There are a lot of other good performances in the movie too, especially Thayer David's professional arsonist and Laurie Heineman's hippie girl. Gilford's timing in his arguments with Lemmon is a kind of counterpoint they manage to convince us they've been having this same argument for 20 years. Jack Lemmon holds the movie together by the sheer force of his performance as Harry he makes this character so convincing that we're fascinated. "Save the Tiger" is essentially a virtuoso piece of movie acting. Lemmon and Gilford bring such energy, such humor and grace, to their handling of the dialog that their scenes together have a life entirely apart from the movie's "message." When Harry ( Jack Lemmon) and his partner Phil ( Jack Gilford) are arguing over the morality of committing fraud, we aren't listening to the meaning of the argument we're enjoying the texture. "Save the Tiger" isn't just a statement it's a summary of Shagan's intellectual inventory over the last five years.īut that doesn't bother me, because (with apologies to Shagan) the movie's survey of contemporary issues isn't central to what makes it enjoyable.
Maybe the movie's writer, Steve Shagan, tried too hard to find a place in his script for everything on his mind. There's hardly a contemporary issue that isn't at least mentioned, sometimes two or three times. "Save the Tiger" has been attacked in some quarters for covering too much ground. It's just that one more season means something different to Willie Mays than it does to Harry Stoner. Now as the ads say, he will do anything for one more season. His dream was to meet a payroll, instead of being on one. He can't quite understand what went wrong. Now he cheats, pimps, steals designs from his competitors and finds himself dealing with an arsonist. Harry was a pretty good amateur ball player himself at one time. Harry's place of remembered beauty is a professional baseball lineup, the Brooklyn team in the 1940s, the boys of summer. The flower child tells him that she read in the National Geographic about how tigers and other wild animals "return to places of remembered beauty" to die. He is haunted by his memory of how simple life was in the 1940s.
But all the time, his mind is on other things.
0 kommentar(er)
