Movies Made Here: Savages (1972)

The wackiest of the Movies Made Here – and featuring the deepest indictment on the shallowness of humankind – is Savages, a Merchant-Ivory production from 1972. Savages has all the makings of a cult classic, if only it could be.

Though the Internet Movie Data Base lists the movie’s location as entirely in Tarrytown, it is technically the hamlet of Scarborough where the Beechwood Estate of the Vanderlip family once sat in all its dilapidated grandeur. (In 1979, developers turned the large mansion and its surrounding acres into a high-end condo complex.)

Director James Ivory came across this place and saw his own opportunity. “Savages came about because we had discovered this extraordinary abandoned house in Westchester called Beechwood," he says. "I mean, there were vines coming through the windows... Everything had been abandoned but it was full of stuff... The grounds had these enormous [beech] trees and it was just quite a strange atmosphere. We thought that it would be a great place to make a film, if only we had a film.”

First inspired by Beechwood, Ivory then came up with the story idea which he gave to screenwriter George Trow to flesh out: Ice Age mudpeople romping through the forest stumble upon this abandoned mansion. In the course of one quick weekend, they learn to chitchat about nothing and reach the “heights” of civilization – drinking tea from tiny cups, playing croquet – until their society unravels again and they run back into the woods where they began.

There’s a playful hodgepodge of film techniques at work here. Initially the naked savages, donning the longest dreads and biggest mudmasks ever, are filmed in black and white. Then the movie goes WWI-era sepia when they first enter the mansion and experience “things” for the first time – licking an oil painting portrait (a Vanderlip boy?, I wondered), trying on fur stoles, playing drum on a top hat – while this German voiceover renders it incomprehensible documentary. (Ivory notes that a Werner Herzog movie had inspired him to want a German voiceover; I admit Herzog’s voice is particularly magnetic).

Then in the “schoolyard” section, as when Dorothy enters Oz, full color arrives. Our savages have assumed most of society’s trappings, although clumsily, like children (comparing breast size and throwing cabbages). Ivory notes that the sections and textures of the movie coincide with the seasons as well as the stages of human life: youth, dinner party, decay, demise. One thinks of the inevitable ruin of an empire, like Rome, when these folks begin to run amuck in the end, watching their friend drown in the pool, fighting over a gemstone, spinning their mental wheels in talk of “the derivation of the term bric-a-brac.”

The soundtrack layers tribal beats with parlor music, and we are perhaps meant to realize we embody both the savage and the sophisticate. High clashes with low at all times: “We’re making love,” says the happily fornicating woman to her lover in the woods; the old man walks by and perceives instead, “They’re gathering mushrooms.” Later, the same old man says to his old lady, “The situation is beyond control; even if we were to intervene, the regime is bound to collapse.” She rebuffs, “Who cares. You are so dull.”

Not to be missed is the old-married-couple-like rapport between Ivory and producer Ishmail Merchant on the DVD’s bonus material interview. Indeed they were partnered both professionally and personally. The two bicker and banter good-naturedly about most everything, including the hauntedness of this estate and the success of the film.

Merchant, now deceased, notes how they stayed at the Hawthorne Motor Inn for six weeks during filming, but with the tiny budget he began cooking for everyone in the mansion’s kitchen. Perhaps his Indian food, he speculates, agitated the ghosts. Ivory says he never went near the kitchen, so he couldn’t attest to the cast and crew singing to scare ghosts away.

A hit at Cannes, and in France and England in general, the movie was well-reviewed but not well-received here. Ivory says, “The idea that these nice guys, Ishmail and myself, who made lovely – [“Who says nice guys?” interrupts Merchant] – Indian movies would come and bring this sophomoric nonsense and put it up there and have this splashy premier and get all this advertising space and publicity and so forth, it just rubbed people the wrong way. It did not fare well in this country."

Merchant protests, “I think if the film were to play now there’d be a cult following.”

It's been 50 years since the first Merchant-Ivory film and the pair is largely celebrated. Sadly, screenwriter Trow didn't fare so well. As this recent 50th anniversary article states, "He went on to pen his crowning manifesto 'Within the Context of No Context,' describing how media culture had destroyed tribalism, and then left The New Yorker to live a chaotic, nomadic existence until his death in 2006. Friends found him living on scotch and sardines in rural Nova Scotia, in the same crazed and naked state as the 'mud people' he created for Savages."