Oft viewed as somewhat of an outlier in Merchant Ivory’s catalogue, Savages is generally viewed as a failure. Pretty much all of that sentence is a rather simplistic take on the situation. There’s quite a bit more to Merchant Ivory’s output than the period dramas that they’re known for, and frankly there are films in their oeuvre that deviate from that description far more than this one does. As for the failure thing… well, I guess that’s harder to quantify. The film is squarely located at a transitional period in the pair’s history and feels rather emblematic of that fact, often seeming like it doesn’t quite know what it wants to do.

With the opening of the film, the viewer is introduced to the Mud People. Firstly, by a title card with a very sharp-intake-of-breath worthy illustration. This film has quite a few title cards incidentally, cropping up whenever there’s a noteworthy change in the scenario. Anyway, yes, the Mud People are a forest dwelling tribe who engage in, you know, the archetypal primitive man type shenanigans in the vein of One Million Years B.C. but with more skin because this is a James Ivory joint. They go about their day, huntin’, gatherin’, enslavin’ wenchs from rival tribes, that kind of stuff. However, while just trying to commit human sacrifice in peace, a croquet ball lands in the middle of the scene. Its perfectly spherical shape has no place in their world, bringing it to a screeching halt. And so, they set forth to find from whence this oopart originated, and following the trail, they land upon an abandoned manor house. It isn’t long before they’re all there, clad in antique finery, having dinner parties, engaging in genteel conversation about the stock market, and, of course, playing croquet themselves. Also, basically doing the same or worse than they were doing beforehand.

I got to use the word ‘oopart’ in a sentence. Today is a good day.

The transitional thing that I mentioned. So… despite Merchant Ivory’s reputation, the company’s original raison d’être was that they would make English language films in and about India with an eye towards the international market. This was their first film to not be in or about India, except for maybe in the abstract. This might not be true; while it’s not mentioned on their website, they were apparently involved somehow with the Egyptian film The Night of Counting the Years (1969), though in what capacity I can’t really tell. Neither Merchant nor Ivory appear to be actually credited, not that that necessarily means anything, and besides which detailed English credits don’t seem to be forthcoming on the internet. That aside, Savages was made in America, suburban New York, around Beechwood, a fancy house and estate that had in its lifetime been owned by prominent bankers, railroad tycoons and also a cultist who claimed himself to be the reincarnation of St Matthias, but by this point was largely abandoned. The image of this abandoned manor house (that is, this particular one) was by all accounts a key part in the impetus to make the film.

You might notice I didn’t really give any characters in the description above. That is because the thing is pretty squarely ensemble based, but also because the plot itself is pretty woolly. Actually, that itself is probably exaggerating quite how much of a plot there is. While there are several stories unfolding amidst the action, describing them as plots… probably not. While we are obviously meant to draw parallels between the section in the forest and the section on the estate, the closest to a plot in terms of structure is in how the set up in the first act, wherein the Mud People are set to sacrifice the High Priestess’s (Anne Francine) lover (Lewis Stadlen), as is her wont, is going to be echoed later on by their twentieth century alter egos, and that is honestly pretty thin, though the direction it goes with it is perhaps not quite as predictable as one might expect. While the scenario is ostensibly a deliberate inversion of that of The Exterminating Angel (1962), it doesn’t really have that film’s sense of urgency about it. While it shares with that work the commentary on the beastly nature of man hidden behind the façade of civilisation, it is frankly a lot more heavy-handed in its approach to the subject; though to be fair to it on that front, it does present itself as a comedy. Nevertheless, the simple parallel with Buñuel’s work is probably one of the less interesting elements of the film.

More interesting instead is are things like how it maps the roles of the primitive society to the civilised (inverted commas, yadda yadda yadda) one. The High Priestess becomes the Hostess, the outcast becomes the fallen woman, the captured member of another tribe becomes the maid… Incidentally, said maid is also the only non-white cast member, frequently baffled by the behaviour of her captors, and whose own views, beliefs and heritage are roundly mocked by them as inferior while also being treated as both inherently suspicious and inherently exotic. Mmm, commentary. When the mask of gentility slips revealing the barbarism underneath, there is perhaps an implication that the behaviour of the dinner party guests, despite being analogous to that of the Mud People, is ultimately worse. The hedonism and cruelty of the latter’s world stems from ignorance and is performed honestly, that of the former, if they are truly as enlightened as they think, comes therefore from malice and is acted out with a false guise of propriety. Suffice to say, as they drift more and more into the same patterns that played out before, the end goal seems inevitable.

So… ultimately… yes, I like this film. However, it does have massive problems. The most flagrant is probably its length. It clocks in at about 106 minutes, which in the scheme of things isn’t that long, especially these days where, honest to god, every film seemingly has to clock in at over two hours whether it needs that much time or not, but even so there isn’t really enough going on in Savages to warrant such a run time. It feels like it could be cut down to something much tighter; I don’t agree with the claim that it’s akin to a short skit padded out into an interminable feature, as the film is actually doing stuff, but there is a lot that could be trimmed. As it stands, it often feels like it’s belabouring the points that it’s trying to make. It also is worth talking about the film’s style. Its inconsistent scattershot style which is presumably a key part in why the film gets labelled as a failure. The film opens as a black and white silent affair, framing itself as a documentary with intertitles explaining what the tribe are doing, then later it switches to voiced narration (…in German (…which apparently had no translation provided in the original theatrical release, though home releases include the optional subtitles for it)), then it just kind of drops the whole conceit. It doesn’t feel like there’s any compelling reason for any of this; something about the development of cinema as linked to the development of civilisation maybe? I don’t know. If that is what they were going for, it doesn’t really work.

Still, it feels like it may be more important in the history of Merchant Ivory than its status lets on. While not straight up based on an existing work, it nevertheless features the groundwork for the sort of films that would become their bread-and-butter in the ‘80s and ‘90s with their Henry James and E.M. Forster adaptations. At the same time, the nature of it lays bare quite what their actual thoughts on pre-war society are, or, at least, were. Not that, say, A Room with a View (1985) or The Remains of the Day (1993) are not critical of early twentieth century society and morals as they very much are, but the acidity with which Savages views the establishment is quite telling in a way that their more respected films, judging by certain dark corners of the internet, are not.

Then again, those are the same kind of people swear blind that there is no political commentary in RoboCop, so even this (non-)nuance would probably fly over their head.