The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 9-15
The Savage Eye (1960)
Directed by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick
Noir films are documentaries offering vivid, specific depictions of places at precise historical moments. They do so through showing the ways in which their locales are inhabited, often by people crowding around each other in isolation. An example is genre latecomer The Savage Eye, shot in and around Los Angeles during weekends over the course of four years. The film’s spine is a running dialogue held in voiceover between childless, recently separated young Judith McGuire (Barbara Baxley, appearing onscreen but never shown speaking) and her hard-voiced interlocutor called The Poet (Gary Merrill, heard but never seen), who challenges her to justify the deep loneliness that she inhabits while in a new place waiting out the legal issuance of her divorce. As they talk, we see the ghostlike “Judith Ex” walking among groups filled with people who look as stranded as she is. Their faces register flashes of pain regardless of whether they are watching boxing matches, visiting cosmetic parlors, attending church, or locked inside cars moving from one place to the next. There’s no spiraling crime plot as in traditional noir films, but The Savage Eye, like them, shows people reaching out towards each other in failed efforts to calm unrelenting despair. Aaron Cutler (December 13, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape”; introduced by series curator Imogen Sara Smith)