THE SWIMMER – The Blu Review

Some films are an enigma. Some movies will not give up their secrets no matter how many times they are viewed. Parts of the puzzle are missing, all the pieces are not present so we can make an accurate determination as to what we are witnessing. And quite frankly I like that, done properly I love it. When you watch as many movies as I have the linear progression from point A to B and then to C and then the final credits can be a bit mundane after a while. I like movies that do not tell us everything, again, done properly I love them. Movies of this type expect you to stretch, to get outside your safety zone, you are expected to think about what you are seeing and feeling, there is some mystery just out of camera range.

Among the more enigmatic and puzzling movies I have seen I would have to start with Citizen Kane (please no arguments, I know we learn the “what” of rosebud but we never quite grasp the “why” of it.), Vertigo, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Performance, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blow Up, (actually all of Antonioni’s resume) The Valley Obscured by Clouds, almost the entire resume of David Lynch, the list is short but impressive.   Among that list I would have to add one of the oddest, most obscure, frustrating, exhilarating, sad and wondrous and yes, enigmatic, movies ever released by a major Hollywood studio, The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, released in 1968.

I first encountered The Swimmer one magic night in 1971, I had the house, and thus the television, to myself and on a network broadcast saw The Swimmer for the first time. Ned Merrill and his suburban adventure has haunted me ever since. I have seen The Swimmer numerous times since then, always on video one way or another. Channel 11 in St. Louis used to show it regularly. It was released on VHS, of which I had a copy. A bare bones edition was released on dvd a few years ago. Now comes a wonderful new blu-ray edition from Grindhouse releasing.

The Swimmer may seem an odd choice for Grindhouse, such a marginal, art house title might seem more at home on Criterion or Kino. Yet I cannot imagine any releasing company doing a better job at presentation. You get both a dvd and blu-ray, with the same material on both discs, the restored feature, trailers, photo galleries and a series of featurettes that in total run longer than the original movie. Also an audio recording of John Cheever reading his short story, upon which the movie was based, one of the best special features I have ever encountered on a disc.

Hearing Cheever read his story is most illuminating, the film makers were very true to the source material, almost every incident, character and line of dialog as written by Cheever ended up in the finished film.

The dvd looks fine but the blu ray is incredible. Colors stand out so vividly The Swimmer almost looks Three Dimensional, without any glasses. I never expected to see any movie from the Sixties, much less the Swimmer look this good. This is easily the best version of The Swimmer we will ever see.

The featurettes are also among the best I have ever seen in terms of value. We get many memories from Michael Hertzberg, the first assistant director and Ted Zachary the second assistant director. Both have impressive resumes, it was Hertzberg who helped Mel Brooks put The Producers together. Both have some great stories to tell about the production of The Swimmer. We also get extensive interview footage with Janet Landgard who played Julie Hooper, Ned’s former baby sitter for his daughters, a very young girl in a bikini who accompanies the Swimmer part of the way on his journey. Joan Rivers tells about her involvement, her first part in any movie, at the very beginning of her career.   Joanna Lancaster, one of Burt’s children tells of her memories of her father’s work in the film business. Marge Champion recalls her part in the film and Bob Horn, a swimming coach and Burt Lancaster’s personal swimming trainer also has a lot to say about Lancaster’s learning to swim for the film.

Yes, incredibly we learn that Burt Lancaster could not swim well; he trained for months before the cameras rolled to look like someone who had been swimming his entire life. As physically fit as he was Lancaster did not swim as part of his exercise regimen. You could have fooled me! Throughout the making of featurettes we also get Lancaster’s own printed comments about The Swimmer and other projects in his career. There is an epic sadness to these quotes. Lancaster, like many movie stars, was not entirely happy with the way the system worked, he longed to not have to stay in such great shape, to not be “a caricature of a he-man” and just be a regular guy watching sports on television. He also is quoted that the film business was a constant fight to get quality work done.

We also learn that Lancaster did not come with an entourage. He had a close friend, Thom Conroy, who almost always accompanied him. In The Swimmer’s credits he is listed as dialog coach. We also learn that Lancaster would throw up before beginning any movie, unsettling information, to say the least!

We also hear from Marvin Hamlisch whose first film scoring job this was. Hamlisch is proud of his score for The Swimmer and well he should be, the music is one of the major reasons the movie is so haunting and stays in the memory for so long.

It is nothing short of amazing that Lancaster signed on to the project. We learn that while not exactly a “troubled production” there were some problems involved. Frank Perry and his partner, his wife, Eleanor Perry were relative newcomers to film making. Perry may have felt out of his league directing a serious heavyweight like Lancaster. At least one major sequence was directed by Sydney Pollack, at Lancaster’s request.

