Dark Lemmon
The poster reads: “Juggle the books. Set fire to the factory. Supply women for the clients. Harry Stoner will do anything to get one more season.” Jack Lemmon looks out at the Pacific Ocean, lost, desperate, and dressed in a gray suit of Italian silk. Almost everyone he interacts with in this movie will notice the suit. They’ll compliment it. “New suit?” “Italian silk.” “Looks nice.” Save the Tiger was acclaimed in its day, but today, it’s forgotten, an obscurity only recently reissued on Blu-Ray. It’s been out of print for over a decade, and the last home video release, a DVD with a cover more suited to The Day After or Three Days of the Condor, did nothing to reintroduce the film to younger generations. No critics or filmmakers have cited it as a lost classic, or even just a great movie that’s fallen through the cracks—it’s just there, successful but not enduring.
Lemmon plays against type as Harry Stoner, a morally dubious garment executive who wakes up screaming (presaging Albert Finney’s introduction in Shoot the Moon nine years later). He’s not getting divorced from his wife (Patricia Smith), but he’s suffering. Lemmon’s a miserable son of a bitch in this movie, politically incorrect and relatively unbothered by infidelity (he sleeps with a hippie hitchhiker played by Laurie Heineman at the end of the movie, after turning her down near the start). Heineman gets higher billing than Smith, a meta-indignity, and Jack Gilford, playing Lemmon’s slightly more morally scrupulous business partner, looks like he’s mid-heart attack most of the movie. Save the Tiger is the mid-life crisis of the generation that fought in World War II and survived; delivering some innocuous remarks at a buyers’ conference, he starts seeing ghosts of his fallen company men in the audience, and breaks down, ushered off stage and left to himself. There’s no one to counsel him, no one to talk to, no one offering anything but a pair of outstretched hands.
Writer/producer Steve Shagan always wanted Lemmon in the role (“that’s the guy I saw on the page”), but when he got it to Lemmon’s dialogue coach, the guy recommended Walter Matthau. Shagan was adamant: “I want Lemmon. Matthau is too ethnic.” Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman, and A New Leaf allowed Matthau to play criminal, violent, even sociopathic. Lemmon had far fewer chances to be anything other than a dweeb (The Out-of-Towners), a loser (Glengarry Glen Ross), or an everyman (The Apartment). Even in Missing, he’s the poor innocent father in way over his head. Every other Lemmon would get ripped off by the Lemmon in Save the Tiger, who chides his employees for not “speaking American,” keeps hookers on retainer to keep clients happy, and, eventually, pays an arsonist (Thayer David) to start a fire in the shirt factory below their building. They can’t burn down their own offices, there are too many fire code violations, but the arsonist assures them that planting the fire downstairs will guarantee the insurance will pay out.
The most remarkable aspect of Save the Tiger is its ending: Lemmon hands the money to the arsonist, agrees to his terms (compromising himself even further and endangering the life and livelihood of his friend), and walks around a smoggy Los Angeles, aimless. He ends up at a baseball field where a bunch of kids are playing. He leans against the outfield fence, and when one kid hits a homer, Lemmon gets the ball and chucks it into the street. It vanishes and the kids are dumbfounded and confused, not exactly upset. “Why’d you do that?!” one of them says. “I thought you’d oughta see it just once!” Nonplussed, one shouts, “You can’t play with us, mister!” They get back to their game, and Lemmon looks on. Roll credits.
Roll credits?!?! This is a 100-minute movie. It’s a relentless and bracingly real threshing of a man rarely granted sympathy in Hollywood cinema. Save the Tiger doesn’t suggest that traumatized veterans deserve a little free something, nor does it say that Lemmon’s justified; it makes no judgments, offering instead the deafening silence that characterize these crises. The audience gets zero resolution, leaving everything up in the air: the fire, Lemmon’s fractured relationship with Gilford, his crumbling marriage, the ramifications of his affair.
Save the Tiger has a small cast, but everyone Lemmon interacts with appears to be going through their own trials: lazy ticket takers, hostile cab drivers, incompetent and angry people everywhere. This was an Oscar movie from the Greatest Generation, but it never veers into schmaltz and, more impressively, isn’t at all dated in its presentation or attitudes. You could program this with other New Hollywood classics like The Bad News Bears and The Parallax View and it’d fit right in. For how fetishized the 1970s are in cinema, it’s amazing to me that Save the Tiger remains a lost classic, a movie begging to be rediscovered and appreciated just for how brave its honest hostility is.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith