, cowering behind a door. Johnny is far more interested in acting the part of badass than actually being one.

The young cast rises to the occasion. Foster is particularly exciting to watch. With the exception of one ill-conceived fight scene in which he suddenly becomes a cut-rate Jackie Chan, Foster brilliantly evokes volatility and danger. Another notable performance comes from singer Justin Timberlake as Frankie Ballenbacher, one of Johnny’s underlings. No one will confuse Frankie for a tragic character, but he’s the closest Alpha Dog comes to having one – a somewhat dense dude given the duty of watching Zack and who subsequently becomes a substitute big brother for the hostage.

Cassavetes (John Q) enlivens proceedings with directorial flourishes. Some of it works, some not so much. He successfully underscores scenes with an air of fatalism; in one nifty gimmick, Cassavetes employs periodic freeze frames in which written text identifies a character by his or her eventual witness number.

Easily the picture’s strangest inclusion is a scenery-chewing Sharon Stone as Zack’s mother. Like the fat suit in which she’s ensconced, the performance is shameless and bloated – and particularly gross when you consider that the mother of the real-life murder victim reportedly attempted suicide after Alpha Dog’s theatrical release. —Phil Bacharach

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Only a few years after the demise of Hollywood’s production code, 1971 must have prompted some serious handwringing from pundits eager to bemoan the end of civilization. Movies were seemingly awash in blood-spattered permissiveness. Dirty Harry and The French Connection showed cops whose ruthless brutality occasionally resembled that of the criminals they chased, while A Clockwork Orange and The Devils initially received X ratings for their sexual violence.

And right in the middle of it all was Straw Dogs.

Even five decades after its theatrical release, Sam Peckinpah’s tale of rape and murder in the British moorlands remains the filmmaker’s most controversial work, what New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael derisively dubbed “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.”

While the characters’ motives and politics are far too problematic for tidy condemnation, one thing is clear: Straw Dogs is a masterful thriller as complicated as it is viscerally exciting.

Dustin Hoffman and Susan George portray David and Amy Sumner. The young couple have moved to a stone farmhouse in Amy’s native Cornwall in the UK, where David, an American astral mathematician, has a grant to study stellar structures. In other words, David is an intellectual, and a socially awkward one at that, which doesn’t exactly endear him to the noncerebral, beer-swilling louts who frequent the neighborhood pub.

It doesn’t help that half the men in the village appear to be lusting after David’s blonde, beautiful wife. In fact, Peckinpah’s camera introduces us to Amy with a shot squarely of her chest, sans bra and in a tight sweater, as she strolls along a street. Among those who take notice of Amy’s return to town is Charlie Venner (Del Henney), her old flame. David, unaware of their history, hires Charlie to join a few other workmen building a garage for the Sumners.

Aside from Charlie, the work crew includes brutish Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), who proudly shows Charlie a pair of undies he has stolen from the Sumner home; as well as a maniacally giggling rat-catcher named Cawsey (Jim Norton). While the men leer at Amy and scoff at David, the Sumners are busy navigating a marriage on the rocks. He is selfish and irritable; she is sullen and immature; both share a talent for passive-aggressiveness. Tensions rise. And then the cat goes missing …

Adapted by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman (Logan’s Run) from a Gordon Williams potboiler called The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, Straw Dogs exudes unease in its opening minutes and doesn’t let up through the inevitably explosive conclusion. Peckinpah choreographs the violence expertly, employing a dazzling array of quick edits, slow-motion and other techniques that had catapulted him to superstardom with 1969’s The Wild Bunch. He takes his time getting to the bloodshed, too, teasing out how the marital slights and sniping begin to pile up. Hoffman and George are both magnificent in their challenging roles.

What makes Straw Dogs such a troubling watch – even after 51 years – is its graphic depiction of Amy’s rape by Charlie, and then Norman. Amy initially fights off her attacker, who slugs her, drags her across the floor by her hair, and rips open her shirt. But then Amy caresses Charlie’s face, and she responds sexually. The pair even engage in some post-coital cuddling before Norman, brandishing a shotgun, takes over for a decidedly unambiguous attack.

