Save the Tiger
Director: John G. Avildsen
Year Released: 1973
Rating: 2.5
Willy Loman-type women's clothing designer (Jack Lemmon) comes to the conclusion he needs to set ablaze his factory because of outstanding debts in this sometimes effective character study. Getting Lemmon to play the lead was an important component towards achieving respectability because the scenes where the script has him 'seeing' dead soldiers, rambling about baseball pros or sleeping with a young druggie in an obvious scene about the clash of WWII and Vietnam cultures are like bad theater. Lemmon was so good as this character (he won an Oscar for it, but that was really one of those 'body of work' Oscars) he would play a variation on it some twenty years later in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross.
