Save the Tiger (1973)

Phil, the government has another word for survival, and it's called fraud.

If there's one thing we learned from Going in Style, it's that growing old is a bummer. For most people, this realisation usually sneaks up on them in middle age, when they start noticing that the world is moving on without their input, belief systems are changing, music isn't as good as it used to be, and they begin to realise that all those dreams they nurtured as a kid are never going to happen. The smart ones accept this and try to find some level of happiness; others become entrenched and incurious, retreating to their querencia where, like a bull, they are at their most dangerous.¹

Harry Stoner is one of the latter, and Save the Tiger is the story of his last twenty-four hours as a human being. Harry (Jack Lemmon) apparently has it all - a mock Tudor mansion in Beverly Hills, a nice car (with car phone, no less²), a spiffy Italian silk suit, and is well-liked within his industry. But Harry's having nightmares, his marriage is one of cordiality rather than passion, his daughter is geographically (and probably emotionally) estranged, and his dressmaking business is about to go down the tubes. He can't declare bankruptcy, not after he "did a little ballet with the books" the previous year, and the buyers can't cover the outstanding debt. Both the bank and the mob offer him crippling loans, so he turns to insurance fraud, deciding to have professional arsonist Charlie (Thayer David) torch his Long Beach warehouse. Like the two men in the dungeon in the comic that hangs in his office, he “has a plan”. But for a man with such loose integrity, a plan isn’t enough. Like the eponymous tiger, he is a creature rushing to extinction.

Save the Tiger was something of a passion project for its writer Steve Shagan and its star. Shagan, formerly a producer on the Tarzan TV series, had tried to get the movie financed for years, but studios weren’t biting. According to Jack Lemmon: “At that time, they still felt that three-quarters of the movie-going audience was thirty or under. Rightly or wrongly, they felt that younger people wouldn’t care. They all respected the script, but they just didn’t feel there was an audience.” Shagan persisted, even writing a novelisation of the script to keep the wheels turning. When he finally approached Lemmon, he was vaguely threatening: “This guy comes up to me and says would I like to read this script and how he’s going to haunt me till I do. So I ask him what he’s done before and he says he was associate producer on the Tarzan series which, I have to confess, does not make me feel like saying ‘Oh boy, I can’t wait to read this.’ However, I did read it. And after the first scene, I’m hooked.”

Lemmon’s enthusiasm for the script was likely down to the prospect of another major dramatic role, something which had eluded the actor since his Oscar-nominated turn as alcoholic PR flack Joe Clay in The Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Harry Stoner has award potential written all over him: he’s barely off-screen for the entire runtime, is clearly suffering from PTSD (among other things), and even gets a mini-breakdown scene tailormade for the nominations reel. He also represents a dark mirror of Lemmon’s previous angst-ridden, put-upon social climber C.C. Baxter in The Apartment (1960) - where Baxter provides the love nest, Harry provides the girls. And Lemmon is extremely good, managing to tone down most of his comic actor tics to fine effect³, although the pressure of the part took its toll: “I was so distraught. I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t relate to anything else. I couldn’t give a damn about anything else. I was too far into this role and I was afraid of losing Harry Stoner.” Lemmon would randomly burst into tears, snap at his wife, talk to himself, and feed his growing alcoholism. A lot of this may be Method PR, but Lemmon clearly suffered for his craft and the resulting performance is one of his best, a standout in an otherwise thoroughly mediocre movie. Without his inherent Everyman charm, Save the Tiger would be an insufferable mess.

There’s no doubt that Save the Tiger has something to say. You could say that it has too many things to say, a swing-for-the-bleachers state-of-the-nation piece that aims to explore both the corrupting nature of capitalism and lost dreams in a Death of a Salesman style⁴, with a seasoning of apocalyptic cynicism: the opening of film is all Vietnam, fatal fires and poisonous air, followed by a newsreader hawking dog food. It’s a world where high-schoolers are “shooting horse in the toilets”, Hollywood hasn’t made a good movie in thirty years, cinemas that once showed Quo Vadis (1951) now have eighteen-week (and counting) runs of “educational” pornos like Denmark Speaks, and stoned young ladies (oblivious to any name that hasn’t been on an album cover) hitch the Strip for kicks and “ball” any guy that looks nice. Save the Tiger has no subtext - like a Christopher Nolan movie, its characters never have a thought they don’t immediately voice - and Shagan apparently never met a metaphor he couldn’t bludgeon to death: the endangered tiger might be the most obvious, but Harry is also linked to Kamu⁵, a whale who has died from injuries sustained while swimming against a current in his tank (“He was magnificent.”). We get it. Harry’s a beautiful creature on the brink of extinction.

