Peter Viney's Blog

The Swimmer

1968

Directed by Frank Perry + Sidney Pollack (uncredited)
Written by Eleanor Perry
From a story by John Cheever

CAST:
Burt Lancaster -= Ned Merrill
Janet Landgard – Julie
Janice Rule – Shirley
Tony Bickley- Donald
Joan Rivers – Joan

The 60s films revisited series continues…

The cast list could go on, but no one has much of a role except Burt Lancaster.  He said it was his best and favourite film. Well, it’s not within many leagues of either Trapeze or Elmer Gantry in my memory. I have a framed soundtrack LP of Trapeze on the wall, plus a framed EP of Elmer Gantry. The thing is, in those films he shared the spotlight with Tony Curtis, Gina Lollobrigida and then Jean Simmons. In this one he really only shares credit with his swimming trunks. Everyone else is fleeting. Maybe that’s why he likes it. He’s barely off the screen. He later described it as “Death of A Salesmanin swimming trunks.”

It all comes from a very short John Cheever short story from 1964. I almost never get rid of books I own. I made an exception with John Cheever (who I had to sit through a dreary postgrad seminar on), so I can’t look it up. IMDB comments reveal it’s set in Connecticut, not LA, and that the central character is an advertising executive with amnesia and no time perception.

I’ve seen the film a couple of times, though not on its original run. I think it was in the 1970s when I last saw it on a black and white TV. My old friend Roy told me it was on Talking Pictures and I recorded it.

The story: Ned Merrill turns up in swimming trunks at someone’s pool. Well, I’d be shocked if he wandered into my back garden, but he looks across the valley and works out that he could “swim home” right across ‘the county’ via the swimming pools of people he knows. He calls it “The Lucinda river” after his wife’s name. We might wonder how he got this far from home barefoot in shorts. He radiates a kind of wooden autistic gloom.  That’s the character of Ned Merrill, rather than a criticism of his acting. There are many, many closes up of his bank of gleaming white tombstone teeth and incredibly blue eyes. You could see it was time to start weaving the rug on top of his head though. The blue eyes look too bright to be real, but Photoshop didn’t exist in 1968. Though computer dating is mentioned and we thought it an anomaly, but we checked and it did exist then.

Everyone knows him, and as we move along through ten pools, seem increasingly wary and suspicious. They know something.

Ned and Julie (Burt Lancaster & Janet Landgard)

He sets off with his ex-babysitter, Julie, to the next pool … some very nice silhouette work by Frank Perry. They decide to run across some hurdles for quite a time. A girl in a pale blue check bikini with a big smile jumping hurdles looks oddly like a Tampax advert. I can’t remember who said it now but at least one of the females (probably Julie) confides My boyfriend is a very highly-strung person with so many problems. I see.

The nudists. Don’t dip it in the teacup, Burt!

He turns up at various places. You’d think a barefoot person would be expected to wash before jumping in your pool, but no. He meets a pair of nudists who know him, and respectfully removes his trunks while speaking to them, but holds it over his private parts. Still they get a good view of the Lancaster bum as he heads for the pool (as do we). He swims across their pool naked, holding his trunks in the air to keep them dry.  WTF?

Kevin and the empty pool

Then there’s an empty pool with a young boy, Kevin, and Ned teaches him swim movements in the dry pool and tells him about his daughters who are playing tennis at the court at his house. He tells everyone this.

Joan Rivers doesn’t get to do a single joke

Joan Rivers makes a very short first film cameo as a woman called … um, Joan. She’s warned to ignore his request to swim along with him. He then sees a hot dog cart that used to belong to him. The pool owner angrily points out he bought in a garage sale.

Surely this is Shirley (Janice Rule). No smiles for Ned.

Then there’s a sparky woman (Janice Rule),an actress, who he once had an affair with. I thought her name was Surely, but according to IMDB it’s Shirley. He has tender thoughts about their affair, in sharp contrast to her memory of being the “other woman.” (This might be part of the famed later re-shoots as stills exist with another actress in her role).

He keeps walking on. There’s a good camera work scene of cars flashing by him, though in contrast he has quite a long walk through glaringly obvious studio foliage.

The public pool

He gets to a public swimming pool full of people and at last someone insists he washes his now muddy and bloody bare feet before entering. He also has to walk through the disinfectant pool. Then various tradespeople ask when he’s going to pay their bills.

He’s been showing signs of chilliness for some time – after all he hasn’t got a towel. It starts pouringwith rain.

The gates of home. Those blue eyes do look Photoshopped, but it didn’t exist in 1968

He approaches the house. His house. The rainswept tennis court he’s been talking about is covered with dead leaves. The net has collapsed in decay. He hammers on the door. The house looks abandoned. We see a broken window. He collapses on the steps in the rain.

The end.

It is compelling, original and unusual. I can believe that repeated watching will enable you to piece the story together, and that the second time through, aside comments will hang together and explain the puzzle. Well, I’ll leave it on the recorder for a while and see again.

The trivia on IMDB is fascinating. Before the film was shot, Burt Lancaster (already aged 52) had a fear of water and had training from an Olympian. Sam Spiegel produced it and the script had been rejected by William Holden, Glenn Ford, Paul Newman and George C. Scott. Burt Lancaster was fifth choice, and keen to do it. He did not get on with the director, Frank Perry. Sidney Pollack was brought in to reshoot scenes after the rough cut screening.

Burt Lancaster:
The whole film was a disaster, Columbia was down on it. I personally paid $10,000 out of my own pocket for the last day of shooting. I was furious with Sam Speigel because he was over at Cannes playing gin with Anatole Livak while he was doing The Night of The Generals. Sam had promised me, personally promised me to be there every single weekend to go over the film, because we had certain basic problems – the casting and so forth. He never showed up one time. I could have killed him, I was so angry with him. And finally Columbia pulled the plug on us. But we needed another day of shooting – so I paid for it.

Roger Eberts’ original review includes:

One interesting thing about “The Swimmer” is that it manages so successfully to reproduce the feeling of a short story in the medium of film. It is a very literary movie, and by that I don’t mean the characters stand around talking to each other a lot. The film episodes are put together in a rather formal way, like a well-made short story, and there is none of the fluid movement between scenes that you usually expect in movies. The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer’s experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man’s life. What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. 2 July 1968

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)