Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

namashi_1 Jack Lemmon. One of the most Prolific, Stylish, Natural Actors of all-times. He's amongst those actors, who, if you watch once, you begin to adore them. I consider Lemmon to be more than just a Legendary Actor, I consider Lemmon to be an actor who took his profession as his bible and lived for his profession.'Save The Tiger', a tremendous attempt, won Lemmon an Academy-Award For Best Actor. And deserved too. His performance as Harry Stoner, an executive at a Los Angeles apparel company on the edge of ruin and man who has had a challenged past, is played by Lemmon as if he was born too.'Save The Tiger' is one of the bravest attempts of it's time. It's a challenging film, that is executed on Screen by the Sheer-Power of Lemmon. He not only helps the film at every level, he actually becomes it's backbone.John G. Avildsen's Direction is superb. The Adpated Screenplay by Steve Shagan, shows us the rough & disturbing journey of a man who hasn't chosen Hell or Heaven to survive. It's a brave film, that has been made with utmost bravery & courage. It's a human story you need to watch, especially, if you consider yourself to be a pseudo intellectual.This is Cinema at it's best for some, but for me, It's ACTING at it's peak of creativity. Lemmon, you are magic.

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).

jexline "Save the Tiger", my all-time favorite film (followed closely by "Network") tells the life of Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon in an Oscar-winning performance) during one day in Los Angeles, where he contemplates burning down his warehouse for the insurance money due to his "ballet with the books". As he contemplates arson, he regresses to his past and wishes for a simple and more easy time. Jack Gilfrod (also Oscar nominated and also deserving) offers strong support as Harry's partner. All in all, a touching and very emotional movie, unprecedent by any film since or before. Also Oscar nomianted for Steve Shagan's script. Better than director John G. Avildsen's follow up "Rocky" (the movie that "Network" should have won over).

tarmcgator Jack Lemmon was the finest American motion-picture actor of the late twentieth century. He is often written off as a comedy star, and certainly some of his efforts in that realm of Hollywood entertainment are forgettable (though more than a few are still very human and very funny). But it is always exciting to see Lemmon unlimber his acting chops and portray the middle-class schlub trying to thrive and then just trying to survive modern life. His portrayal of Harry Stoner in SAVE THE TIGER ranks with his Joe Clay in THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, Ed Horman in MISSING, and Shelley Levene in GLENGARY GLEN ROSS, to mention only his most notable dramatic roles. I'd like to think the Best Actor Oscar that Lemmon received for SAVE THE TIGER (he had been awarded Best Supporting Actor for playing Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver in 1955's MISTER ROBERTS) was the film community's overdue recognition that he could play for sighs and tears as well as for laughs.Seeing this film recently on TCM through the filter of 35 years, I was still moved by the commitment of Jack Lemmon to Harry Stoner. Unfortunately, SAVE THE TIGER remains an awkward and extremely self-conscious movie, as much so as when I first saw it in a theater in 1973. Steve Shagan's script contains no references to the Watergate scandal that had started the year before; but in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, American popular culture was becoming increasingly obsessed with moral decay. Many novels and films of the 1970s suggested that political corruption and official deceptions had blurred the boundaries of conventional good/bad, black-and-white morality with which most Americans had supposedly been comfortable. (That was the standard they usually saw in the movies, after all.) Viewed from the perspective of the early 21st century, the suggestion that government and corporate wrongdoing could somehow make personal immorality understandable, or even commendable, seems rather quaint -- a sop, perhaps, to a movie-going Baby Boomer generation that was coming of age and groping for its own moral grounding.There are many problems with this clunky script, not so much in terms of plot as in terms of texture. Harry Stoner's obsession with the joys of his youth -- baseball and big bands -- quickly turns into a heavy-handed exercise in nostalgia, as though Shagan is showing off his knowledge of 1940s popular culture (Shagan was born in 1927). Harry's apparent readiness to hire an arsonist to save his troubled business makes his moral agonizing less involving, though perhaps Shagan meant to enhance the difference between Harry's seeming confidence and the severe misgivings of his partner Phil (Jack Gilford). The big dramatic setpiece of the film -- Harry's speech to the buyers at his firm's fashion show -- is extremely suspicious. Harry strikes me as too much of a professional to start losing it at such a vital moment. Why THAT event for a PTSD flashback? (There's another scene toward the end of the film -- Harry standing alone on a beach, replaying the soundtrack of Anzio in his head -- that's more subtle and more effective.) And then there's Myra, the happy-go-lucky hippie chick with whom, Shagan apparently thought, "the kids" could identify. (With a smile, she offers to have sex with Harry about 47 seconds after they meet. Yeah, I could identify with that.) Myra's seeming innocence and optimism have so little to do with Harry Stoner that she seems not a contrast but an irrelevance.Shagan's script benefits from the direction of John G. Avildsen. The opening shot of Harry's swimming pool is haunting, and industrial Los Angeles looks appropriately unglamorous. All of the actors (including Laurie Heinemann as Myra) are credible. But the real reason to see SAVE THE TIGER is Jack Lemmon portraying Harry Stoner. If his performance can't rescue the film, it is still compelling -- an exploration of a human heart that will break your own.