The Savage Eye
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ’50s!
This multiple award-winning drama takes the form of a documentary to tell the story of Judith, a newly divorced woman who moves to Los Angeles to get a fresh start. In this journey through the dark side of 1950s urban life, the camera acts as a character that follows Judith through the streets as she encounters the strange denizens of the city, ranging from trendsetters to religious fanatics. All the tawdry and desperate faces of this world become a mirror for Judith’s personal failures and struggles to claim her new life. As an added bonus, Interviews With My Lai Veterans is included on this video. This Academy Award-winning documentary makes an unflinching exploration of the 1968 massacre of the Vietnamese village of My Lai by U.S. armed forces.
The Savage Eye is somewhere between documentary and poetry. The story is of one Judith (Barbara Baxley), recently divorced, who’s trying for a fresh start and dealing with her own sense of desolation. Her inner state, and that of the society we see in the documentary-style footage, is revealed completely in voice-over dialogue with an incisive and sometimes cruel-sounding interviewer the credits identify as “The Poet” (Gary Merrill), though he seems more like a guardian angel. The tone of this piece is achieved through the dialogue, which is always fashionably bitter and disdainful. Here’s an example:
The Poet: On the morning of the sixth day, the stars declined, and the sun rose, and out of a handful of fire and dust, garbage and alcohol, God created man.
Judith: He made a big mistake.
It always stays just this side of overbearing, so you keep waiting for it to stumble, but it never does. A fascinating look at ’50s-era emptiness. Also included is the Oscar-winning documentary short Interviews with My Lai Veterans, directed in 1970 by Joseph Strick, one of the directors of The Savage Eye. You couldn’t ask for a more privileged look into what happened at the My Lai massacre than these interviews with five veterans who were there, though it’s unlikely you would ask. The atrocities as recounted are very hard to listen to. One veteran rationalizes the killing this way: “The Vietnamese are funny people…. They seem to have no understanding of life. They don’t care whether they live or die.” An indispensable 20 minutes of history. –Jim Gay