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The Savage Eye

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Initial DVD release
  
October 10, 2000 (USA)

Duration
  

7.2/10
IMDb

Genre
  
Drama

Budget
  
65,000 USD

Country
  
USA

The Savage Eye movie poster

Director
  
Ben Maddow Sidney Meyers Joseph Strick

Release date
  
June 6, 1960

Writer
  
Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, Joseph Strick

Initial release
  
June 6, 1960 (New York City)

Directors
  
Joseph Strick, Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers

Cast
  
Barbara Baxley
(Judith McGuire),
Gary Merrill
(The poet),
Herschel Bernardi
(Kirk),
Jean Hidey
(Venus the Body),
Elizabeth Zemach
(The nurse)

Similar movies
  
Silent Hill
,
Trucker
,
Mark of the Devil
,
The Rapture
,
Simon of the Desert
,
Ten

Leonard rosenman music score from the savage eye 1960 film editing


The Savage Eye is a 1959 "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of an unspecified 1950s city. The film was written, produced, directed, and edited by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick, who did the work over several years on their weekends. The Savage Eye is often considered to be part of the cinema vérité movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Contents

The Savage Eye wwwgstaticcomtvthumbmovieposters47640p47640

The savage eye 1960 oh mama


History

In a 1960 review, A. H. Weiler characterized the film:

... it is from the photographic and sound-track concentration on the Hogarthian faces of Los Angeles that The Savage Eye derives most of its ferocity. The rabid wrestling-match audiences; the middle-aged and elderly ladies seeking improvement of gross bodies in beauty parlors; the sensuous writhings of Jean (Venus the Body) Hidey as she strips and teases in a burlesque joint, and, most effectively, the matter-of-fact faith healer who doles out wholesale blessings on the afflicted (done with a direct voice and sound track) are the most striking glints in The Savage Eye.

Benjamin Jackson has noted that Irving Lerner, Strick's collaborator on the earlier documentary Muscle Beach (1948), "was part of the original group, but left in the middle of production." The camera footage for the film was done over these years by the principal cinemaphotographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer; the sound editing for the film was one of Verna Fields' early credits. The film won the 1960 BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award as well as several film festival prizes. Reviewing its debut at the 1959 Edinburgh Film Festival, the art critic David Sylvester called its imagery "sharp, intense, spectacular, and imaginative".

John Hagan has written further of the film's influence that: "One can see how, in its study of a woman whose marital problems have estranged her from the world, it anticipated, if not influenced, such films as The Misfits, Red Desert, and Juliet of the Spirits."

The Academy Film Archive preserved The Savage Eye in 2008.

References

The Savage Eye Wikipedia
The Savage Eye IMDb The Savage Eye themoviedb.org