User Reviews

This is a very unusual sort of western and in some ways I commend it. On one hand, the film is very sensitive in its portrayal of the American Indians--much more so than the typical film of the day. They are NOT savages (despite the title) and have much to admire. Yet, on the other hand, most of the 'Indians' are actually just white actors in brown paint--an opportunity lost for real Indian actors.

The film begins with a wagon train being attacked by the Crow tribe. All but one are killed--a young boy survives and is adopted by the Sioux. This boy grows into Charlton Heston--and it made sense to have a white actor playing this role. He is caught in the middle--as the Sioux are moving towards being pushed to fight against the white men to survive. But some of the Sioux are worried he has divided loyalties and favors the whites over his own people. So, Heston has to show his loyalty while at the same time taking a cautious approach--as he and his adopted father do not want a war if it can be avoided (which, as history has demonstrated, was not possible). And, if war comes, on which side will he fight?! In many ways, this film is reminiscent of later westerns like "Little Big Man" and "Dances With Wolves" because these films, too, are told from the natives' point of view. And, they all have a white guy in the lead who has been adopted by the tribe. If you think about it, this is a HUGE step from the typical westerns of the era where the Indians are all faceless savages and idiots. Yet, they also are a bit paternalistic because they MUST have a white guy in the lead. Wouldn't it be interesting if the leading man was an American Indian?! Overall, a better than average western that isn't perfect but it does have a unusual take on the typical cowboys versus Indians plot.

Young Jim Aherne, sole survivor of an attack by Crowe indians, is adopted by a Sioux chief. As an adult, now named War Bonnet, he is a go-between in an effort to head off war with the white man. But different groups of white men have different agendas.

This is one of the earlier films to portray native Americans in a sympathetic light, and to tell a story in which white men - or some of them, at least - are racist and treacherous. It over-symplifies, draws its morality in broad brush strokes, and loses some moral authority by not having a single native American in the cast.

But it is eventful, entertaining, colourful, and features pre-Biblical Charlton Heston as the heroic and conflicted War Bonnet which, with hindsight, is interesting casting. And it tries hard.

"The Savage", along with the likes of "Broken Arrow" and "Apache", is one of a number of Westerns from the fifties which signalled that Hollywood was starting to rethink its attitude to American Indians. Its traditional attitude had been one of hostility, a hangover from the nineteenth-century view that Native Americans were bloodthirsty savages who needed to be cleared out of the way so that America could achieve its Manifest Destiny, which was to become a continent dominated by the white man. This view did not entirely disappear after 1950- it is still present in films like "Only the Valiant" and even in John Ford's "Rio Grande"- but increasing numbers of directors and screenwriters were beginning to realise that there was another side to the story.

Like a number of later Westerns such as Ford's "The Searchers", the Paul Newman vehicle "Hombre", "A Man Called Horse", "The Legend of the Lone Ranger" and "Dances with Wolves", the plot revolves around a white character who has grown up among, or lived among, the Indians and absorbed many elements of their culture. (John Huston's "The Unforgiven" dealt with the opposite situation, that of an Indian woman adopted by a white family and raised as white). A young boy named Jim Aherne is the only survivor of the massacre of a wagon train by Crow Indians. He is rescued by a group of Sioux, traditional enemies of the Crow, and adopted by their Chief, Yellow Eagle. He grows to manhood as a member of the tribe, but when war threatens between the Sioux and the white men after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, Jim (or War Bonnet as he is now known) finds his loyalties torn.

This was the period when Hollywood was starting to discover that the magnificent scenery of the American West could be a big box-office draw in its own right. Most early Westerns had been made in black-and-white, but by the fifties many film-makers were starting to switch to Technicolor to show this scenery in its full glory (although some directors, notably Ford, could produce equally unforgettable monochrome images). Here George Marshall achieves some photography of great visual beauty, shot in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This is one Western which was filmed in the area where the action is supposed to take place, something which was not always the case. (Any film buff will be able to think of Westerns where, say, a flat prairie state like Oklahoma acquires lofty mountain peaks or the high plains of Montana bear a suspicious resemblance to the California deserts).

Although this is a comparatively liberal film when compared to something like "Only the Valiant", there are limits to its liberalism. The Sioux are treated respectfully but the same respect is generally not extended to their Crow enemies. (The one thing the Sioux and the whites have in common is a hatred of the Crow). Given his young age when he is adopted, Jim/War Bonnet, by the time he reaches adulthood, would probably identify culturally much more closely with the Sioux than with the whites, and would probably no longer speak English with any fluency. The film-makers, however, rather shy away from this and prefer to see him as a man with one foot in each of two camps. He still speaks perfect English and puts this ability to good use in negotiating peace between the Sioux and the US government, a peace which, it must be said, is very much on the white man's terms. Moreover, this peace is presented to us as something not altogether unjust, and War Bonnet goes so far as to concede that it is only fair that the Indians should make "elbow-room" for white settlers. (The historical reality is that the government was breaking the terms of an earlier treaty with the Sioux and that white settlers would have had little interest in the Black Hills, which are not good farming country, were it not for the gold).

The star of the movie is Charlton Heston, in an early part of his career and not yet the major Hollywood figure he was to become a few years later, especially after the success of "The Ten Commandments". Heston himself did not have a particularly high opinion of the film, writing of it in his autobiography "There was a very good film in there. Unfortunately, we didn't quite find it". Yet "The Savage" starts off as a very good film indeed, promising to be as good as something like, say, "The Searchers"; it is in the second half that it tends to lose its way, and what could have been a first-class Western never quite makes it. 7/10