The Savage Eye

Movie reviewers are pretty hard to find during exam period, so this review of The Savage Eye comes too late for anyone to catch it at the Brattle. But it's still worth seeing.

The Savage Eye is a movie put together by Ben Madlow, Sidney Meyer, and Joseph Strick, and it shows Americans still going west, even though the west has filled up. It shows a world of last-chancers, with nowhere left to move, nothing else to do, on the edge of the continent, alone. South of San Francisco, where there are more drunks and suicides than any other American city, the tent messiahs and the cancer quacks and the lonely-hearts clubs minister to congregations of men and women come west to wait.

At its best, The Savage Eye documents the lives of some of these people. At its worst, it sermonizes and moralizes and hates itself into incoherence. And, in between, it has lesser troubles. For example, instead of remaining a simple documentary, it tries to have a plot. There is a made-up story about a divorcee who comes to Los Angeles, and the story serves as a thread for the movie's savage comments on life in this bucket of human crabs. The thin story and the perceptive camera's eye rarely support each other. For the plot gives the divorcee's sufferings a point, when the documentary is shrieking all the time that they have no point. Towards the end of the story, it even seems likely that a car accident will somehow regenerate the woman, and yet the only conclusion that anyone can draw from the evidence presented is that, in such a world, there is no regeneration.

The narration is introduced by a stilted device: the narrator is the guardian angel (or conscience) of the woman, and he chats with her like a second-rate Whitman. The woman herself, Barbara Boxley, is a good actress, but her role is so uneven and inconsistent that she cannot make much out of it.

What is best in the movie are its city scenes--like the long, careful study of the faces of fans watching wrestling. The rage, hatred, and identifications of the crowds are shown with humor and little of the contempt that interferes with the camera's vision elsewhere. Especially memorable is an unprintable gesture one disappointed fan makes towards the victor of a match--a gesture I've never seen before in a film. By contrast to the wrestling scene, a carefully photographed sequence showing a night club stripper is spoiled by editorializing; when the camera turns angrily and unfairly on the audience, its moral rage seems totally unjustified.

Sometimes, though, the moralism of The Savage Eye is terribly effective--as in a scene where a honey-voiced faith healer professionally handles a line of suffering and believing people, giving each one just so many seconds of consolation and then efficiently moving them off to the side: "Just you step right over there and pray a little, sister, God love you, and now, what's the matter, brother?"

Furnished rooms, cafeterias, pet cemeteries, and empty stares are the boundaries of the world The Savage Eye shows us with so much anger and so little respect. The effect is enormously depressing. But I wonder if only a kind of sentimentalism could see such total boredom and sin in the faces of these city people. It is hard to see what values the makers of this movie are applying to city life.

Since their values aren't clear, I'll make a guess. This film reminded me a little of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a documentary on southern sharecroppers written by James Agee and photographed by Walker Evans. Try comparing the faces of rural oppression in that book with the city faces of The Savage Eye. Everyone (certainly every American) admires the craggy, Yankee-stock faces of the southern farmers; they seem part of our past, they are what we mean when we talk about the dignity of common people. They are men who have certain traits of character we are used to admiring. But--and this is my guess--the faces of the people in The Savage Eye are not what our rural nostalgia is willing to come to terms with. The makers of this movie hate the city. They hate divorce and strippers and late-shift workers, and they miss men of independent, elemental, moral character--the weather-beaten faces of an idealized rural past.

It's easy enough to share this rural point of view, to refuse to struggle toward the smoother-faced people the movie views so coldly. Why, you ask, can't they be different from what they are? But the fact is that they aren't different, and much of this movie's rage seems wasted. In the end, you can take The Savage Eye's values, or you can leave them. It certainly makes no attempt to persuade you of them. You can condemn the West Coast as a bucket of obscene crabs--the way The Savage Eye does--or you can see its people as men trying to make the best of a new order of things. Either way of looking at them is valid, and that is why The Savage Eye seems so unfair.