Review of Save the Tiger (1973) by Paul Z — 25 Jun 2010

Save the Tiger is the account of a day and a half in Harry Stoner's life. John G. Avildsen sets the tone with a deliberately paced opening scene: In a frigid dawn, the heated swimming pool steams grimly outside his Tudor manse. The film thoughtfully unfolds, and we spend what feels like real time (in a good way) comfortably easing into Harry's routine. We learn he sends his daughter to a Swiss finishing school, drives a limousine equipped with a telephone and has a wife who suggests that he see a Dr. Frankfurter to cure his nightmares. He manages a huge amount of people, he helps fuel the economy, he pays his . . . well, last year he didn't actually pay his taxes. He and his partner did a nice dance with the IRS, who hopefully won't figure that out. It opens when Harry wakes up from a nightmare, and it closes with some kids who don't need him as a utility infielder in their baseball game. Harry is a partner in a dress-manufacturing firm, and this is his big day as it's the day when he presents his new line to the out-of-town buyers. Countless things happen to Harry during the day. A buyer almost dies of a heart attack on him, he has a couple of deeply reflective conversations (one with an ancient European tailor, one with the last of the beatniks) and he plots to have one of his warehouses set on fire.

And still, the entire time, his mind is on other things. He is plagued by his recollection of how simple life was in the 1940s. The title comes from a campaign to save tigers from extinction to which Stoner contributes. Then later on beatnik tells him that she read in the National Geographic about how tigers and other wild animals return to places of remembered beauty to die. Harry's place of remembered beauty is a professional baseball lineup, the Brooklyn team in the 1940s, the boys of summer. Harry was not such a bad ball player himself at one time. Now he deceives, pimps, steals designs from his rivals and finds himself negotiating with an arsonist. He wrestles with the guilt of surviving the war and yet losing touch with the ideals for which his friends died. He can't entirely grasp what went awry. His dream was to meet a budget, not being on one.

Save the Tiger is indeed invigorating in its offering of apprehensions and dismay brought out into the open, the handling of notions and intimate answers to the perceived moral dilemmas of modern times, and the puncturing of stereotypes that have clenched many into angles where they cannot comprehend the people with whom they share the world and cannot truly grasp the intricacies and dichotomies that make up the layers of daily life. But Save the Tiger is primarily a monolithic piece of movie acting. Jack Lemmon carries this great movie, which he was determined to get made, by the very impact of his performance as Harry. He makes this character so persuasive that we're mesmerized. Gilford's eye and ear in his altercations with Lemmon bring a sort of contrast. They persuade us they've been having this same fight for 20 years. There are countless other good performances in the movie too, particularly Thayer David's professional arsonist and Laurie Heineman's hippie girl.

There's barely a topical subject that isn't referred to, occasionally two or three times. Save the Tiger is an implosion of writer Steven Shagan's philosophical stockpile over the late 1960s and early '70s, as well as by far director Avildsen's most triumphant attempt to interpret the mold of 1930s and '40s characters, spirit and narrative into a misanthropic and progressively autonomous 1970s. Yet the movie's scrutiny of topical subjects isn't crucial to what makes it exhilarating. When Jack Lemmon and his partner Jack Gilford are feuding over the ethics of committing fraud, we aren't listening to the substance of the altercation quite as much as we're relishing the smoothness of its fabric. Lemmon and Gilford pack such vitality, such agility and banter into their carriage of the dialogue that their scenes together have a life alternately apart from the movie's indications.

No, the movie's not philosophically right as rain. Nothing is! Naturally there are disfigurements in Harry Stoner's character, and we shouldn't let him go scot free feeling so idealistic and nostalgic. Yet my whole analysis is askew, it feels like. The exhilaration to be had at this movie comes from the way the performers and John G. Avildsen distill a sequence of scenes that are human, temperamental, crimson. We have spent the day with Harry, and owing to Lemmon's performance, he won't be consigned to oblivion, not like Lou Gehrig, Joe Penner or Henry Wallace.