Not Burning Bright

I finally caught The Tiger Makes Out (1967), a dated film that was never that good. I mostly wanted to see it because it's Dustin Hoffman's first big screen performance. His appearance lasts about a minute, but it's cool to see him on the street of New York just before he became, against all odds, a movie star.

But he's not even in the opening credits. This is a Murray Schisgal script, based on his play, starring the original stage duo Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, directed by Arthur Hiller.

The play was actually The Typists and The Tiger, two one-acts, neither one of which holds up that well. (Same goes for Schisgal's Broadway smash of the 60s, Luv, which is rarely revived. See the disastrous 1967 film version, starring a great cast--Jack Lemmon, Elaine May and Peter Falk--to discover why.)

I wanted to see, if nothing else, how a film was made out of the simple premise of the play. A man kidnaps a woman, brings her to his room, ties her up and plans to have his way with her. They have a long conversation and find they have more in common that they expected. The play verges on the absurd (Luv went even further in that direction), and in the abstraction of the stage, the distastefulness of the situation could work in a comic manner. Could it possibly work in the more realistic medium of film?

Well, no.

Whatever life the play had is adapted out of it. After the obligatory 60s rock-inflected song during the credits (actually pretty cool, though not as good as Burt Bacharach's "Promise Her Anything" in Arthur Hiller's 1965 comedy of the same name, starring Warren Beatty), we get to see Eli Wallach (the Tiger) and his miserable life. In fact, we spend a lot of time with this unhappy mailman as he tries to make his way through life in 1960s Manhattan. A self-styled intellectual with a hugh chip on his shoulder, he's so mad at the world that he plots to kidnap a beautiful young woman--any will do--get her to his place and, well, rape her, I guess. This idea is so ugly it's hard to laugh at, even if you can't take Wallach seriously and don't figure the women he's after are in any real danger. Worse, his escapades are shown through a lot of bad slapstick and satire, courtesy of Schisgal and Hiller.

Meanwhile, Anne Jackson is a suburban wife stuck in an unhappy marriage. She wants to better herself through higher education, and so goes into Manhattan to finish the education she gave up when she got married.

Meanwhile, we run into a lot of fine character actors--Bob Dishy, Charles Nelson Reilly, John Harkins, Elizabeth Wilson, David Doyle, Bibi Osterwald, Sudie Bond, Rae Allen, David Burns and others--who do the best they can with weak material.

Eli finally gets Anne to her room about two thirds of the way into the movie, where they do about ten or fifteen minutes of dialogue from the play. It's not bad--the two actors (still married to this day) have a rhythm. But even if it worked better, this chunk of the original play doesn't sit comfortably inside the bigger, wilder film

Then we end the same way we came in, with more wacky comedy that doesn't hold up. Still, I'm glad I saw it. I liked some of the performers and it's a great time capsule of New York.