[Originally published in Movietone News 26, October 1973]
Savages is consistently appealing, intermittently brilliant, and—in the end—very nearly inconsequential. Though given elaborate and oblique treatment, its basic idea is a simple one: the “savage” mud-people whom we see in mock-silent-movie fashion at the start are more or less interchangeable with the elegant, conspicuously “civilized” moderns who inhabit the huge mansion which is the film’s single most dominating presence. This notion is almost not an idea at all—though not completely irrelevant, even as rhetoric—but fortunately James Ivory and company use it less as the film’s “point” than as its underlying assumption. And in that light, we are given an extended charade which makes playful and amiably inspired use of a filmic idiom that is part Buñuel (esp. The Exterminating Angel), part Resnais (esp. Last Year at Marienbad), part Theatre of the Absurd (in its use of language for disturbing comic effects), part “experimental” film (in its resurrection of some ancient avant-garde devices). The question of influences is important because Savages often leaves the impression of being unique but not very original—just derivative enough for its multitude of small delights to become faintly dubious. It is “surrealistic” but lacks a genuinely surrealist intensity. On the other hand, even though it has a campy-chic Art Deco look to it, Walter Lassally’s color cinematography achieves a nostalgic sensuality which becomes the film’s most compelling emotion (here the spirit of von Sternberg might be invoked, but only on the margins).