Director Frank Perry\u2019s 1968 adaptation of The Swimmer<\/em> has such a strange, unsettling power probably because it\u2019s so unfilmable. This is a weird, unnerving picture, with the then 53-year-old Burt Lancaster strutting his freakishly tanned and toned body in a pair of too-short swimming trunks, leaning into every unsettling aspect of his screen persona amid a disorienting barrage of woozy, dated camera trickery and an overbearing Marvin Hamlisch score that New York Times critic Vincent Canby amusingly noted \u201cwould sound overly passionate in a Verdi opera.\u201d Yet the film\u2019s unsteadiness is how it gets under your skin. There\u2019s a wobbly menace in these bland Connecticut gatherings, the too-friendly backslapping bringing with it a chill. \u201cI drank too much last night,\u201d they all bellow, almost in unison. Lancaster is too ardent, his eyes too blue. It doesn\u2019t take the viewer long to realize there\u2019s something seriously wrong with this man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neddy\u2019s always surrounded by whispers and sad looks. The neighbors flash confused glances at each other when he mentions his wife Lucinda or his two daughters, who Neddy insists are back home at his mansion on the hill, probably playing tennis. (He sure loves to mention that his house has tennis courts.) Expanding Cheever\u2019s 12-page story to feature length, screenwriter Eleanor Perry fashions a poolside rake\u2019s progress in which our protagonist finds himself in progressively less refined surroundings. Neddy\u2019s journey takes him from the company of the chauffeured elite \u2013 comically depicted as a pair of elderly nudists \u2013 to the tacky, new money types Neddy snobbishly insists don\u2019t even make his Christmas card list, but he\u2019s not above helping himself to their liquor and attempting to woo a young Joan Rivers (in her movie debut). Neddy\u2019s eventually reduced to washing his feet at an overcrowded public pool, surrounded by the hoi polloi who hate his guts. And all that\u2019s before his harrowing return home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Super-producer Sam Spiegel, who won Oscars for On the Waterfront<\/em> and Lawrence of Arabia,<\/em> doesn\u2019t seem like a logical choice for such an insular psychodrama, and by all accounts he was a bad fit with the indie-minded Perrys, who had each recently scored unexpected Oscar nods for their 1962 debut David and Lisa<\/em>. They\u2019d originally envisioned The Swimmer<\/em> as a smaller picture with unknown actors, and the constant behind the scenes clashes are the subject of Chris Innis\u2019 exhaustive 2014 documentary The Story of the Swimmer<\/em>, which at almost two-and-a-half hours runs 43 minutes longer than the movie it\u2019s about. The most tantalizing revelation is that Rule\u2019s role was originally played by Barbara Loden, and when her husband Elia Kazan saw the scene, he flipped out and ordered Spiegel to burn the negative. We can only wonder how it must have originally played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Swimmer<\/em> was shot in 1966, but with all the backstage drama didn\u2019t hit theaters until 1968, when it must have made quite the boozy, suburban nightmare double bill with John Cassavetes\u2019 Faces<\/em><\/a>. It was not a successful picture at the box office, but it\u2019s the kind of movie that tends to haunt viewers with memories that linger for years after the credits roll. There\u2019s simply no shaking this Lancaster performance. He\u2019s remembered for his smarts and athletic prowess, yet Lancaster\u2019s best roles<\/a> explore the self-delusion behind that swagger. He\u2019s fearless here, with his strapping, still godlike physique running counter to Neddy\u2019s fundamental ridiculousness, looking the fool while cavorting with his grown daughters\u2019 old babysitter (Janet Landgard) or insisting to Rivers that \u201cI am a very special person. Noble and splendid.\u201d He\u2019s a towering failure, and we can\u2019t look away from his collapse.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Swimmer” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/swimmer-1024x517.jpg\")
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We only get fragments of the protagonist\u2019s backstory, a few breadcrumbs here and there hinting at how far Neddy has fallen, and how much of the fall was his own dastardly doing. The most of what one might describe as conventional exposition comes during a dip with an ex-mistress, brilliantly played by Janice Rule. It\u2019s near the end of Neddy\u2019s journey across the procession of pools he\u2019s nicknamed \u201cthe Lucinda River,\u201d and like a lot of folks on these banks, she\u2019s none too happy to see him. You could pull the scene out of the movie and it would stand alone as a shattering one-act of regret and recrimination, and it turns out the entire sequence was reshot in California long after this troubled picture had initially wrapped, after director Perry had been fired and replaced by Sydney Pollack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n