The Savage Eye

In 1959, a trio of outsider filmmakers – formerly blacklisted screenwriter Ben Maddow (The Asphalt Jungle), Oscar® nominated editor/director Sidney Meyers (The Quiet One) and future Oscar® winning director Joseph Strick (Interviews with My Lai Veterans) – wrote, produced, edited and directed this ‘dramatized documentary’ that San Francisco Cinematheque calls “a masterpiece of verité cinema.”

Adrift and bitter after her recent divorce, a woman (Barbara Baxley, Nashville, Norma Rae) moves through a purgatorial Los Angeles confronted by the poetic grotesqueries of the city’s leering landmarks and underground spaces – to the film’s devastated protagonist this is all apocalyptic spectacle. Gary Merrill (All About Eve) co-stars as the woman’s condemnatory internal voice in this “knockout of a film” (Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women).

Part Mondo film, part stream-of-consciousness experiment, part one-woman scream into the void, The Savage Eye was filmed on location over a period of four years by a…