Unnatural Acts

By J.C.

THE SAVAGE IS LOOSE

Directed by GEORGE C. SCOTT

Screenplay by MAX EHRLICH and FRANK DE FELITTA

Watching this movie is like visiting a friend in intensive care. Terrible damage has already been done, and the prognosis for recovery is uncertain.

In recent interviews, George C. Scott announced that he has given up acting. (Anyone who caught his performances in The Day of the Dolphin and Bank Shot would know that he must have reached his decision long before the official announcement.) Scott wants now. he says, to devote himself to directing. His most noticeable lunges along that line thus far have been a bombastic television version of The Andersonville Trial and a hysterical film on germ warfare called Rage.

Now comes The Savage Is Loose, which might most charitably be described as a fearless refutation of social Darwinism. The plot is Swiss Family Robinson with incest. John (Scott) and Maida (Trish Van Devere) are husband and wife who have been shipwrecked for seven years along a remote coast line. Their son David (Lee H. Montgomery) takes to the lovely surroundings with natural exuberance. He hunts and fishes, all under the tutelage of his father, while his mother fills his ears with memories of civilization.

Father, however, is a scientist, a student of Darwin. He resolves to raise the boy to be a natural man, with the skills and wiles of an animal. As he grows (he is portrayed at an older age by John David Carson), he proves to be more unfettered by convention than Father might have liked. As his mother comments, in what may be the worst single line of dialogue so far this year, "What we've got is a lusting male." Nothing will do but that Junior must have at Mom.

No Competition. The loutishness of this film is hilarious, but Scott's participation is sobering and depressing. He acts very badly here. Perhaps the only mark of his actor's canninesss is that he has surrounded himself with players who give him no competition. Van Devere (Scott's wife offscreen) delivers. under what must have been her husband's guidance, the most ruthlessly embarrassing hysterics since Marilyn Monroe's desert outburst in The Misfits. Carson, similarly clumsy, suggests not so much the primitive life as a somewhat furtive one, say, in late-night doorways on Manhattan's Third Avenue. The George C. Scott of former years, the actor of furious power, would never have worked with Director Scott.

J.C.

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