Jack Lemmon as Harry Stoner lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with a Spanish-speaking maid, a life of luxury that masks a haunted mind scarred by WWII and crushed by mounting business pressures. He is obsessed with his baseball-loving youth, a fixation that flares up as he wakes screaming for the second time that week and acts out pre-war Brooklyn Dodgers games in the bedroom—a wild pitching windup he nostalgically recalls.
His wife, Janet Stoner, Patricia Smith urges him to seek help from a hypnotist, while he explains that every morning he wakes up costs him about $200—money tied to the mortgage, his daughter's Swiss school, the pool cleaner, the tree surgeon, and a looming need to finance a new fashion line at Capri Casuals. Together with his partner, Jack Gilford as Phil Greene, they run Capri Casuals, a Los Angeles apparel firm struggling to stay afloat, juggling fraudulent bookkeeping and the threat of a potential audit.
Today is the day of a big show for out-of-town buyers, and the tension between Stoner and Greene thickens as they argue about how to cover the remaining gap in funds. The bank offers only 50% on sales, leaving them to find another surge of cash within sixty days. Desperate, Stoner rejects every clean, legal option and even tests the limits of his morality, hinting at torching their Long Beach factory to collect an insurance payout. Their clandestine circle tightens when they meet the arsonist, Charlie Robbins, Thayer David, who has been hired to burn a different business on the ground floor and funnel the flames into their space above. The plan is laid out in a backstage exchange: a $2,500 retainer, a set of keys, and a rendezvous to carry out the fire. Stoner agrees to proceed, instructing Robbins to forget him if everything goes wrong.
Backstage at the fashion show, a different kind of pressure arrives in the form of a wealthy client from Ohio who expects discreet service by a local prostitute, Margo Duka, Lara Parker. The client and his French-speaking assistant are whisked away after a medical emergency—a sudden arterial occlusion—while the rest of the show presses forward. The event itself is a delicate blend of glamour and unease, with the emcee keeping the crowd engaged even as the room weighs the fragility of Stoner’s world. The show is a tentative success, but the undercurrent of risk lingers, and Sid Fivush, a mob-connected financier, Ned Glass arrives backstage with a stark proposal: emergency financing at 200%.
The duo’s desperation intensifies as Stoner and Greene secretly meet Robbins in a blue movie theater, where they pass him the cash and the address for the factory. Robbins delivers a critical caveat: the warehouse is out of compliance with fire safety regulations, and the insurance would not pay out if a fire occurred there. The only option would be to ignite a neighboring business on the ground floor and direct the flames into their own space. Stoner agrees to the plan, but under the condition that he and Robbins maintain some distance from Greene, and that if things go wrong, Greene must disappear from the equation.
As the day winds down, Stoner has a moment of quiet clarity on a baseball field. He comes upon boys playing in the outfield; the ball is hit to his left field fence, and he steps onto the grass to throw a pitch, turning the moment into a poignant reflection rather than a retreat from reality. When the ball sails over the backstop, a child looks up and asks, “You can’t play with us, Mister!” Stoner answers with a soft, lingering smile, a small gesture that hints at the enduring pull of his past and the uncertain fate of his present.
> So you could see it one time.
In the end, the film drifts between glittering success and moral peril, painting a portrait of a man who is both a shrewd survivor and a man corrupted by fear—and the people around him, from his devoted wife to his loyal partner and the shadowy financiers, are forced to reckon with how far they’re willing to go to keep the dream alive.
