SAVE THE TIGER (John G. Avildsen, 1973)

Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for his middling portrayal of Harry Stoner, partner in a Los Angeles dress-manufacturing firm who is at loose ends as he desperately tries to keep the business from going under, in Save the Tiger, a drama that’s occasionally rich but more often as frayed as Harry’s hopes and dreams. Partner Phil Greene’s “ballet with the books” has kept the firm afloat, but an I.R.S. audit is a constant threat, and now Harry is arranging for a warehouse arson to collect the needed insurance money. “The government has a word for survival,” he snaps at Phil. “It’s called fraud.”
     The film covers less than two days, but Harry’s head drifts back in time as Harry keenly feels he is being left behind. This is Richard Nixon’s America, and the current Southeast Asian war revives memories of World War II. Nothing seems to be going right for this endangered tiger; a major client, the day of the firm’s important show, is close to death after a session with a prostitute that Harry arranged for him goes horribly awry. The red paint involved is another reminder of war.
     Steve Shagan’s script, despite a few good lines, and John G. Avildsen’s clumsy, clueless direction are both at the TV-level. But two good performances matter: Jack Gilford as Phil, who is always prepared to let Harry do what he (Phil) says he doesn’t want Harry to do; Patricia Smith as Harry’s much concerned wife, Janet.
     His Oscar was largely the result of something that Lemmon did that his fellow actors admired—guiltily, since few would be caught doing this themselves: believing in the material, Lemmon performed for scale ($165 a week), to keep down production costs, thereby helping to get the project greenlighted.

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

Semi-sensational in the dark style of his Mildred Pierce five years earlier, Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn, allegedly based on the life of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, slides bumpily from individual story into moral fable. This is one film that gets thinner and thinner, and more and more ridiculous, as it hums along. The same can be said for the performance of its star, Kirk Douglas, which is at its best early on, when the actor is given something to play, but gets more and more ridiculous as jazz trumpeter Rick Martin comes to exemplify more and more blatantly the false adage that a great artist must be a great human being first. This aspect of the material may have been lifted from The Citadel (King Vidor, 1938), from A.J. Cronin’s medical novel.
     One may therefore wish to give Curtiz a pass and blame instead the authors of the script, Carl Foreman and Edmund H. North, and Dorothy Baker, whose novel they adapted; only, one finds strengthened the argument that Curtiz pursued just such a moral fable in the case of Mildred Pierce, to wit, one which warns that fate will slap down a woman who attempts to succeed in the “male world” of business. This, though, is an interpretation, possibly wrong, possibly right, but even if right incomplete, while there isn’t much else to Young Man with a Horn.
     But the possibility that most interests me (until the slide) about this film suggests an alternative theme: the vexing conflict between those who have a certain talent and calling and those who feel at a loss as to which course to pursue in life. The embodiment of the latter disadvantage is Amy, Rick’s wife, played with ferocious complexity by a stunningly gorgeous Lauren Bacall. Rick’s name perhaps reminds us that the hero of Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), also named Rick, seems at different times to belong in either camp.
     Given that Jo Jordan secretly loves Rick, why does she arrange to introduce friend Amy to him? Three possible explanations suggest themselves. One, Jo is testing Rick’s affection for her (Jo)—attempting to assign Rick’s feelings for her to the realm of certainty. (When we are struggling with self-doubt and in love, we sometimes do stupid things.) Or, two, Jo may be unconsciously trying to prove Rick’s lack of love for her and thereby give herself at least the impetus to move on. Three, if one prefers a more elusive reading of the material, Jo may unconsciously be testing Amy’s affection for her. Unfortunately, we will never have the faintest glimmer of Jo’s motivation because the character is ineptly, inscrutably played by slack-faced Doris Day, whose singing throughout—Jo is a band singer—also is monotonous beyond measure. There is punishing irony here, to wit, that former band singer Day makes no sense as band singer Jo.
     Hers is the worst acting in the film; who contributes the best? Juano Hernandez as Art Hazzard, the brilliant though humble jazz trumpeter who befriends Rick when Rick is an orphaned child, tutors him generously, and whose death in a street accident makes the grown Rick (we are assured) a better man.
     Harry James dubs Rick’s flights of art on the trumpet as Rick pursues—I’m not making this up; the film identifies this—the high note that the instrument cannot deliver; indeed, music is one of the film’s four alluring elements. Hernandez and Bacall are two others, while Ted McCord’s noirish black-and-white cinematography is the fourth.
     Early on, Curtiz and cutter Alan Crosland Jr. attempt a bit of visual simulation of jazz, but nothing comes of this. Hoagy Carmichael’s on-camera narration, as piano-playing “Smoke,” is florid and condescending. Trenchant (although more or less lifted from Billy Wilder’s 1945 The Lost Weekend) are scenes of Rick walking and walking city streets.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

“Beginnings are always difficult.”

