1. HUNTING SEASON IS OPEN!: This season’s opener will have some kind of seeking, stalking, tracking or trapping, you know… hunting! Tally ho!
If your only frame of reference for America’s favorite fictional small-town sheriff is Mayberry’s gentle, homespun wisdom, watching 1974’s Savages is like finding out Uncle Bee moonlights as a syndicate hitman. Months after playing a howling-mad psycho in the telefilm Pray for the Wildcats, Andy Griffith traded in his folksy charm for a three-piece suit, a high-powered rifle and zero moral compass.
Based on Robb White’s 1972 novel Deathwatch (which famously forced its protagonist to hoof it completely in the buff across the scorching sands), Savages strips the hunter-prey thriller down to its bare, sun-bleached bones. The setup is deceptively simple. Wealthy, influential Los Angeles lawyer Horton Madec (Andy Griffith) wangles a rare permit to bag a bighorn sheep in the blistering Mojave Desert. Needing a knowledgeable guide with a sturdy vehicle, he hires Ben Campbell (Sam Bottoms), a timid, nature-loving college student and gas station attendant who knows the terrain like the back of his hand in his trusty Jeep CJ.
Things go south immediately when Madec fires blindly at a silhouette on a ridge, bringing down not a ram, but an old prospector named Winnie Haas, who just happens to be Ben’s mentor. When Ben refuses to help bury the mistake and take a bribe, Madec pivots from distinguished pillar of the bar to cold-blooded final boss. He forces Ben at gunpoint to strip down to his shorts, hatches a wicked alibi about Ben going stark raving mad and running off into the desert to die of exposure and begins playing a slow, cruel game of cat-and-mouse. Armed with a .30-06 Winchester Model 70 and an unyielding supply of malice, Madec spends the next day tracking Ben across the dunes, shooting him in the back and watching him bake in the furnace of the desert.
Naturally, Ben has to dig deep into survival mode—using a slingshot for a makeshift breathing apparatus while buried in the dirt, finding water in a hidden cave and eventually turning the tables on his tormentor in a satisfying third act.
Robb White’s source novel Deathwatch draws heavy, obvious DNA from Richard Connell’s legendary 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, proving that civilization’s thin veneer always peels away nicely when you add high-end firearms and wide-open spaces. Have I made an entire Letterboxd list of movies in this genre? You know I have.
As directed by veteran television helmer Lee H. Katzin, Savages is a lean, mean, workmanlike thriller. Because the audience knows right away that Madec is a murderer, the film skips the whodunit and leans into a pressure-cooker survival dynamic. Griffith is awesome in this, and when you think about it, he was already a villain in A Face in the Crowd. This is totally a movie I should make a Letterboxd list for: Movies where a rich elite man gets his comeuppance, but not before he shows what a lunatic he is.
In 2014, this was remade as Beyond the Reach, which changed Griffith and Bottoms for Michael Douglas and Jeremy Irvine.
