The Swimmer (1968)
Country: US
Technical: col 94m
Director: Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack (uncredited)
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Kim Hunter
Synopsis:
An athletic man on the brink of middle age turns up unexpectedly at some friends' house in rural Connecticut and after exchanging pleasantries announces his intention of swimming home via the pools of their friends and neighbours. It gradually becomes clear that he is living on a different level of reality to everyone else, even in a different time.
Review:
With its Marvin Hamlisch theme tune and flower power visuals, this peculiar movie might have become a cult, but instead nestles in that hinterland of neglected flawed masterpieces. Hailing from the same thematic pool as The Graduate, Seconds and The Stepford Wives, its concerns embrace all three, as if the characters of a Douglas Sirk melodrama had suddenly come to ten years later, to find that everything has rotted on the tree. On repeated viewings the pathos is increased by prior knowledge and one reads the faces of each successive encounter differently. While Lancaster begins a brash, confident and lean swimmer, attacking each pool with relish, he then acquires a limp, a shiver, etc. until he has to battle through a municipal pool crammed to capacity. The film can be read as a comment on the materialism of our times, but it is much more universal than that, a lament for lost youth and how our dreams come to nothing through our own human weaknesses. The production design is nicely graded to make each property individual, and the direction has that touch of sixties tricksiness (close-ups of Lancaster's eyes dissolving into next shot, slow motion, slanted shots through trees) which is appropriate to the shifting sands of the narrative.
Country: US
Technical: col 94m
Director: Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack (uncredited)
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Kim Hunter
Synopsis:
An athletic man on the brink of middle age turns up unexpectedly at some friends' house in rural Connecticut and after exchanging pleasantries announces his intention of swimming home via the pools of their friends and neighbours. It gradually becomes clear that he is living on a different level of reality to everyone else, even in a different time.
Review:
With its Marvin Hamlisch theme tune and flower power visuals, this peculiar movie might have become a cult, but instead nestles in that hinterland of neglected flawed masterpieces. Hailing from the same thematic pool as The Graduate, Seconds and The Stepford Wives, its concerns embrace all three, as if the characters of a Douglas Sirk melodrama had suddenly come to ten years later, to find that everything has rotted on the tree. On repeated viewings the pathos is increased by prior knowledge and one reads the faces of each successive encounter differently. While Lancaster begins a brash, confident and lean swimmer, attacking each pool with relish, he then acquires a limp, a shiver, etc. until he has to battle through a municipal pool crammed to capacity. The film can be read as a comment on the materialism of our times, but it is much more universal than that, a lament for lost youth and how our dreams come to nothing through our own human weaknesses. The production design is nicely graded to make each property individual, and the direction has that touch of sixties tricksiness (close-ups of Lancaster's eyes dissolving into next shot, slow motion, slanted shots through trees) which is appropriate to the shifting sands of the narrative.
Country: US
Technical: col 94m
Director: Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack (uncredited)
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Kim Hunter
Synopsis:
An athletic man on the brink of middle age turns up unexpectedly at some friends' house in rural Connecticut and after exchanging pleasantries announces his intention of swimming home via the pools of their friends and neighbours. It gradually becomes clear that he is living on a different level of reality to everyone else, even in a different time.
Review:
With its Marvin Hamlisch theme tune and flower power visuals, this peculiar movie might have become a cult, but instead nestles in that hinterland of neglected flawed masterpieces. Hailing from the same thematic pool as The Graduate, Seconds and The Stepford Wives, its concerns embrace all three, as if the characters of a Douglas Sirk melodrama had suddenly come to ten years later, to find that everything has rotted on the tree. On repeated viewings the pathos is increased by prior knowledge and one reads the faces of each successive encounter differently. While Lancaster begins a brash, confident and lean swimmer, attacking each pool with relish, he then acquires a limp, a shiver, etc. until he has to battle through a municipal pool crammed to capacity. The film can be read as a comment on the materialism of our times, but it is much more universal than that, a lament for lost youth and how our dreams come to nothing through our own human weaknesses. The production design is nicely graded to make each property individual, and the direction has that touch of sixties tricksiness (close-ups of Lancaster's eyes dissolving into next shot, slow motion, slanted shots through trees) which is appropriate to the shifting sands of the narrative.