Think of Venice as a modern Eden—except that Ernst Lubitsch sullies the image of gleaming canals at night by showing the collection of garbage by gondola. The garbage collector, a jolly sort, sings an aria—to distract himself from the stench.
     In Trouble in Paradise, master thief Gaston Monesque falls for Lily Vautier on their dinner date in a posh hotel. “My little shoplifter, my sweet little pickpocket, my darling,” he coos. He is “The Baron”; she, “The Countess.” They were born with larceny in their hearts—this, their Original Sin. Their foreplay consists of little games of mutual pickpocketing; thus they show each other their mutual worthiness. Love doesn’t get more delightful than this.
     But there’s “trouble in Paradise”: temptations galore; and Gaston’s pretense at affection for high-toned Mme Mariette Colet, because of the shifting masks of the world to which he belongs (a metaphor for our own fallen world), brings his heart into proximity to the real thing, if there is any difference. Reviewers are fond of reporting that Lily, who finds herself, like Gaston, in Mariette’s employ (also under a false identity), is jealous. Well, yes; but jealousy is another, self-protective mask; above all, Lily is anxious that nothing is certain in her and Gaston’s world, that at any moment she might lose the love of her life.
     This comedy was Lubitsch’s favorite among his own films; the forty-year-old Berliner, transported to Hollywood, had pickpocketed fate that had ordained poverty for his Jewish existence. Fellow Jews Stroheim and Sternberg added “von” to their names as a kind of mask; Lubitsch’s mask was his Continental sophistication. The mask, poignantly, became his reality.
     Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall, as Lily and Gaston, give the performances of their lives.

FOUR MEN ON A RAFT (Orson Welles, 1942)

Four Men on a Raft was part of the ill-fated, never completed Orson Welles documentary about Brazilian culture and politics, It’s All True. It is a reconstruction of the voyage on a sailing raft that four impoverished fishermen had made eight months earlier from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, to present in person their grievances to President Getúlio Vargas. In the “feudal system” in place, owners of the rafts—jagandas—appropriated from such fishermen half of their catch, imposing poverty on the latter no matter how hard they worked, while at the same time, by law, these workers were denied the social service benefits available to other poor union workers. Vargas initially renegged on his promise to remedy the situation but, perhaps pressured by Welles’s filming, extended by law all normal benefits to jangadeiros, including housing, and medical and retirement benefits. During filming, the leader of the four men, Manoel Olimpio Meira, nicknamed Jacaré (Alligator), died. Welles’s postscript haunts: “Jacaré and the others made their voyage by jaganda exactly as it is here filmed. They were sixty-one days in the open sea, without compass, and guided only by the stars. . . .”
     The film is silent (given the equipment that RKO provided, it could not have been otherwise), although sound effects and music were later added. This punctuation only deepens the dreamy effect of the silence. The four men’s voyage is epic; they stop at various points along the way, mostly to interact with others (although in one scene they pray by themselves), affording the black-and-white cinematographer, George Fanto, opportunities to collaborate with Welles on gorgeously mysterious extreme long-shots of the four men walking across sandy land, on the horizon or towards the camera, which is to say, us. The film, of course, is just as mysterious on water; a man will suddenly appear as a shade behind the sail.

NINOTCHKA (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)

Greta Garbo proves herself a wondrous comedienne as Nina Yakushova Ivanov, nicknamed Ninotchka, a no-nonsense Soviet emissary sent to Paris to sell former tsarist Grand Duchess Swana’s jewels to alleviate Soviet financial duress. Swana, living in Paris, wants back her jewels—for themselves, but also in a psychological attempt to reverse history. Meanwhile, Ninotchka has fallen in love with Swana’s representative in the matter, Léon, Comte d’Agoult, who is also Swana’s lover. Léon has fallen for Ninotchka as well. Swana feels that Bolshevik history is ransacking her all over again.
     This hilarious film was cleverly written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, along with Walter Reisch, from a story by Melchior Lengyel. Deadpanning, Ninotchka, referring to recent Stalinist purges, hews to the official Party line: “There are going to be fewer but better Russians.” Sarcastic Léon tells her, “I’ve been fascinated by your Five-Year Plan [for national economic growth] for the past fifteen years.”
     But Garbo’s sublime acting and Ernst Lubitsch’s filmmaking are what matter most. Everything dour in the impassioned young communist slides into grace in Garbo’s romantic portrayal. Surpassing even Fredric March in Death Takes a Holiday (Mitchell Leisen, 1934), Garbo is revelatory with Ninotchka’s more and more appreciative apprehension of a Parisian world entirely new to her, the symbol for which is a purely decorative (hence decadent) hat that Ninotchka initially disdains but later buys for herself. Lubitsch achieves radiant visual slapstick and wit when Ninotchka bursts into laughter in a café after Léon, after trying unsuccessfully to make her laugh, falls from his chair onto the floor. Gorgeous, and full of anxiety: the shot of the empty safe where Ninotchka had been keeping the jewels—an anticipation of the vacant mail slot in Lubitsch’s next film, The Shop Around the Corner (1940).