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Rating: If a subtitle were to be given to the movie reviewed here, it could be An Everyman Today. Yes, especially when considering that, compared to the year it was made, 1973, the general situation not only in the United States described therein has certainly not changed for the better, quite the contrary.
Reread this title the other day and watched it again with undiminished pleasure, made by a director like John Avildsen (yes, the same one who directed the first "Rocky" in 1976) who presents us with a protagonist classifiable as the typical self-made Yankee man who has reached the turning point of a midlife crisis. It is Harry Stoner (played by an extraordinary Jack Lemmon, who rightly won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1973 for this role), owner of a successful clothing company. He would have everything to be happy, but money and success are not reliable vectors for a peaceful life. In fact, Stoner would be about to launch a new clothing line if it weren't for a simple snag: lack of sufficient funds to proceed. Or at least, given the banks' unwillingness to finance him, the only option remaining would be to turn to some loan shark in the mafia circle, with all the related consequences that such a choice would entail. Alternatively, equally dishonest and diabolical, he could resort to other hired criminals to set fire to one of the company's disused warehouses and thus collect the insurance policy money. In short, Harry Stoner is not doing well, the present is stressful, the lack of communication with his wife is a fact, and the psychological repercussions are becoming increasingly severe as, in addition to regretting the youthful years when he enjoyed playing in a jazz orchestra and adequately practiced baseball, he now suffers from recurring visual hallucinations even in broad daylight and sees fallen comrades who shared the traumatic war experience on the Italian front with him in 1943-1944.
But if this constitutes a nightmare dating back to a tragic past, Stoner, raised in an America immersed in the constructive and reactive spirit of the Rooseveltian New Deal, feels uncomfortable and is comparable to a tiger at risk of extinction in the current Yankee society where compromise reigns, the reckless race for success, compulsive consumption, tax fraud in the name of total deregulation, and customer deception. And it's not bizarre that, at the end of such a heart-pounding workday, the protagonist encounters a hippie hitchhiker with whom he shares a night of affection and intimacy, despite both belonging to different generations with different points of reference.
A sincere film highlighting the alienating condition of a man (perfectly embodied by a versatile Jack Lemmon) who has not yet processed past traumas, lives the chaotic present with anxiety, and fears what the future will bring. As if to say that the god of money damns all those who race to assert themselves in modern bourgeois society. And consequently, I am spontaneously reminded of what the great Giorgio Gaber used to sing when, in a song whose title I don't remember, he described a local self-made man, one who made his own way and stated "mi son fatto con le mie mani mi son fatto proprio di... merda!"
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