The Tiger Makes Out

There's a new wave in American films that might be labeled New York Ugly. It's a style first exploited on television in now-departed shows like Naked City and Car 54, Where Are You? Lately, it's moved to movies, most recently in The Tiger Makes Out.

This genre presents New York, of course, but not the glamorous, romantic New York of countless other books, plays, and movies. Now instead the camera records the New York of banging pipes, stockings that run, girls who wear falsies, and men in step-up shoes. It's the New York of stoopball at dusk, pop-top rings in parking meters, and second-rate furriers squiring lingerie models to Toots Shor's for a big date.

The Tiger Makes Out concerns a 42-year old mailman, and he is not played by Paul Newman or George Peppard. Eli Wallach squnched-in face and all, stars in this major, technicolor release. His wife, Anne Jackson, co-stars, and they are backed up by a cadre of New York-based actors, most of whom you'll recognize from Naked City and Car 54, Where Are You?

Wallach's mailman is an intellectual who never went to college because he couldn't master French. He lives in a basement flat that other people use as a storage room. There's a blackboard in the room on which he places

"Today's Word." But words are about the only things in life Wallach can master. After a particularly agonizing day of put-downs the mailman resolves to abduct and rape the first nubile ("Today's Word") female he chances upon. But instead, after a series of failures worthy of Wily Coyote, he accidentally kidnaps a pushing-40 Long Island housewife in town trying to re-enroll in college.

The Tiger Makes Out is a comedy, but the jokes, and laughs, are small ones. Author Murray Schisgal (he wrote Luv) likes to stretch situations that are, as they say, "all too real" and draw smiles with the resulting absurdities. His favorite device is a rapid trade of cliches by people quite oblivious to their banality.

If you know that The Tiger Makes Out is adapted from a one-act play by Schisgal called The Tiger, it's easy to understand why the film seems a succession of high points surrounded by a lot of filler. Those high points are good, though. They are touching in their way, but salty, not schmaltzy.

Wallach is good; Miss Jackson is good; Bob Dishy is especially good as Miss Jackson's car-pool husband. Director Arthur Hiller uses his camera with some originality, yet keeps it fairly unobtrusive. The film has some originality yet is fairly unobtrusive. --GLENN A. PADNICK