John Savage
John Savage is an actor, born 1949.
For a few years at the end of the 1970s, John Savage was in the middle of American film. Born John Youngs and working under a stage name, he played Steven in The Deer Hunter (1978), Karl Hettinger in The Onion Field (1979) and Claude Hooper Bukowski in Hair (1979). Between them those films cover Vietnam, police work and the counterculture, and all three cast him as the same essential type: a decent, sensitive man being taken apart by something much larger.
That became the speciality. Savage is very good at lucid distress, at playing a man who is coming apart and still trying to answer the question politely. It is a hard register to hold, and it is why directors kept hiring him for one or two scenes long after the leads stopped arriving.
He never got the career the late 1970s promised. What he got instead was an unusually good address book: Spike Lee twice, in Do the Right Thing (1989) and Summer of Sam (1999), Terrence Malick twice, in The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), plus Salvador (1986), White Squall (1996) and a priest in The Godfather Part III (1990). Alongside those, in far greater numbers, sit decades of low-budget genre pictures with titles like Carnosaur 2 and Empire of the Sharks.
Television treated him better than late-period film did, with recurring runs as Colonel Donald Lydecker on Dark Angel and Hack Scudder on Carnivàle. He is still working, with credits here dated into the 2020s.
Movies (46)
- The Godfather Part III (1990)
- The Deer Hunter (1978)
- The Thin Red Line (1998)
- The New World (2005)
- Hair (1979)
- Last Cut (1997)
- White Squall (1996)
- Do the Right Thing (1989)
- Maria's Lovers (1984)
- Real Gangsters (2013)
- Message in a Bottle (1999)
- The Last Full Measure (2020)
- The Last Full Measure (2020)
- The Crossing Guard (1995)
- Summer of Sam (1999)
- Bereavement (2010)
- Bad Company (1972)
- Little Boy Blue (1997)
- In Dubious Battle (2016)
- The Jack Bull (1999)
- Fort Bliss (2014)
- Salvador (1986)
- Followed (2020)
- Bullet (2014)
- Sins (2012)
- Three Seconds (2017)
- They Nest (2000)
- I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale (2009)
- The Attic (2006)
- Tales of Halloween (2015)
TV (3)
Where to start with John Savage
The famous credit is The Deer Hunter, and it earns its reputation, but the performance to seek out is The Onion Field. He plays a policeman living with what happened during one night's shift, and the film hands him most of its second half to sit inside it. Very few actors of his generation were trusted with that much silence.
Hair is the opposite mode and shows the range: open-faced, naive, easy to like. After those three, jump forward and take him in small doses. Do the Right Thing uses him for one exchange and gets a whole social type out of it, and The Thin Red Line and The Godfather Part III are brief appearances in films you would watch anyway.
For a proper serving, Carnivàle is the best of the television, a Depression-era series with the patience to let a face like his do the work. Be warned that the filmography also holds a great deal of cheap genre filler, and the presence of his name is not on its own a recommendation.