Ann Savage from Detour in Renegade Girl
Ann Savage, star of a lot of B movies in the 1940s, played an astonishingly nasty femme fatale in Detour (1945), now recognized as one of the great films noir. When I, as Rhombus, made my short philosophical film noir parody, Sometimes Almost Never (see it on YouTube channel John Berner), I based the femme fatale, Wanda Mae Chisel (Imogen Lapp), on Savage's Detour character, although the latter possesses a much stronger acidity in her personality. By contrast, I directed Imogen Lapp to display no affect, almost as if Greta Garbo were to play a killer.
Blonde and pretty, Savage was an A list-quality actress stuck somehow in B movies. Her challenge as an artist was to make the most of her performances, to stand out above the mediocrity typically displayed in the plots of most of her movies.
The western Renegade Girl (1946) takes place in Missouri during the period when the Confederate William Quantrill and his outlaws hunted escaped slaves until he was killed fighting Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War. Ann Shelby (Savage) and her family are Quantrill allies. The film doesn't get into Quantrill's anti-slave activity, thus it doesn't cover Shelby's. She's the sympathetic heroine seeking vengeance on the Indian chief who murdered her brother.
This same chief puts a thrown knife into the flesh below her left collarbone. She takes a long time to recover. Quantrill by then is dead, the war has ended, Missouri is relatively peaceful. Hooking up with her old gang, she offers to marry the man who "does the most to make Chief White Cloud dead!"
This offer incentivizes the half dozen men, but also gradually makes them ornery as they chase White Cloud around Missouri and Arkansas. Ann Shelby, the only woman near them, drives some of them nuts with lust. Eventually, the worst of the bunch, Jerry Long (Russell Wade), kills his comrades, but is rejected by a disgusted Ann. She eventually gets White Cloud, but at the cost of her own life, dying in the arms of a cavalry officer she attracted earlier in the film.
It's not much, but at sixty-five minutes I didn't mind watching it, mainly because of Ann Savage's screen presence. Because she was so much better, usually, than the material she had to work with, it's a wonder as to why film business executives and other decision-makers in that world never decided to give her good roles in classier movies. On the other hand, her work in B movies points to something often overlooked about such entertainments: people like them, just as detective novels, true crime stories, horror and science fiction tales are popular.
As with Detour, there's something worthwhile in using a genre that can explore the depths of human experience. Had Dostoyevsky somehow made movies, Crime and Punishment and The Gambler may have been regarded as film noir.
A story of a woman outlaw in 1860s Missouri could be an A list movie if the powers that be had put big money behind it, but then they wouldn't have cast Ann Savage, possibly going instead the ridiculous route of miscasting someone like Jane Wyman.
It's a game of hindsight, looking back at decisions made by studio executives, casting directors, wondering what they were thinking some of the time. That Ronald Reagan was the first choice at Warner Brothers to play the male lead, Rick Blaine, in Casablanca should tell us that even men in that business didn't necessarily have foresight, but they did think in terms of popularity. Reagan in the early 1940s was a prominent actor, more so than Humphrey Bogart, whose star only began to rise with The Maltese Falcon (1941), after a decade of playing supporting roles, with the occasional stand out performance (The Petrified Forest).
Ann Savage illustrates why it's important to illuminate and explore the careers of actresses and actors one has never heard of, or knows little about. There's gold in them thar hills. Renegade Girl, while typical of the B movie western genre, comes alive because of one person, the star of the show and of this essay.
Vic Neptune
Ann Savage, star of a lot of B movies in the 1940s, played an astonishingly nasty femme fatale in Detour (1945), now recognized as one of the great films noir. When I, as Rhombus, made my short philosophical film noir parody, Sometimes Almost Never (see it on YouTube channel John Berner), I based the femme fatale, Wanda Mae Chisel (Imogen Lapp), on Savage's Detour character, although the latter possesses a much stronger acidity in her personality. By contrast, I directed Imogen Lapp to display no affect, almost as if Greta Garbo were to play a killer.
Blonde and pretty, Savage was an A list-quality actress stuck somehow in B movies. Her challenge as an artist was to make the most of her performances, to stand out above the mediocrity typically displayed in the plots of most of her movies.
The western Renegade Girl (1946) takes place in Missouri during the period when the Confederate William Quantrill and his outlaws hunted escaped slaves until he was killed fighting Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War. Ann Shelby (Savage) and her family are Quantrill allies. The film doesn't get into Quantrill's anti-slave activity, thus it doesn't cover Shelby's. She's the sympathetic heroine seeking vengeance on the Indian chief who murdered her brother.
This same chief puts a thrown knife into the flesh below her left collarbone. She takes a long time to recover. Quantrill by then is dead, the war has ended, Missouri is relatively peaceful. Hooking up with her old gang, she offers to marry the man who "does the most to make Chief White Cloud dead!"
This offer incentivizes the half dozen men, but also gradually makes them ornery as they chase White Cloud around Missouri and Arkansas. Ann Shelby, the only woman near them, drives some of them nuts with lust. Eventually, the worst of the bunch, Jerry Long (Russell Wade), kills his comrades, but is rejected by a disgusted Ann. She eventually gets White Cloud, but at the cost of her own life, dying in the arms of a cavalry officer she attracted earlier in the film.
It's not much, but at sixty-five minutes I didn't mind watching it, mainly because of Ann Savage's screen presence. Because she was so much better, usually, than the material she had to work with, it's a wonder as to why film business executives and other decision-makers in that world never decided to give her good roles in classier movies. On the other hand, her work in B movies points to something often overlooked about such entertainments: people like them, just as detective novels, true crime stories, horror and science fiction tales are popular.
As with Detour, there's something worthwhile in using a genre that can explore the depths of human experience. Had Dostoyevsky somehow made movies, Crime and Punishment and The Gambler may have been regarded as film noir.
A story of a woman outlaw in 1860s Missouri could be an A list movie if the powers that be had put big money behind it, but then they wouldn't have cast Ann Savage, possibly going instead the ridiculous route of miscasting someone like Jane Wyman.
It's a game of hindsight, looking back at decisions made by studio executives, casting directors, wondering what they were thinking some of the time. That Ronald Reagan was the first choice at Warner Brothers to play the male lead, Rick Blaine, in Casablanca should tell us that even men in that business didn't necessarily have foresight, but they did think in terms of popularity. Reagan in the early 1940s was a prominent actor, more so than Humphrey Bogart, whose star only began to rise with The Maltese Falcon (1941), after a decade of playing supporting roles, with the occasional stand out performance (The Petrified Forest).
Ann Savage illustrates why it's important to illuminate and explore the careers of actresses and actors one has never heard of, or knows little about. There's gold in them thar hills. Renegade Girl, while typical of the B movie western genre, comes alive because of one person, the star of the show and of this essay.
Vic Neptune
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