The Savage Eye

Judith McGuire, separated by an ugly divorce from an unfaithful husband, moves to Los Angeles in bitterness. She has nowhere in the city to hold on to and spends her days and nights wandering. She comments on what she sees in a sardonic voice: hypocrisy, vanity, everyday cruelty and the estrangement of people from themselves and from each other. The film joins an invented account to documentary footage; the woman’s story is fiction and the city around her is real. It offers no solution and does not cure its heroine. In American cinema of 1960 this hybrid construction was rare. The constant conflict of voice with image is the film’s real method. Barbara Baxley plays the lead in the sixty eight minute film by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick, completed in 1960.