Compared to other Russell movies, Savage Messiah is actually rather restrained, although like them it gets involved in role playing, theatrical behavior, comedy, madness, and the transcending of everyday life. As Tchaikovsky does in The Music Lovers, Gaudier equates life and art. Like Tchaikovsky's women or Sister Jeanne in The Devils, Sophie lives in an ethereal realm of fantasy harshly at odds with the surrounding material world—in this case, a world of starving artist's poverty that requires her to grub for half-rotten vegetables or menial jobs and to hole up in a hovel that roars with the din of trains and traffic overhead. But here things change. Insanity, self-destruction, death menace or annihilate people in the other films; even the ragged troupers of The Boy Friend … are almost macabre in their blindness to their own incompetence. None of these threats disappears from Savage Messiah, but the pattern established in the other films—the willful immersion in destructive, alluring illusion that is both exalted and condemned—has been altered.

For one thing, Savage Messiah contains no antiromantic satire. (pp. 10-11)

Nor is transcendence any longer a major issue, for when the film opens Gaudier and Sophie have already achieved it. Russell's previous heroes and heroines try to escape everyday banality by immersing themselves in love, art, religion, fantasy. The results in each case are ambiguous; in Savage Messiah they are not. The devotion of Gaudier and Sophie to their ideals gives them the courage to face their difficulties with grace, wit, and passion: the film emphasizes not their suffering but their responses to it. Nobody rapes either of them at any time. Who could?

Even the stress on death, likewise an important concern of the earlier films, undergoes a change in emphasis here. In the movies preceding The Boy Friend (in which death was metaphorical), Russell dwells on death and more or less religious concepts of immortality befitting a person with a Catholic background. In Savage Messiah he focuses on death and earthly life. The powerful drives of Gaudier and Sophie are certainly death defying; but neither, unlike Russell's version of Tchaikovsky, shows much interest in being remembered; neither turns art into a religion the way he and his fellow music lovers do. In this film, "death" indicates not just physical passing but killing approaches to art as well.

One of them is the sanctification of the creative act, the ascribing of it to some ineffable mechanism which only the lucky few can understand. With Savage Messiah, Russell explicitly (in his own way) joins Rossellini, the post-1968 Godard, and other filmmakers who have striven to demystify art and the making of art. (pp. 11-12)

To demystify is one thing; to deromanticize is another. Unlike those who demand the second along with the first, Russell remains a consummate romantic even when he scalds romanticism. (p. 12)

At other times, the film's demystification becomes more political…. (p. 13)

[The first draft of the] script fails to tell us why Sophie suddenly gets so political when she has not previously shown any interest in the subject. When in the film Gosh asks, "How many of the enemy will that kill?" she is clearly being presented as a jingoist loudmouth. But what are we to think when in the script Sophie asks this question? Are Sophie's political statements intended to rid herself of Gaudier by persuading him to go away to war? The script offers nothing but inconclusive hints: the way she muses about "thick, oily" sleep during a distracted monologue. In an effort to clarify things, the film adds the other influences on Gaudier's decision, plus scenes like Sophie writing to him, promising marriage and saying that she mistook his enlistment for another of his extravagant jokes. Her political remarks, now that the nastiest one has been put in Gosh's mouth instead, seem more consistent with her contempt for Shaw and her spiritualized opinions on the nature of art. These changes tend to suggest that she does not consciously desire Gaudier's death. Yet the contradictory hints from the first draft still remain; and the film fails to reconcile them with the newer material, undercutting as a result its treatment of how political and personal motives can merge.

Even so, the concluding sequence intercutting Gaudier's exhibition, Sophie's grief, photos from the trenches, and a wartime parade—brings the film's consideration of art and politics to a moving climax…. The images are poignant not only because they reveal the full range of Gaudier's art but also because they show the art still existing after he has died. Again, the first draft is crucially different, presenting this exhibition before Gaudier's death, having him be on hand for it, and supplying suggestions for the spectators' empty-headed chitchat, which Russell has entirely discarded. The chic cannibals appear in only a few shots, and even then our attention is directed to one woman, honestly affected by the work, who looks at it attentively.

The contradiction between the beauty of the sculpture and the social realities that make it what movie moguls call "product" remains unresolved, held in suspension…. Over the end titles, Russell adds a spirited march, and this final contrast between image and sound epitomizes the film's moral position. Undeceived by reactionary social structures, Russell acknowledges fully how transitory is the artist's victory over death in all its guises. Yet he rejoices in this victory nonetheless. (pp. 15-16)