Andrew Sarris placed The Savage Innocents on the same ten best list of the year as Breathless (and Ray's King of Kings), and Godard placed it above Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, Hitchcock's Psycho, and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player on his own annual ten best. A decisive break with Hollywood, The Savage Innocents is set in the Canadian Arctic, where Ray did extensive ethnographic research for his tale of Inuk (Anthony Quinn, immortalized as “Quinn the Eskimo” by Bob Dylan), an aboriginal who becomes a fugitive from the law when he kills a priest for refusing his wife's sexual favors (a native custom). Peter O'Toole is one of the two Mounties who pursue Inuk across the tundra; though it was his film debut, he had his name removed from the credits when he discovered his voice would be dubbed. Capitalism and Christianity seem in cahoots against Natural Man in Ray's widescreen allegory, which has long been impossible to see in North America.
—James Quandt