Nothing says summer like a middle-aged man waltzing around the neighbourhood in nothing but a bathing suit diving into backyard swimming pools and occasionally flirting with much younger women.
There must have been something in the chlorine in the late 1960s, to have seen at least two movies, released a year apart and in different countries to centre thriller plots around private swimming pools in the heat of summer with characters who spend the bulk of the film unclothed. But where La Piscine, which came out in 1969 in France, is characterized by a dangerous eroticism in its crisp, sultry cinematography escalating its tensions to a fever pitch, its predecessor The Swimmer is more picturesque and aesthetic in design, its brazenness rather delineating gradually from a place of high esteem and purpose to one of intense uncertainty and timidity. In cruder terms, La Piscine is a film that rises to explosive climax, while The Swimmer shrivels into impotence. Like getting out of the pool.
A bit tasteless perhaps, but the sexual analogy is apt -especially in the case of The Swimmer, which though not so provocatively sensual a movie as its French cousin, is far more sexually-themed in the trajectory of its narrative and enigmatic protagonist, whose proud, open masculinity becomes immensely vulnerable as the film goes on and the facade of his nature is continually exposed. It is indeed an incredibly vulnerable and exposing role for its star Burt Lancaster -in his early fifties at the time it was shot- who never wears more than his athletic swimming trunks throughout the movie (and in one notable beat, less). It might be considered a daring performance at any time, but certainly in the late 1960s and in the personage of one of the biggest stars of the decidedly chaste and modest classic Hollywood era (this said, Lancaster had ruffled that particular feather before in the famous beach love scene in From Here to Eternity). And especially given that masculine sex symbol icon that Lancaster was, it is a highly compelling thing to see.
Coming from the writer-director team of Eleanor and Frank Perry (she wrote it, he directed it), The Swimmer adapts a quite famous short story by John Cheever, incidentally the only major movie adaptation of one of Cheever’s works. I haven’t read the piece myself but I can detect a loyal adaptation in how the movie moves and is structured, with its foreboding intangible atmosphere encapsulating well a literary style from that period I predominantly associate with Shirley Jackson, but was common among others as well of psychologically enigmatic allegorical short stories. The Perrys -and Sydney Pollack, who took over the extensive re-shoots due to conflicts between Lancaster and Frank- invented a few new scenes for the film to stretch it out to feature-length, all flowing together remarkably, in spite of potential incongruence and the chaos behind the scenes, like the river of swimming pools in Ned Merrill’s head.
Ned is a prestige marketing man living in an elite wooded suburb of Connecticut, introduced enjoying himself at a neighbour’s small pool party. They have a cordial conversation about vague successes in business and family before Ned notes that there are a series of homes in the area with backyard pools leading down to his place that he could effectively ‘swim his way home’. So he decides to do just that, hopping from one pool to another all through the neighbourhood. Along the way though, Ned finds himself gradually disillusioned by his neighbours and their perception of him, seemingly inconsistent with his own outlook and presentation on his life and personality.
He is a classic unreliable narrator, without ever actually providing narration -we simply are trained at the start on his point-of-view in a subtle and cleverly written way. There is an implied comfort and security in Lancaster's immediately charismatic persona, and the direction isn't particularly unusual for a 1960s star vehicle, that it is easy to trust the baseline perception.
The geniality at the first couple of homes first takes up new dimension though when Ned happens upon the former babysitter of his children, still a very young woman called Julie Ann played by Janet Landgard, who is bubbly and suspiciously forward with Ned -whom she eventually admits she had a crush on as a schoolgirl. Even before this though, Ned's attitude towards her is distinctly flirtatious, even predatory -obscured perhaps though it may be by her own interests and clear sexual power over him. She joins him for a little while on his adventure, along the way sharing in conversations with him, including on topics and stories of a sexual nature -while his attraction becomes more flagrantly obsessive. He starts making presumptuous, committed statements about protecting her, alluding to some kind of whirlwind romantic affair -and it is here that the script makes clear its perspective external to Ned; we don’t relate to his feelings here, it is creepy. And Julie Ann, it becomes more obvious, has been polite more than sincere in her affectionate attitude -the power imbalance that spurred it is in focus. She is alienated by him and is scared away. Ned, hurt and confused, is able to carry on though -but without the audience in his tennis court, several of which he passes by and where, on his property, his daughters are supposedly engaged.
