May 18, 2010: Save the Tiger
It’s been months since I skipped back into the 1970s for a reminder of how unique the filmmaking from that decade was. Being a bit of an Oscar hound, Save the Tiger (1973) has been on my list for a long time since it’s the only film for which Jack Lemmon won a Best Actor Oscar (he did win a supporting Oscar nearly 20 years earlier, so he did get appropriate recognition earlier in his career, which many actors can’t claim). I was rewarded with a thoughtful if somewhat dated study of two days in the lives of a desperate man, and a reminder of why I like the 1970s.
The setup is jam-packed despite its apparent leisurely pace and requires close attention, which may be a result of me familiarizing myself again with the period and not automatically understanding the shorthand of some of the dialogue and decor. Lemmon goes through his morning routine, showering and getting dressed while talking with his wife in their Los Angeles house, establishing their relationship, the status of their daughter (away at college), their financial situation, his business troubles, and the fact that his wife is going away for a few days on a trip. When a random young attractive hitchhiker he picks up on the way to work offers sex after about five minutes of conversation, the modern viewer is reminded of the free love days of the early 1970s, and the point the film seeks to make to current-day as well as contemporary viewers is how it’s often forgotten that this new hippie culture played out alongside the still-extant social framework of the older and more conservative generation who grew up in an earlier time and were living their more traditional lives. Lemmon is one of those older conservatives, being fiftyish at the time.
It turns out that Lemmon works with a partner in a clothing design/manufacture business which they have built up together over a long period of time, weathering the economic hard times but making a good living otherwise. However, they have now fallen on hard times and are getting desperate. Lemmon wants to pursue an arson-for-hire-to-get-the-insurance-money scheme, and his partner is not keen on the idea but being older and weaker, he knows he can’t stop Lemmon if that’s the decision. At the same time, they are hoping that an upcoming showcase of their new clothing lines for the year will inspire buyers and the orders will come pouring in, but that requires them to make sure the buyers are kept happy, by setting them up to enjoy the nighttime pleasures of the big city, one of the sleazy sides of the sales business.
This is the classic story of businessmen in trouble and trying to find a way out. The setting in the early 1970s is important, because this was a time when middle-aged successful businessmen had not lived a cushy life since their privileged youth, but rather had fought in overseas wars and been left haunted with memories of atrocities and infused with an innate sense of real human right and wrong. Thus, these immoral and illegal business decisions carried significantly more weight, which is a point which may have been obvious at the time of this film’s release but isn’t any more. Lemmon’s character obviously has made plenty of money, but he has not kept his consumption in check, having a luxurious Beverly Hills house, a maid, taking a cab out to lunch every day even when on the brink of bankruptcy, and talking about a run rate of $200/day, which really was quite a lot for those days. He doesn’t seem to have connected his lifestyle excesses with a softening of character which has apparently accompanied it, which appropriately diminishes our sympathy for his situation. He dreams of the good old days when even the professional baseball players were better. The changing times are also illustrated in the factory by the personality and style clashes between the old Jewish designer and the young gay designer he refuses to work with.
If this last point seems a bit awkward and obvious, it’s illustrative of an approach this film commonly takes, and the major flaw that I noted, though I admit that I come to the film with little context and without the benefit of having lived through those days with sufficient years behind me to perceive societal subtleties. Much of the exposition throughout the film is also obvious in this way, including the seemingly tacked on “Save the Tiger” title, which refers to a petition some guy on the street is trying to get signed to save tiger habitats. I guess it’s supposed to make Lemmon think of how the pace and pressures of modern life are making people destroy the existences of the defenseless in the world, and to make him yearn for a simpler time. But by shoving our face in this consideration, I think significant weight is lost. Even Lemmon’s childhood love of baseball comes full circle in the closing scene, in which he realizes he himself may be one of those defenseless relics of the simpler world, who is being destroyed.
I guess I’ve been beating up a fair bit on Save the Tiger, which betrays my ambivalence about it. I do consider it to be a thoughtful film and it’s clear that it loses some impact by being very much of its time, for which I don’t suppose I can blame it. If every film were a timeless classic, there wouldn’t be any commentary on the specfics of a particular time. Lemmon’s second encounter with the hitchhiker, towards the end of the film, is a rich exploration of generational differences and is absolutely worthwhile. This is a film worth seeing, and for more than just a peek at an era.
From a technical point of view, above-mentioned screenwriting weaknesses aside, there’s a solid pedigree here. Director John G. Avildsen would go on a few years later to win the Oscar for directing the first Rocky film to its Best Picture win for 1976. And of course Jack Lemmon is the centrepiece here, and while he’s still undeniably “Lemmon-ish”, this isn’t nearly as affected a performance as many he has turned in, and he really inhabits the character, particularly during an anguished attempt at a speech at his fashion show during which he is bombarded by memories from the war, and in a trippy sequence at the hitchhiker’s beach house. He sheds a tear, and therefore wins his Oscar, but this is a deserving performace in a way that Al Pacino’s and Paul Newman’s only Oscar-winning turns, in Scent of a Woman (1992) and The Color of Money (1986) respectively, are roundly considered to be NOT their best works despite being in my opinion both quite solid performances.
Save the Tiger captures a particular time when the baby boomers were wrenching power from the old guard, leaving them in the gutter wondering what they did so wrong and what these spoiled kids did so right. It’s a unique time in the North American culture of the past century, and well worth revisiting in a contemporary piece which can capture the time in a way that a period one could never do.
Shows the 1970s as they were.
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