1940s
Savage instead made a screen test with Columbia Pictures—after playing Lorna in a Reinhardt acting showcase of Odet's Golden Boy"—and was offered a contract. Recalling Columbia mogul Harry Cohn as "a friendly Uncle type", Savage remembered Cohn being intimidated by acid-tongued Rosalind Russell. The two actresses featured together in What a Woman!, one of a dozen films with Savage released in 1943.
Although Columbia typically groomed its girls in the mold of Rita Hayworth, Savage's look echoed Ann Sheridan, although her customary blonde locks were reddened for Footlight Glamour (1943) "so that the star, Penny Singleton, would be the only blonde on screen." She joined Joan Davis and Jinx Falkenburg in Two Senoritas from Chicago (1943) and starred (as a brunette) in the first of several outings with Tom Neal in Klondike Kate (1943). At this time, during World War II, Savage was also a popular pin-up model, including posing for a centerfold in Esquire shot by George Hurrell. She was a tireless seller of war bonds on two nationwide drives coordinated by Hollywood studios with the United States government.
Although Savage and Neal did not see eye-to-eye (she found him "childlike"), the duo would star together in Two Man Submarine and The Unwritten Code (both 1944) before their most famous film, the 1945 film noir Detour. Reminiscing in the 1980s about her career as a stalwart actress in B movies, Savage dismissed most of her roles as "mindless", saying: "The actresses were just scenery. The stories all revolved around the male actors; they really had the choice roles. All the actresses had to do was to look lovely, since the dialogue was ridiculous". Detour, she felt, was different. The two leads underwent role reversal, with Savage's Vera blackmailing Neal's Al, in a style described by her manager Kent Adamson as "vicious and predatory... very sexually aggressive".
Although the B-feature was shot quickly in 28 days, its status has been cemented over the years. Director Wim Wenders called her work "at least 15 years ahead of its time", and The Guardian termed Ann "a Garbo for our times". More recently, critics such as Derek Malcolm and Barry Norman have praised the film, with Norman calling Savage "sultry and sexy... a feline film noir star at its finest". After Detour, although Savage starred in a half-dozen more films during the later 1940s—including Scared Stiff (1945), The Spider (1945), The Dark Horse (1946), and Satan's Cradle (1949; a rare western)—her most prolific years were behind her.
When Detour entered the public domain, it frequently was syndicated on television channels and released in numerous VHS incarnations. Gaining cult status and garnering critical acclaim as "arguably film noir's greatest low-budget feature", this exposure earned Savage a new, younger following. From the 1980s, Savage also attended a number of film festivals, helping to bolster her personal status and leading her to emerge once more as "a glamorous figure-about-Hollywood at film festivals and galas".
In 1983, she attended a screening of Detour held as a tribute to director Edgar Ulmer with Ulmer's widow Shirley.