From here, his reception at the various swimming pools becomes more and more muted. There is an air that he is either unwelcome or that he overstays it pretty quickly -we see hosts subtly trying to get rid of him as fast as they can. One of the great jokes is of course when Ned visits the home of a pair of nudists, and even they quickly see his bravado as not worth their time. The couple seem to expect him to be nude himself and he obliges in probably the most daring thing that Lancaster commits to here. Yet his dopey clutching his trunks in front of him rather diminishes the confidence he attempts to otherwise express. And it highlights something important -how naked Ned is through this movie. It appears like a gimmick at first, that Lancaster would go through this film so exposed in that brief, but it emphasizes too a compelling physical manifestation of his delirious arc. The body is an incredibly expressive thing and this movie allows us to watch its state falter as pride turns to vulnerability in both Lancaster’s body language and the hostility of his environment. Often times, the pool parties he steps in on are more conservative than he is -he stands out. And while he has a nice physique, especially for his age, it doesn’t take much for the awkwardness to set in.
Of course the state of mind that this reflects is equally interesting. Ned’s small talk and air of authority, from that incident with Julie Ann, are found to be at least partially fictitious. Another telling glimpse comes in the child he meets who is so taken with the fantasy Ned cultivates of water in his empty pool that he nearly dives into it -it is a glimpse of just how disconnected Ned is and how easily he can bring the impressionable (perhaps including Julie Ann) under his sway. Those that do snub him aren’t particularly upfront with what exactly his reputation is, what he has done and where he is standing. But it certainly becomes clear, and from enough objective sources, that Ned is not the man he projects himself as. Little details come up to cast doubt -the tenor of condescension from these elite figures, non-specific but pointed questions around his fortunes and allusions to unpaid bills, and a hot dog cart that he recognizes as his own -upset to apparently learn it was sold. It also doesn’t help that his focus on his objective is the crucial point of most of his otherwise trivial interactions. How would you feel after all if a neighbourhood acquaintance just dropped by unannounced asking to go in your pool? What perception his neighbours have of him is only lessened by this clear eccentricity and one-track priority, that begins to read as his own distraction from reality wherever it creeps in too uncomfortably. Yet he is cognizant of his loneliness and -in spite of having a wife- attempts on several other occasions to flirt with or recruit another companion -most notably a young and unrecognizable (pre-cosmetic surgeries) Joan Rivers.
The nearest he gets, in more ways than one, is with Shirley Abbott, played in a scene-stealing bit of fierceness by Janice Rule (although originally cast with Barbara Loden). She was an actress Ned had had an affair with, who in the rejection of Julie Ann and Joan, he is content to turn to as some partner in romantic adventure. But while he recalls their liaison with warmth and excitement, she only recalls the pain and devaluing she felt as a mistress. She reprobates him with starker sentiments than anyone he encountered thus far, especially when his disillusioned precepts lead to him nearly assaulting her in the pool. By this point it is blatantly clear that his version of events, and this relationship itself, cannot be trusted. At best he was completely naive to Shirley’s needs and emotions, irrespective of the pleasure he received. Inevitably this too is forced on his mind, and he struggles to comprehend it while desperately clinging to his mission as a distraction.
But distractions are naturally impermanent. And the movie continues to mount tension around what awaits him at the end of his swim. At a public pool is where it becomes too much -an environment where his social class makes him the most estranged -and he feels it upon entering the space, having had to walk at the side of a public road to get there. It’s here Lancaster’s body language is the most dilapidated, he is shrunken-in, shivering, and with a far more embarrassed sense of modesty. His appearance is for the people here a confirmation of their suspicions of what might have befallen him, and he is mocked for it. When the poor fortunes of his daughters are invoked, a nerve is set off and he runs the last little stretch home in the middle of a conveniently timed rainstorm. The specifics we still don’t know at the end, but Ned Merrill’s home is decrepit and empty, no daughters are in the run-down disused tennis court, and there is a lock on the door keeping him out as he sinks finally down on the step -the lie of his existence at last inescapable.
The extent of this state hits harder than the twist itself, the suggestion that Ned has nobody, his family is gone and he may not even have a home anymore for whatever disastrous financial ruin he has found himself in, is pretty blunt, and casts his whole demeanour through the movie in another light, even as elements of it were foreshadowed. His desperation with Julie Ann and Shirley rings more harshly, as does the directionless pattern of his talk; even the humouring of everyone around him. At the same time, Eleanor’s script and Frank direction did such an ample job of both weaponizing Lancaster’s charisma and setting a tone of uncertainty gradually building around his point-of-view. It pushed Lancaster as well, both physically and emotionally -certainly it is one of his most complex performances. The Swimmer is a movie that toes the line of the surreal, it is moody in places, perfectly mundane in others depending on the interaction. All of it depends on the vibes of those interactions making it a gripping psychological study. It feels a lot like other movies made around the same small batch of years like Wait Until Dark and The Wild Bunch, that feature classic stars in unconventional types of movies without censorship, therefore existing on the cusp of Old and New Hollywood -having feet in both waters. The Swimmer is one of the most intriguing of these, an under-seen gem of a movie that deserves more attention and recognition.
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