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Sleeping Dogs
Film (Trailer and Excerpts) – 1977
...don't you ever worry about killing the wrong man?
– Smith (Sam Neill)
[Sleeping Dogs] almost single-handedly created a climate of acceptance within the country for a Kiwi film industry.
– Jonathan Dowling looks back at the film's impact, The Evening Post, 27 February 1988
For a debut, Sleeping Dogs is precociously accomplished ... like Hitchcock's Saboteur, Sleeping Dogs is suffused with paranoia, mistaken identity and breathless chase. Unconventionally and convincingly, Donaldson makes the case that there is no such thing as existentialism, no personal gains to flying solo.
– American reviewer Carrie Rickey in Village Voice, 9 March 1982
A lot of people after the novel came out said it was some kind of prediction or forecast [of] where New Zealand was going. But I saw it just as an exercise of 'what If? Let's imagine there was that kind of divide in New Zealand that turned into a civil war, where would you stand? What would you do? How would you feel?
– Author CK Stead talks about Smith's Dream, the novel which inspired Sleeping Dogs, late in episode 11 of the first season of The Good Word
I think Sleeping Dogs has something important to say. Civil liberties are declining fast in many parts of the world. Although they don't all suffer from events as violent as those in the movie, there have been plenty of indications in the last few years that New Zealand is becoming a constricted democracy. If Sleeping Dogs has a lesson, it is that we should beware of giving anyone too much power in the belief that he won't abuse it.
– Director Roger Donaldson in the press kit for Sleeping Dogs
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This adaptation of CK Stead's novel is discussed
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