Cover of Save the Tiger

The star of the film Save the Tiger (1973), Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a Los Angeles clothing manufacturer who, in financial dire straits, plots to have one of his factories set on fire for the insurance money. . . As it happens, Harry prefers the past to his depraved self in the 1970s present.  In the Forties, after all, he was an American soldier at Anzio.  But Harry also prefers the past to the moral condition of present-day America, with, for example, its deep incivility.  A parking attendant snaps at him, a cab driver is angrily sarcastic to him.

What’s wrong with the film is that not only does Harry romanticize the past, so does Steve Shagan‘s script.  Harry says there used to be rules but not anymore—which is why such things as pornography and a lack of patriotism exist in our culture—and the movie seems to accept this.  Well, as objectionable as pornography, etc. are, and despite the collapse of so many traditional Western values, it is of course false that there are no rules.  What is true is that many otherwise decent or likable people keep pushing against the rules, often for the sake of an agenda.

Save the Tiger avoids self-righteousness and condescension—toward, for instance, the hippie girl (Laurie Heineman) whom Harry beds even though he is married.  Directed by John Avildsen, it is largely intelligent, but problematic.  Indeed, Avildsen should have known that the bright big-band song at the end of the film was inappropriate in light of the very dark incidents that Tiger was setting in motion.

On Monday night’s Jane the Virgin, a woman tells Rogelio, Jane’s father, she would like to have a baby with him since the two have much in common.  For one thing, the woman asserts, they’re both “aging narcissists.”  What other response would Rogelio make than to say something along the lines of “How dare you say that I’m aging!”?

Yeah, the episode gave us that and a whole lot of other things too, even some Hitchcock parody.  Take-baby-to-church Sunday rolled around (Mateo’s first time at Mass) after Alba admonished Jane to see to Mateo’s spiritual development.  The kid is too young for church, however, and—well, though I feared the episode would finally express some kind of banal, fatuous, secular-minded sentiment about religion, it pleasantly did not.

No Petra or Luisa this time.  Instead, pretty Justina Machado showed up, enacting a love dealer (i.e. a matchmaker), a new factor named Darcy Factor.

Cover of The Sugarland Express

Is The Sugarland Express (1974) a stupid movie, or is it just that the people in it are stupid?  Well, a ton of human stupidity obtains, but when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s The Sugarland Express that’s stupid.  The lower class woman played by Goldie Hawn is nothing but a cretin about whom we care very little if at all.  It’s an underwritten role and Hawn, withal, fails to make her sympathetic.

Steven Spielberg has a full supply of moviemaking talent, but his film, though based on a true story, has no good reason to exist.  At least Duel and the finally unsatisfactory Jaws are entertaining.  Sugarland can be entertaining too, but is so trivial the entertainment value seems as though it’s always on the periphery.

Cover of Marnie

Is Marnie (1964) one of Alfred Hitchcock‘s artistic entertainments, like the majority of his films?  For the most part it is, for it is consistently powerful and pictorially fine.  Consider the brunette female thief washing the dye out of her hair to reveal a blonde Tippi Hedron.  But all the mise en scene, all the engaging sights, do not keep away the rising shabbiness.  One wishes Hitchcock had known psychological nonsense when he saw it in a script or a novel.  Marnie is usually watchable, but The Birds, not this flick, is the genuinely good Tippi Hedron movie.

In Pupi Avati‘s exquisite Italian picture, The Best Man (1997), the narrative unfolds on the last day of 1899 when a young woman called Francesca (Ines Sastre) is expected to marry by parental arrangement an unappealing man.  By no means does she love him, but to cancel the wedding would bring scandal and financial disaster to the family, and so Francesca goes through with it.  Except that she falls in love at first sight with Angelo (Diego Abatantuono), one of the groom’s best men, and in her heart, she avers, he is the one she marries.  Separated for years from a paramour of his own, heavy-hearted, self-doubting Angelo finds Francesca a real temptation and in truth cannot really condone the marriage, but he doesn’t condemn it either.  The groom, after all, is his friend, albeit that friendship is obliterated once the groom learns of his new wife’s affection for Angelo.  At length the wedding is seen to have been a mockery, but the fin de siècle arrives without Francesca being in the arms of “the best man” she assuredly loves.  I will not reveal, however, the movie’s ending.

The fin de siècle—i.e., the end of the century—is important here.  The characters gleefully look forward to the 1900s.  Because she rebels against her arranged marriage, against the tradition of marrying not out of love but out of mere duty or habit, Francesca unwittingly behaves like a bona fide child of the new century.  She represents a coming change of values.  Ironically, the only person in the film who believes in marital Love is an ostensible lunatic, one of Francesca’s aunts.  Curiously, Francesca seems to absorb this “lunacy,” to become crazy herself, and yet in fact she is eminently sane.  Celibate now that her husband has apparently had the marriage annulled, she receives refuge in a country church and teaches Catholic schoolchildren (the clergy are good to her; there is no anticlericalism in this film).  No doubt loneliness emerges in this kind of life, but so does sanity.  More or less there is health here, and there are lunacies the West of the twentieth century will sweep away.  (But the characters are foolishly optimistic.  One man, after all, states it will be a century without war.)

The Best Man boasts a sensitive and sophisticated script, and its cast is very winning.