And this is the key issue with Save the Tiger: it likes Harry Stoner too much. In traditional middle-aged, conservative fashion, it suggests that Harry’s success was bootstrapped and his current financial issues are a national problem, rather than a clear case of him overextending himself. Harry’s partner Phil (a wonderful Jack Gilford) does mention this, but it’s quickly glossed over by the sheer weight of Shagan’s script: how can this be Harry’s fault when the world has gone to rack and ruin? They’re making jockstraps out of the flag, for crying out loud!

Save the Tiger also makes a banquet of Harry’s nostalgic yearnings, whether he’s muttering the names of baseball players or waxing lyrical about his jazz drumming days, even though it comes across less like a pining for days past than a severe case of arrested development. Yes, he was at Anzio; yes, there was moral courage attached to World War II; and yes, the capitalist system turns a blind eye to unethical (and unlawful) behaviour if it turns a profit. But this neither excuses nor provides a solid enough reason for Harry to jump into insurance fraud as his first option. The film would like us to believe he’s thought long and hard about it, but the arson is floated as a possible escape route within thirty minutes, and there’s no question that he’ll go through with it, even if it means ruining the shirtmaker in the space below. The decision should be momentous - a tragic loss of decency - but instead it’s another in a long line of seedy decisions (procuring prostitutes for buyers, fiddling the books, employing illegal immigrants in his sweatshop, cheating on his wife) that ultimately say more about Harry’s self-pitying entitlement than the state of the world.

This isn’t to say Save the Tiger is all bad. The performances across the board are good, particularly Jack Gilford (always a pleasant presence), Laurie Heineman in the thankless part of Myra, and Thayer David as the arsonist. Indeed, the arsonist scenes are the most compelling in the movie, and I wonder what the movie could have been had it concentrated on that aspect a little more. I also wonder what frequent Lemmon collaborator Billy Wilder would have done with the material: while John G. Avildsen is a solid director, Wilder would undoubtedly have cast a more cynical eye on Harry and less on the world that surrounds him. Perhaps that would have brought in the fabled under-thirties and helped at the box office, where it struggled to find an audience.

The movie fared better critically, with most reviews praising Lemmon’s performance. even when they weren’t so hot on the rest of the film. Lemmon would go on to win his first Best Actor Oscar against tough competition⁶, and cemented his status as a comic actor with dramatic chops, which is arguably a good thing, because without Save the Tiger, we probably wouldn’t have Lemmon’s later performances in Missing (1982) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), both of which make Save the Tiger look like the straining nonsense it really is.

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Next Up: “One man alone understood the savagery of the early American west from both sides.”

1. Really, Raymond? A bullfighting analogy? Who do you think you are, Hemingway?

2. A car phone with an old-fashioned receiver, which would make him a very early adopter.

3. Billy Wilder in Nobody’s Perfect: “Lemmon, I would describe him as a ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat.” There are many theories around the derivation of “ham”, but I rather like Peter Ackroyd’s take in The English Actor: Medieval to Modern, which suggest it comes from tightened hamstrings, implying that a ham actor is one who strains for effect.

4. And failing to nail any of it - it is, if you will, Miller Lite. Thank you, folks, thank you. I’m here all week. Try the veal.

5. “Kamu” is how it’s spelled in the novelisation - there’s a part of me that swore it was “Camus”, which I’m sure was intentional on Shagan’s part.

6. For those keeping score at home, his fellow nominees were Marlon Brando (Last Tango in Paris), Al Pacino (Serpico), Robert Redford (The Sting) and Jack Nicholson (The Last Detail). Say what you want about those performances - I don’t think I could sit though Last Tango again - but those are some all-timers.