Save the Tiger

I first saw this movie as a young man on PBS in Boston,in the late seventies and was immediately struck by the power, honesty and conviction of Lemmon's portrayal, of the ultimate mid life crisis.

Little did I know, that thirty years later, I would be going through one of my own and would once again be drawn to, and struck by, the sincerity and integrity of Jack Lemmon's performance.

The film has it's critics, self indulgent, sentimental and simplistic are only some of comments made, but the film still has the power to make you question what you have done with your own life. It asks you how you got to where you are, and it makes you ask yourself if it was all worth it. It also questions/exposes the Great American Dream and asks, if that is not the be all and end all, then what is?

Harry Stoner is not a man you should feel sorry for, but Lemmon's interpretation forces you to question his ideals and your own, as you follow this crisis point in his life. In the end, whether you like the film or not, or agree with what it is trying to say, you can't deny Lemmon his Academy Award.

Jack Lemmon will always be remembered for his comic performances. However, he could have been just as great as a dramatic actor. Save the Tiger and his tour-de-force performance in it more than proves that.

He plays Harry Stoner, owner of an heavily indebted ladies designer clothes manufacturing company. The film covers just 2-3 days of his life and we get a pretty good idea of his sad existence in the urban jungle and what he has become - no longer a good, decent person fighting for the right cause. There are references to Stoner's war record and patriotism throughout the film. The fact that the US was fighting the very unpopular Vietnam war could have influenced the themes of this film.

There is little in the way of plot but there is a rich characterization made deeper by the crises in Stoner's life and Lemmon's excellent depiction of a man who is cracking at the seams. My favorite scenes were the ones in the car with the hippie girl towards the beginning of the film and the question she asked him and Lemmon's comic reaction....

Lemmon won the Oscar for his Save the Tiger performance. He is complimented by Gilford as his partner. Lemmon is excellent as a troubled businessman at the breaking point because of financial troubles; it makes him decide to torch his warehouse so he can collect the insurance money.

Jack Lemmon's wonderful gift for portraying the every day man is fully at work here.

The film almost has a low budget, made-for-television feel and look. But it still delivers an engrossing story of people under stress.

This is a well-crafted movie, directed in 1973 by John G Avildsen in a conventional, theatrical manner, harking back to social dramas of 10 or 20 years before, but reflecting the more uncertain '70s in its unresolved ending.

Jack Lemmon delivers a brilliant, Oscar-winning performance as Harry Stoner, a middle-aged man at the end of his tether, who confuses his personal midlife crisis, and the failure of his fashion business, with what he sees as the USA's moral decline in the post-war years. Obsessed with the lost cameraderie of his active service in the war, with the baseball and jazz giants of yesteryear, and with the slain and fallen idols of the 60s (Kennedy, King, Monroe etc), he sleepwalks into his own moral abyss of an arson plot, comforting himself that he is no worse than the times in which he lives.

Lemmon's character is countered by those of Phil Greene, his business partner, convincingly played by Jack Gilford, and Meyer (William Hansen), the firm's veteran, expert cutter and refugee from Nazism. Phil does not suffer Harry's sense of disillusion, because he is too down-to- earth to have experienced the illusion in the first place; Meyer, also, despite superficial discontent with the changing times, gains strength from his skill and family life.

For me, the main theme here is the familiar one of the lost American Dream, and the film brings to mind the final lines of the seminal exploration of that theme, the Great Gatsby - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Harry's American Dream is not of a golden future, but of a golden past; it isn't lost, it simply never existed. But, that said, in this movie thematic analysis definitely takes second place to appreciation of Lemmon's bravura performance.