Lancaster himself is quoted as saying that maybe they needed a director like Fellini to get across the idea that what we see is not “really happening.” I don’t know, as it stands The Swimmer falls just short of masterpiece status. Only occasionally does it really look and feel like a 60s movie. During Ned’s sequence with Janet Landgard some of the cinematography looks like a shampoo commercial. Janet Landgard in close-ups often looks like a Breck girl.

Of the movie itself, what can I say. We begin with a man in swim trunks coming out of the woods where he has apparently been scaring the wildlife. This footage quite frankly looks like stock footage and sticks out due to graininess that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie. Our man in trunks jumps into a swimming pool, unannounced and uninvited. There are people there who know him, haven’t seen him in a while and are glad at his dropping in.

This is The Swimmer, Ned Merrill, a suburbanite with what he thinks is the perfect life. From the very beginning we see that something isn’t right. At the first pool he talks of his wife and daughters, his friends exchange worried glances. Ned decides that he can swim home, across the county from pool to pool, he knows everybody, every neighbor and knows he will find friends all along the way. He dubs these pools the Lucinda River after his wife, whom we never see.

He swims one lap in the first pool, takes off running leaving his friends more than a little bewildered. He carries no money, no keys, no identification. Ned Merrill begins and ends his chlorinated odyssey with nothing in the world but his swim trunks. Before it’s over we will come to realize that is all he has in the world. At every pool, even if he is greeted warmly the people he speaks to exchange glances, look worried, even try to talk sense to him when he speaks of his wife and daughters waiting for him at his big house on the hill, just above the public swimming pool. At almost every pool he will have a drink, only once is it non-alcoholic, and then just a couple of sips of Coke. Most telling, he will eat nothing, no one offers him food and he never asks for any. Were The Swimmer grounded in reality this guy would be starving by the time he got to his own house.

The Swimmer was way ahead of the curve in many ways. In the Seventies the New Hollywood would begin to make many movies without the obligatory happy ending. Many big screen films would center on losers, people who just cannot win no matter what. The Swimmer and the early films of John Cassavettes paved the way for the “Decade Under the Influence.”

After managing to make his “swim home” against all the odds, after being insulted, humiliated and having his manhood called into question, there can be no happy ending for Ned Merrill. One of his friends at the very first pool refers to Ned as “an old monster!” The Swimmer is many things all at once, yet it defies any genre label, except possibly a horror movie. The Swimmer is a nightmare in broad daylight, following impeccable dream logic to its horrifying conclusion. Each pool that Ned visits is worse than the last one. Everyone he speaks with seems to know more about him than he knows of himself.

Ned has lost everything and doesn’t seem to be aware of it. At one pool he even takes off the swim trunks in deference to the owners, an elderly nudist couple. Yet because it is Burt Lancaster playing him, in the performance of a lifetime, we want Ned to win, we want him to have a happy ending. Yet we see him make promises to people he has no intention of keeping, offering to write worthless checks to local business men he owes money to.   Repeatedly he refers to his wife and daughters who are not only gone, they may not even be alive. He tells Joan Rivers that he is a “very special person, noble and splendid!” How we want to believe him, but we know it’s not true.

At one pool party he is not only called out as a gatecrasher, he gets pushed down, by Dolph Sweet! He struggles to his feet and says… “I’ll have my lawyers call you in the morning!” Huh!? What!? You’re Burt Lancaster! It’s only Dolph Sweet! Punch his lights out Burt! In a movie that is all about subversion this is one of the most subversive moments. This is one movie with Lancaster where we long to see him take a poke at somebody, to fight back, yet he does not. Ned takes every kind of abuse and gets back on his feet and walks to another pool, for more humiliation and degradation.

The last two pools rate special mention, Janice Rule plays an old girl friend, Shirley Abbott, his mistress on the side while he was “happily married.”  Janice Rule manages to make believable dialog like “You met your match in me you suburban stud!” Shirley calls into question everything Ned Merrill knows about himself, most especially his manhood; she flatly denies she ever enjoyed any intimate time with him, that she was “playing a scene!” The look on Ned’s face is unforgettable, one of those moments so real and intimate we want to look away, we are witnessing the total disintegration of a fellow human being, it is not a happy scene, far from it. And The Swimmer is not a happy movie.

