Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

kag2 This superb drama offers middle-aged longing, lost dreams, success, despair, and superb acting by Jack Lemmon (won the Oscar) and Jack Gilford (nominated for supporting). BUT: this film is not for everybody. A serious drama about middle-aged loss, struggle, and fading dreams won't grab every one. It's too slow for some viewers, and too realistic for some others. Harry Stoner (Lemmon) is as an LA businessman who seeks an arsonist to burn him out so he can collect the insurance and rebuild his failing business. His aging partner Phil Greene (Jack Gilford) opposes this, but realizes at his age (close to 65) he may never find another job. Both men are decent but jaded, and troubled by the lost innocence (or false innocence) of their youth in Brooklyn. Harry is also troubled by post-traumatic stress flashbacks from his lost comrades at Anzio in World War II, while Phil is troubled by going along with a crime that means losing his integrity. Both men appear to be Jewish, and may feel added burdens that come with having beaten anti-Semitic discrimination (or worse). There is the also longing for their boyhood in New York, before crime made cities less safe, and before the Dodgers (plus these two men) deserted Brooklyn for Los Angeles - which is not quite the sunny paradise that both probably hoped for. This film also came out in 1973, as Watergate, Vietnam, and the non-success of the Great Society all seemed to evidence a certain national decline. Save the Tiger is like "Death of Salesman Goes To LA." There is fantasy, failure, and searing struggles for success. The two main characters are not so tragic as Willie Loman; yet they are not all that far removed, either.

gavin6942 A businessman (Jack Lemmon)'s professional struggles begin to conflict with his personal life over the course of two days.Lemmon was determined to make the movie, despite its limited commercial prospects, and so he waived his usual salary and worked for scale. The movie failed financially at the box office, but critics and viewers who saw it liked the Oscar-winning performance of Jack Lemmon as Stoner.I have to agree with the viewers and Academy on this one. Lemmon, primarily known for his comedy, is excellent in this more serious film and really carries the picture. There is not much of a plot and although it is enjoyable, I suspect there is little re-watch value. But Lemmon is great, and this is very much a one-man show, so any fan of his is going to appreciate it.

jzappa 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.

rosyrnrn Don't get me wrong - I LOVE MOVIES AND I LOVE JACK! He is one of my favorite actors! But I have to tell you, while his acting in Save the Tiger had a few very poignant and striking moments, the overall picture was painfully boring-painfully. It was as if we were placed into the warped mind of a lost, middle aged man, wishing some of these twisted, immoral things would happen to him in real life, but he didn't have the guts. So he wrote the part and let Jack Lemmon act it out. Just a few of the parts that annoyed me were: -his stupid affair with a fairly unattractive girl young enough to be his daughter and who asked HIM if he wanted to have sex with her just as casually as when we ask a friend if they want to have coffee - this was ridiculous, contributed nothing to the plot and it was repulsive. -the part where the guy was with the two prostitutes, OK, I AM naive, but what on EARTH did it have to do with this movie? It was 150% grotesque and I have absolutely no idea what they were doing to him--he deserved the coronary that freakazoid! They could have left out that entire part of the movie... -meeting the arsonist in, of all places, a movie theater showing XXX movies was also pointless and again, senseless. Why not pick a more threatening location to talk over this crime? -could Jack's character's wife be any more icy and for no particular reason? Maybe the writers/directors could have built up that part of the movie, and include flashbacks of his war days??? -And the title, Save the Tiger -- no matter how many lifeforms are extinct/close to extinction, I simply do not see any correlation to the movie's main character. Why? Because there are always people on the verge of losing their business, or have already lost their business, AND there are ALWAYS people in the 'rag' business, no matter how bad the economy gets. It doesn't go extinct. It's like the food business. Clothes-food-transportation.... they don't go extinct. Out of all his acting roles, I just don't get why this performance would be Jack Lemmon's personal favorite one. Was it because he JUST overcame drinking? Because then I would see a link between drinking oneself to death and extinction of a tiger in that sense. Or was it because the entire role made no sense and was as far a departure Jack could ever have taken? Oh, Jack. I love your movies (not this one) and I miss you & Walter. But watching this movie -- I felt like I was being drug, slowly behind a truck, over a dry dirt road, and occasionally was pulled over a medium sized boulder. When the movie was over, they untied me from the bumper so I could go take a shower. (At least they didn't drag me through a cactus patch).