Save the Tiger is the performance Jack Lemmon himself often called his favourite, and it is easy to understand why. Directed by John G. Avildsen from a screenplay by Steve Shagan, the film stars Lemmon as Harry Stoner, the co-owner of a struggling Los Angeles garment company, a Second World War veteran who feels that the country he fought for, and the business he built, have both slipped away from him. Over the course of a few days, Harry considers arson, fraud, and other desperate measures to save his company, while trying to hold together a marriage, a friendship, and a sense of himself. Lemmon won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, his first Oscar in a leading role, and the first of his two wins. Harry Stoner is not a hero, and Lemmon does not play him as one. He is a man who once believed in simple values: loyalty, hard work, courage under fire, and the idea that America would reward those things. By 1973, he finds himself in a world of accountants, clients who expect favours, and a fashion business that changes faster than he can follow. Lemmon plays Harry’s nostalgia without sentimentality. When Harry talks about the war, or about a baseball game from his youth, or about a time when a handshake meant something, he is not merely reminiscing. He is trying to find a version of himself that still makes sense. The tragedy of the film is that he cannot quite find it, and Lemmon lets the audience feel that loss without explaining it away. The film’s structure is deliberately small in scale. There are no grand set pieces, no villains in the conventional sense, and no easy resolutions. Instead, Avildsen follows Harry through offices, factories, restaurants, and hotel rooms, watching him negotiate, evade, charm, and lie. Jack Gilford is superb as Phil Greene, Harry’s business partner, a quieter man who shares Harry’s desperation but not his recklessness. Their scenes together have the ease of a long partnership, and Lemmon’s generosity as an actor is evident: he gives Gilford space to be funny and sad in his own right, and the friendship feels lived-in rather than written. Laurie Heineman appears as Myra, a young hitchhiker Harry picks up, and their scenes show Harry’s tenderness and his confusion in the presence of a younger generation he does not understand. What makes Lemmon’s performance remarkable is its restraint. Harry is often on the verge of shouting, crying, or confessing, but Lemmon holds those impulses back, letting them surface in a look, a pause, or a joke that falls flat. The famous sequence in which Harry, exhausted and sleepless, watches an old baseball film and weeps is played without embellishment. Lemmon does not perform grief for the camera. He lets it overtake him, and then he tries, awkwardly, to compose himself. It is one of the most affecting moments in his career, because it shows a man who has spent a lifetime holding himself together finally allowing himself to feel how tired he is. Save the Tiger was a difficult film to get made, and it was not a commercial success on release. Its portrait of a middle-aged businessman contemplating crime was too bleak for many audiences, and its politics were too ambiguous for easy categorisation. Yet critics recognised what Lemmon had achieved, and the Academy Award confirmed it. The film has grown in reputation since, partly because its themes have only become more relevant: the pressure to keep a business alive at any cost, the gap between the values a generation was taught and the economy it actually inhabits, and the loneliness of a man who cannot admit that he needs help. Avildsen, who would later direct Rocky, directs with a documentary-like attention to Los Angeles locations: the garment district, the freeways, the motels, the offices with their fluorescent light. That realism serves Lemmon well. Harry does not exist in a stylised world. He exists in a city of contracts and deadlines, and Lemmon’s performance is rooted in that world. He knows how Harry holds a phone, how he straightens a rack of dresses, how he smiles at a client while calculating what the smile will cost him. Those details accumulate into a portrait of a man, not a thesis about America, and that is why the film still works. For Past Tunes readers, Save the Tiger is the essential bridge between Lemmon the comedian and Lemmon the dramatic actor. The humour is still there, in Harry’s wry asides and his attempts to talk his way out of trouble, but it is humour used as a defence, not as an escape. When Harry jokes, he is trying not to cry. Lemmon understood that distinction, and he played it with a precision that few actors could match. Harry Stoner is not a man who learns a lesson and reforms. He is a man who survives a few more days, and who is left to wonder what survival is for. That ambiguity is the film’s strength, and Lemmon’s performance is its centre. Revisiting Save the Tiger today, it feels less like a period piece than like a warning. The garment business has changed, but the pressures Harry faces, to cut corners, to please clients, to pretend that everything is fine, are familiar to anyone who has run a small business or worked in a declining industry. Lemmon does not judge Harry, and he does not excuse him. He simply shows him, in all his decency and desperation, and trusts the audience to understand both. That trust is what makes Save the Tiger a signature role, and one of the finest performances of the 1970s.