I don’t like to give out spoilers but to speak of The Swimmer is to talk about one of the most unhappy and downbeat endings in film history. The last pool is the public pool, the place where people like you and I would swim with our families, crowded, too much chlorine. Ned even has to borrow 50 cents to gain admission, from a store owner he already owes money to. Howie Hunsacker played by Bill Fiore is the storekeeper who really lets Ned have it, right between the eyes.   We find out that his daughters were involved in a drinking and driving accident and that he managed to keep their names out of the paper. Ned owes money to Howie, his wife and another couple, promises to write them checks he, they and we know are worthless. Ned insists his daughters love and respect him, Howie lets him know that his daughters used to come in his place all the time and thought “he was a big joke!”

After his last swim with the working people Ned has to climb a hill to get home, where the metal gate is rusted, the weather has changed from hot summer to cold winter rain and autumn leaves cover the ground. We hear the voices of his daughters on the tennis court, but we do not see them. Are they ghosts? And finally Ned, of course, is locked out of his house, the camera enters through a broken window, the house is empty, locked up and has been for some time. We last see Ned moaning at the locked door, trying to get back to his perfect suburban life, to his happy family, who have vanished.

There was no way The Swimmer could have found a mass audience, not with that ending. The Swimmer is one movie that draws a strong reaction, I have know people who have seen The Swimmer and hate it, loathe it. Others who, like myself, become obsessed with it, watching it repeatedly, trying to unlock it’s secret.

The original trailer for The Swimmer is included and it reveals one of the most brilliant, intelligent ad lines I have ever heard. The voice over narrator asks us, “When you talk about the Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?” Here is a film that calls into question the very nature of identity, the concept of “the self.” Are we who we think we are? Do other people see us completely differently than we see ourselves? Are people laughing behind our back as we stumble through life, losing everything and everyone we ever loved, until we find ourselves locked out, in the rain and the cold with no place to call home (wearing nothing but swim trunks, or underpants?)

Maybe our lives are not as disastrous as Ned’s, but The Swimmer follows the complete arc of one man’s life, on one hot summer day, from pool to pool. Here is a movie that defies genre and is widely open to interpretation. Just some examples, when I bought The Swimmer on VHS I loaned it to three different people, and asked them all to tell me what they saw.

One person said that obviously Ned was in a mental hospital, escaped wearing only his trunks and began his swim across the county. He had received shock treatment, the reason he could not recall any of his problems.

Another person told me the movie was obviously a fantasy or science fiction story, somehow Ned was caught in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over, he begins and ends the movie in his trunks, so obviously he circled around after finding his house locked up and started all over again at the first pool.

And yet another person told me that obviously Ned is a ghost, has been dead for a while, probably committed suicide when his life fell apart and in an inversion of the Twilight Zone episode, based on a radio play, The Hitchhiker, everybody can see the ghost. Ned’s moaning at the door at the end sounds exactly like someone imitating the moaning of a ghost and in a terrible irony Ned cannot even haunt his own house. Actually that’s my favorite interpretation, I wish I could say they are all my own thoughts but I have to give credit to other people for these ideas, only one of these people was a film buff.

And finally The Swimmer is in a class by itself, it resembles no other movie that I can think of, there is nothing I can compare it to, and that ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls is the highest compliment I can pay to any movie. The Swimmer is unique, original and one of a kind, open to multiple interpretations and wearing a weird, psychedelic, hallucinatory edge all its own.

I could not imagine The Swimmer being remade, how could it possibly be reinterpreted for the 21^st Century?

A Master’s Thesis in film could be written about The Swimmer. Hell, a book could be written about The Swimmer, the symbolism just will not stop.   What are to make of the idea that the Lucinda River is entirely artificial? That Ned is almost the only character in the movie that actually swims? At some of the pools people are in the water but just splashing around, the public pool is a problem for Ned because he is the only person swimming; it is crowded with people just taking up space.

And at the heart of The Swimmer is, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a woman we do not know. We never see Lucinda, Ned’s wife, we know nothing about her and learn nothing in the course of Ned’s journey. In Cheever’s short story she is present at the first pool but we are told nothing about her. It is the daughters who wait for Ned at his own house, losing all sight of Lucinda was exactly the right thing for the film makers to do.  And what of the fact that Ned seems only happy around animals? The only real joy in the movie is his footrace with a horse in a pasture (in bare feet? Yikes!)

And it is no mistake that The Swimmer was released the same year, 1968, as Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 deals with outer space while The Swimmer explores inner space.   Ned is the icon for American men who fought WWII, worked hard, felt they were living the good life, only to see their sons and daughters turn their back on those ideas and ideals they held sacred. Ned’s daughters may not be dead; maybe they were living in a commune and dropping acid with Charles Manson?

Finally I must say The Swimmer belongs in every movie geek’s collection, Grindhouse Releasing has done an excellent job with what is considered by many to be a marginal title, I never dreamed I would see The Swimmer look and sound so good.