The Savage Eye
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Sidney Meyers
Joseph Strick
Sidney Meyers
Joseph Strick
Sidney Meyers
Joseph Strick
Herschel Bernardi
Jean Hidey
Elizabeth Zemach
Gary Merrill
| The Savage Eye | |
|---|---|
 Poster | |
| Directed by | Ben Maddow Sidney Meyers Joseph Strick |
| Written by | Ben Maddow Sidney Meyers Joseph Strick |
| Produced by | Ben Maddow Sidney Meyers Joseph Strick |
| Starring | Barbara Baxley Herschel Bernardi Jean Hidey Elizabeth Zemach Gary Merrill |
| Cinematography | Jack Couffer Helen Levitt Haskell Wexler |
| Edited by | Ben Maddow Sidney Meyers Joseph Strick |
| Music by | Leonard Rosenman |
| Distributed by | Trans-Lux Distributing-Kingsley International |
Release date |
|
Running time | 68 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Budget | $65,000 |
The Savage Eye is a 1959 independent film[1] written, produced, directed, and edited by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick.
A "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of Los Angeles.[2]
Production
According to Ben Maddow, the film began when Joseph Strick wanted to make an extended film. Maddow suggested a film about William Hogarth "using the etchings, rephotographing them, and comparing them with modern London, to see whether there were parallels or changes. This was a development of that." Eventually the concept of the film evolved. "It's really an anthropological film about the lower middle class, anywhere, but it happened to be [set in] Los Angeles, so it was an investigatory job as well as a film job."[3]
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."[4] The camera footage for the film was shot over four years by the principal cinematographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer.[4] The sound editing for the film was one of Verna Fields' early credits. Barbara Baxley enacted the role of divorcée Judith X, while Gary Merrill was the male narrator who voiced her angel, her double: "That vile dreamer, your conscience."
The directing trio worked over several years on this film during their weekends.
Exhibition
The film premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 1959 and received the Roy Thomson Edinburgh Film Guild Award; at the Venice Film Festival, it took the Italian Film Clubs Prize.[5] It also won the 1959 BAFTA Robert Flaherty Award for Best Feature Length Documentary. Reviewing its debut at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the art critic David Sylvester called its imagery "sharp, intense, spectacular, and imaginative".[6]