The scene, which earned the movie an X rating from British censors, also proved to be an offscreen ordeal for George. The shoot took three days, during which Peckinpah reportedly refused to utter a word to the then-20-year-old actress.

Does Straw Dogs foster the toxic male myth that women secretly want to be raped? Many critics at the time certainly thought so, and still do. Peckinpah also has his defenders, who point to the twisted dynamics between the characters. They note that Charlie is Amy’s ex-lover and that her marriage is dissolving. And there is always the possibility, as some have suggested, that Amy only surrenders when it is clear Charlie has overpowered her.

Maybe so, but I am skeptical, especially given Peckinpah’s hard-to-miss misogyny in The Wild Bunch and The Getaway. Still, it is a testament to Straw Dogs’ brilliant ambivalence that even a brutal rape is open for interpretation. —Phil Bacharach

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Crime Wave is a crackerjack noir that packs a wallop and assembles an impressive array of ’50s-era character actors. While it might fall a little short of the promise of its kick-ass title, this B picture starring Sterling Hayden and directed by André De Toth is nevertheless a gem of criminal goodness.

Trouble begins when three prison escapees from San Quentin rob a Glendale, California, gas station, but not before one shoots a police officer who has the misfortune of showing up at the wrong time. Shortly after, they reach out for help from Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), a former fellow inmate. Steve, now married and determined to remain on the straight and narrow, declines their request.

Enter Hayden as the imposing police Lt. Sims. Hot on the trail of the escapees, Sims’ gut tells him that Steve can lead him to the bad guys. There is no room for rehabilitation in Sims’ cynical mind; once a crook, he reasons, always a crook. When Sims has another officer phone the Lacey household and no one picks up, the intrepid lawman concludes that the unanswered ringing “doesn’t look good” for Steve.

Sims doesn’t know how right he is. One of the escapees, Gat Morgan (Nedrick Young), hoofs it to Lacey’s apartment after being seriously injured in the gas station robbery; Gat shows up just in time to die in Steve’s easy chair. Sims, suspecting Steve knows more than he lets on, jails the ex-con for several days before grudgingly letting the man return to wife Ellen (Phyllis Kirk). The timing is unfortunate. The two surviving escapees, Doc Penny (Ted de Corsia) and the brutish Ben Hastings (Charles Bronson, then still going by Charles Buchinsky), track down Steve and force him into their scheme to knock off a bank before fleeing the country. Steve reluctantly goes along to keep Ellen from harm’s way.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Nelson is miscast in the central role. Primarily a dancer who later turned to directing TV and movies (including two Elvis Presley flicks), Nelson is a little too pretty and self-satisfied for the part, his smug demeanor seemingly at odds with a character wound tighter than a hangman’s noose. But Nelson is surrounded by a bevy of terrific character actors happily chewing on enough scenery to warrant a bite block. The toothpick-gnawing Hayden delivers his hardboiled dialogue with machine-gun ferocity. De Corsia and Bronson are believably menacing, while Jay Novello steals his scenes as a disgraced doctor and ex-con who gets pulled into the nastiness. Dub Taylor (billed here as “Dubb Taylor”) has a memorable turn as a bumpkin gas station attendant, and an uncredited Timothy Carey appears as a gang member so batshit crazy, you half expect him to begin drooling at any minute.

Shot on location in Glendale in naturalistic black and white, Crime Wave has the lean, no-nonsense feel of the early-television crime dramas that undoubtedly were pulling away movie audiences of the time. Director De Toth and screenwriter Crane Wilbur, both of whom had also collaborated on the the first 3D picture, House of Wax, keep the pace snappy and brusque enough for a compact 73-minute running time. Crime might not pay (or so they say) but Crime Wave definitely pays off as entertaining noir. —Phil Bacharach

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