The Swimmer

What an interesting, weird film The Swimmer is. Released in 1968, and based on a story by John Cheever, it stars Burt Lancaster as a man who appears to be a typical upper-middle-class businessman who has decided to travel across his neighborhood swimming pool by swimming pool. He calls it "swimming home," and his journey is something of an odyssey through the world of Connecticut millionaires. As the film goes along, though, we start to realize there is something wrong with Lancaster.

To start with, he appears, wearing only swimming trunks (his only costume in the film) in the backyard of friends to take a dip in their pool. He glories at the beautiful day, happy as a clam, enjoying small talk. But as he moves to different pools, he starts to get hostile responses. A woman whose son he ignored while in the hospital; a big party where he sees a hot dog cart that was his, but has been sold;, at a public pool where the simple folk swim, sneering at him for not paying his bills.

We never learn the whole truth--we can surmise that he has lost his job, as one couple prepare themselves for his asking for money, though he doesn't. He repeatedly stresses his wife is well and his daughters are at home playing tennis. But then we wonder, how did he get started on this trek in the first place? Who walks around a neighborhood in just a swimsuit, barefoot, without a wallet or even a towel? It reminded me of those dreams where you are in public, naked.

This is not a feel good movie. At one point he is joined by a teenage girl who admits she had a crush on him, but when he gets a little too familiar she runs off, scared. The big scene in the film is when he visits a former lover (Janice Rule), an actress. She is not happy to see him, though he tries to rekindle their passion. He reminds her that they made love in that very pool, and she loved it, but she denies it, and he is enraged.

I won't reveal the ending, which is like something out of The Twilight Zone, that makes us reevaluate everything that we've just seen. It is devastating.

The director was Frank Perry, although he was fired from the film and it was finished by Sidney Pollack. Joan Rivers has a small role (her film debut) and for those who watched TV in the '70s, you may recognize Jan Miner, who was well-known as Madge the manicurist in a long series of dishwashing liquid commercials.