EDITOR’S NOTE: The Swimmer was on the CBS Late Movie on February 22 and December 4, 1973, and July 3 and December 5, 1974.
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving the church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the velarium, heard it on the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it in the wildlife preserve, where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover.”
With those words, John Cheever started his short story “The Swimmer,” which ran in the July 8, 1964 issue of The New Yorker.
It’s the story of Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster, who feared the water before making this movie), a middle-aged man with a toned body, no shoes and a swimsuit who emerges from the woods that border the affluent homes of a Connecticut suburb. The first party that Ned wanders into welcomes him warmly, with cool drinks in their hands, old friends who welcome him even though it seems like he’s been missing for some time. He doesn’t know, doesn’t care, and is just interested in the idea of swimming his way home through the pools that form the river of his neighborhood.
He meets Julie Ann Hooper (Janet Landgard) in one of those pools, the girl who used to babysit his daughters but now works as a secretary in the big city. She used to nurse a crush on Ned — surely, so many women and girls did; he takes it in stride — and she’s having a rough time dealing with the sexual attentions of the lotharios in the high rises. Ned wants to protect her, drive her to the train, and pick her up when needed, but that’s too much for her. They part ways.
Pool by pool, people open up to Ned. There’s young Kevin Gilmartin Jr. (Michael Kearney), who he teaches to swim in an abandoned pool. Or maybe they don’t quite understand him, like the nudist couple or the woman who insults him for being an uninvited guest.
Somewhere along the way, the swim gets dark. Ned’s obsessed with the idea; the people he thinks he’s connecting with are just ciphers. And so is he. His neighbors are only concerned with bragging about how great their lives are and insinuating that maybe Ned’s life isn’t quite as wonderful as his charming demeanor would make it out to be.
Even Joan Rivers is there, as a woman intrigued by him before a concerned friend leads her away. Ned splashes into the pool only to emerge and see a hot dog cart that was once his. Indeed, it was his, and he wondered why they were keeping it from him. Why are they throwing him out?
Then he remembers Shirley Abbott (Janice Rule, an actress for a time before becoming a psychotherapist and someone who knew a bit about being with intense men, having relationships with Farley Granger, N. In her lifetime, Richard Nash, Robert Thom and Ben Gazzara; her role was initially played by Barbara Loden, the “female counterpart to John Cassavetes.” I’ll get back to that…), someone who he once had an affair with and who he can’t reconcile her hatred of him with his memories.
When once Ned ran, now he’s limping shoeless across a highway, making his way to a public pool where he doesn’t even have the money to get in, a place where he endures the insults of people who gossip about his wife’s expensive taste and his daughters’ troubles with the police. And then there are all Ned’s unpaid bills…
Finally, he gets home, but it’s not the grand castle it was inside his mind. The tennis court where his daughters are playing, well, that’s not even standing any longer. Trees are down, the lawn is overgrown, and the windows are shattered. And Ned slumps in the doorway because he no longer has a key.
The Swimmer is a truly unique and deranged movie, and I say that with a sense of intrigue and curiosity. It was the brainchild of Sam Spiegel, a three-time Academy Award Best Picture winner, and director Frank Perry, who had a personal connection to the story’s setting and shooting location, Westport, Connecticut.
After the film’s shooting wrapped up in September 1966, Perry had plans for additional transition scenes. However, he was unexpectedly replaced by Lancaster’s friend Sydney Pollack and cinematographer Michael Nebbia, who was brought in by Spiegel to finish the movie. This West Coast shoot saw several cast replacements, adding a layer of complexity to the film’s production history.
Speaking of that…
Loden was married to Elia Kazan — man, what is it with 60s playwrights and directors getting impossible gorgeous blonde bombshells to marry them and then making them feel inferior? — the director of Spiegel’s On the Waterfront. The Swimmer was her first significant film, but she had a prominent career as a star.
During post-production, there was a dispute about the scene where Loden confronts Lancaster between Spiegel and Perry, whose wife Eleanor wrote the script. According to Eleanor, Spiegel hated the rough cut, which, to be fair, wasn’t anywhere near finished. He started showing it around to other directors in Hollywood, including Kazan, who began interfering with the final cut, which belonged to Perry. Kazan wanted the scene toned down, as he didn’t like how Lancaster’s character assaulted his wife’s character — Kazan wrote in his autobiography that his wife depended on her sexual appeal in a condescending way — which led to Loden being replaced. Neither Kazan nor Spiegel would take the blame but accused each other. All that is left of the scene between the two is in Chris Innis’s 2014 documentary The Story of The Swimmer.
After all those reshoots, they still needed one more day to finish, so Lancaster paid for it himself: “The whole film was a disaster; Columbia was down on it. I personally paid $10,000 out of my pocket for the last day of shooting. I was furious with Sam Spiegel because he was over at Cannes playing gin with Anatole Litvak whilst he was doing The Night of the Generals. Sam had promised me, personally promised me, to be there every single weekend to go over the film because we had certain basic problems – the casting and so forth. He never showed up one time. I could have killed him, I was so angry with him. And finally, Columbia pulled the plug on us. But we needed another day of shooting – so I paid for it.”
I thought the wildest thing was that Marvin Hamlisch got hired to score the movie after playing one of Spiegel’s parties.
I love this movie. It feels like the modern mid-60s that I’ve only read about, and it takes you through the rise and fall of that decade and how things changed so much in just a few years. Or a few hours through ten pools. Most of all, I love the tagline, which is so of its era: “When you talk about The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?”
Lancaster wore 17 identical pairs of suits for this movie, warred with the director over how actors should play their parts, gained twenty pounds of muscle and still said it was his favorite role, despite all the hardship.
It’s also a movie where you slowly fall out of love with its lead or grow in empathy for him. Seriously, they’re right, those tagline writers. Is this the Riddle of the Sphinx, starting on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night? Is the measure of a man his accomplishments that he brags about or the fact that in the face of morality, he never wavers? Can you swim the whole way home?
When I write about The Swimmer, will I talk about myself?
For the best possible version of this movie, there’s only the Grindhouse Releasing set. You can get it here, and as with everything they’ve put out, it has the love and care that so few would put into something that anyone else would release as a throwaway. Where others see dross, they know it is gold.
Sources
Middle Age Crazy | Cinema Sojourns. https://cinemasojourns.com/2014/05/24/middle-age-crazy/
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