It's bleak in places, for sure, but the grimy details of the settings and a tour-de-force performance from Lemmon ensure there's enough to pull viewers into a world where moral ambiguity is normalized in a realistic yet fairly hopeless way.

| Mar 18, 2024

[Save the Tiger] asks us to accept Harry's own justification for what he does -- that American materialism has turned him into what he is. And this is a moral hustle that must have enchanted the movie executives who financed this picture.

| Sep 29, 2023

The film is a meticulously painted portrait of a deeply flawed human being, and through it finds something to say about the growing cynicism and bleak reality of 1970s America.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 19, 2022

I very much doubt whether one would recognize the range of themes were it not for a masterly performance by Mr. Lemmon. Without him the film might look like just another glance at a man on the edge of breakdown.

| Aug 8, 2022

Avildsen has a particular talent for recreating lifelike situations. Here, his camera works like a magnet, picking up each squalid detail.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2021

The only thing that saves "Save the Tiger" is Lemmon's highly believable dramatic performance.

| Jun 11, 2021

Jack Lemmon gives the truest, most convincing performance of his career in "Save the Tiger," a vividly affecting film about middle-aged survival.

| Jun 11, 2021

Lemmon is acutely sensitive at earning pity in this exceptional acting achievement. His brain in a vise is yours, for a time.

| Jun 11, 2021

Only days after seeing the picture do we realize just how much "Save The Tiger" has to say.

| Jun 11, 2021

At times, many times, in "Save The Tiger" one wants to yell out to Harry Stoner, "Hey, man, either quit your job or stop complaining." And then one realizes that it's not Harry's fault.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 11, 2021

Just a few wry degrees in another direction would have made us scorn Harry and his sentimental self-serving values. But, Lemmon is a great sympathy-bidder and his worst punishment is to feel sad.

| Jun 11, 2021

It's a sad, powerful, depressing movie.

| Jun 11, 2021

To observe Jack Lemmon's foremost performance in "Save the Tiger" is to witness and share the actor's joy in having reached the pinnacle of his long, gratifying career.

| Jun 11, 2021

Save the Tiger is a small and intensely personal work, carrying the concerns of Shagan (who fought for two years to get it financed), Lemmon (who did it for no salary) and Avildsen (whose sympathetic response to the material is evident in every frame).

| Jun 11, 2021

[Save the Tiger], despite its flaws, stands as a remarkable achievement for its writer, Steve Shagan; its director; and, perhaps above all, its star, Jack Lemmon.

| Jun 29, 2020

In the phony moral quagmire of Save the Tiger Jack Lemmon tugs at our heart strings while never letting go of his purse strings ...

| Mar 22, 2018

A jolting drama, fueled by two stunning performances.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 11, 2011

There is a lot of mature, untapped ability on display in Lemmon's performance.

| Mar 26, 2009

Jack Lemmon won the 1973 Best Actor Oscar in John Avildsen's Arthur Miller-like sentimental melodrama, in which he plays a bitter down-on-his-luck L.A. businessman who feels cheated by the American Dream.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 31, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 1, 2008