The late Lee H. Katzin specialized in directing episodic television as well as made-for-television features during his 38-year career in Hollywood. He helmed a handful of big-screen features, including "Heaven with a Gun," "What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice," "Le Mans," "Restraining Order," "The Phynx," "The Break," "World Gone Wild," and "The Salzburg Connection." A suspenseful saga about survival in the desert, "Savages" qualifies as one of Katzin's more memorable made-for-television movies. Writer William Wood adapted Robb White's award-winning novel "Deathwatch" that received the 1973 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America. Casting is everything in this taut, 74-minute, ABC-TV melodrama about a wealthy lawyer out to bag himself a bighorn sheep. Affable Andy Griffith is surprising as this mendacious killer whose impetuosity lands him between a rock and a hard place. Co-star Sam Bottoms is a twentysomething gas station attendant who serves as his guide and helps him find his quarry. Somewhere along the way, Griffith shoots a man quite by accident, and then he struggles to clear himself of manslaughter by framing his guide for the man's unfortunate demise.
After Griffith gave up playing a widowed North Carolina sheriff with a son in "The Andy Griffith Show" between 1960 and 1968, he broadened his repertoire and played villains. The first time he portrayed a criminal was on "Hawaii 5-0" when he was cast as a con artist. Later, he played unsavory roles in at least five made-for-television outings: "Crime of Innocence," "Under the Influence," "Savages," "Pray for the Wildcats," and "Murder in Coweta County." In "Savages," Griffith plays the Machiavellian Horten Madec who wears spectacles and walks with a slight limp. Madec boasts about his wealth and influence, and he has fooled himself into thinking he knows everything about everything. He hires a young nature lover, Ben Campbell (Sam Bottoms of "Apocalypse Now"), who knows something about desert survival, as a guide to take him into the desert. As it turns out, before they become adversaries, Ben and Horten spot bighorn sheep. The reckless Horten shoots on impulse, misses the sheep, but winds up killing a desert vagrant. The sympathetic Campbell is willing to report the death as an accident. This accident, Madec realizes grimly, may exert harsh repercussions on his career. He shoots the vagrant with Campbell's rifle to implicate the youth, and then he orders Campbell at gunpoint strip down to his jockey shorts and wander in the desert. Madec keeps track of Campbell's every move by stalking him in a Campbell's own jeep. The attorney relies his high-powered rifle to prevent Campbell from drinking or hiding out from the sun. Madec hopes that Campbell will perish from dire exposure to the sun before he can reach town.
Shrewdly, Campbell exploits his knowledge of the desert and his ability to conceal himself and gets the drop on Madec. He wields a sling-shot and disarms the murderous Madec. When he escorts Madec to the local sheriff's office, the wily lawyer manages to appropriate the one piece of evidence that anchors Campbell's improbable story about what happened in the desert. Sheriff Bert Hamilton (James Best of "The Killer Shrews") seems to believe the slick-tongued Madec over the sincere Campbell. For a while, it appears like Madec will give Hamilton and the others the slip. Fortunately, things don't work out entirely as Madec has planned it. A piece of incriminating evidence—a slingshot--is recovered, and Madec's studiously orchestrated alibi collapses. "Savages" ranks as an above-average, unpretentious, tale of tension. Griffith looks like he relished playing a sleazy dastard. During his screen debut back in the 1950s, Griffith played an unscrupulous personality in director Eli Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd," but afterward, he went on to play sugar-coated heroes. The game of cat and mouse that ensues between Madec and Campbell is memorably handled on a small budget. Although "Savages" lacks the budget of director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's film "Beyond the Reach," ostensibly a big-screen remake of "Savages," with money to blow, it emerges as superior to its polished remake that cast Michael Douglas as the big-game villain.
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