Savage

Savage (1973) is a television pilot that was turned into a made-for-TV movie, and it plays like one. It's essentially a 1970s detective drama, except the lead is a television reporter rather than a private eye, with an attractive producer tagging along as they investigate the case. It's not great, and it's not terrible—it feels like an episode of Mannix, Columbo, or one of the other detective shows of the era, which may explain why it never... - Full Review

Among Steven Spielberg's TV work, this gets classified as a "movie" alongside "Something Evil" and "Duel" simply in virtue of being the pilot for a TV series that was never picked up. It feels like it. It's well put together, and has some good performances, but has all the marks of a TV show including being timed mostly around commercial breaks, and it just doesn't highlight what Spielberg does well.

Spielberg closes out his TV commitments with one of those TV-movie-pilots. The script feels for all the world like one of the less compelling Columbo episodes, and the formula falls kind of flat without all the customary chewing of scenery, but Spielberg's dressed it up with all the gratuitous foreshortening and constant short cuts he can muster. As it happens, the network did not pick up Martin Landau's high-flying investigative reporter who never seems to get around to the "reporting" part.