Savages feels more like a feature-length version of a short art film idea. Various reviews always describe Savages in terms of its premise – a group of savages are interrupted in their rituals by a croquet ball, follow it to a country estate where they put on clothes and become upper-class aristocracy, until everything falls apart and they hit a ball back into the woods, follow it and revert to savagery again – and that really is the whole of the film. The dramatics in between the idea are just padding. And some of the song and dance numbers and games during the Edwardian sequence certainly do give evidence of that padding. Nevertheless the idea is rather droll – the symmetry of the ending is quite delightful. The most intriguing of the sequences is the one entitled In the School Yard with its images of people caught halfway between civilization and the remnants of tribal culture – where the capitalist plays with toy trains, which are interpreted as mythical carriages, and we see people discovering the embryonic beginnings of dance steps.

The film was one of several others at the time that explored the thin dividing line between barbarism and civilization. Others included the British film Lord of the Flies (1963), about schoolboys reverting to barbarism when abandoned on a desert island, and the French anarchist fantasy Themroc (1973) about people suddenly reverting to pre-verbal behaviour.