Distinct Impressions #1: Peter Vaughan

Not your standard village drunk. Peter Vaughan as Tom Hedden in Sam Peckinpah's ‘Straw Dogs’ (1971) is a frightening and strangely hilarious character, full of grit and playfulLY VIOLENT ambiguity; the type of behaviour that seemed to only be enabled in yesteryear pubs of a PARTICULAR kind.

With meagre screen time, Vaughan still manages to instil the character with enough weird-aggro-mateyness to set a viewer's teeth on edge. Part-patriarch, part-old thug, Tom is introduced in an early scene as we see him brooding over his pint glass. Before the short glimpse is over however, Tom manages to physically assault the landlord, ignoring last orders, sending a confiscated pint glass into a palm slicing shatter. Causing enough of an episode to allow himself to pull his own pint from behind the bar — a glass of thick brown gloop about as appetising as canal water — Tom stands there defiantly gulping, happier than a pig in muck. In the same scene he furthers undermines authority by saluting the local magistrate (T.P. McKenna), hand up to his brow, and issuing a series of fart noises in a crude reveille. 

Peckinpah, in his first movie outside of the Americas and with a reputation for being a director of Westerns (though often hyper-gory, i.e. The Wild Bunch) takes the tropes and constructs of the classic Western and drops them into an English Village setting, to fascinating end. Tom certainly fits a certain 'Western' character mould: the lawless governing bully who reigns (the village pub at least) without challenge. In a literally pot-boiling finale, Tom gets his overdue comeuppance after leading a band of local scruffs to David and Amy's farmhouse (played by Dustin Hoffman and a devastating Susan George) to exact vigilante revenge on the village idiot who is suspected of killing Tom’s daughter. It's a fitting end to a character who we feel should rightfully be pored over. Or should that be poured?