The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster

I haven't seen the movie yet but I did read the short story by Cheever and found it underdeveloped.

Supposedly Cheever had 150 pages of notes, but he really needed to limit the tangents if wanted to write an allegory

[quote]Genius film or bomb?

neither

Interesting and worth watching.

It currently has 🍅100% based on 28 reviews

As few movies do, "The Swimmer" stays in the memory like an echo that never quite disappears.-NYTimes Vincent Canby May 16, 1968

Saw the film some 25 years after it's release and was able to guess the ending but in 1968 it may have been unexpected,

At times it has the feel of a Twilight Zone episode and a discursive narrative similar to Falling Down with Michael Douglas

Frank Perry gets the directorial credit but Sydney Pollack apparently directed some of the film as well.

Burt Lancaster is very good and looks perhaps too athletic for the character he's playing

.Pollack directed Lancaster in 1969s Castle Keep.

Joan Rivers is in the film briefly.

Lancaster's ass stole the picture.

In seriousness, I liked the film and the conceit, which I won't spoil for those of you who haven't seen it yet.

I love it. They ran it so infrequently I finally bought the DVD. I love it because it's a whole sequence of little mysteries. Who was that guy? What accident? What did he do to them? Why did they break up? And on and on.

Tsar Bomba.

Horrible movie. So full of itself it implodes. The cinematic equivalent of watching the director eat his boogers.

I've always liked The Rainmaker. "Now give me my hundred bucks!"

My mother, through tears, called me an idiot for criticizing this movie. I didn’t see the point.

Frank was my uncle!

It is possible to be both, OP.

This is a film I’ll never forget. Gotta watch it again. Thanks OP!

Lancaster was so fit at that time. I remember his performance being a very “open” one emotionally.

The ending turned very dark and somber and sad.

The locations used in that film (Fairfield County Connecticut) were super exclusive and posh. In real life, I remember many of those exclusive areas had very few street signs and they were often obscured by foliage. In school, someone told me that they didn’t want the roads well-marked because they wanted only people who lived in these areas to be able to navigate them. The idea was “if you don’t know where to go, you shouldn’t be here”.

It was a bomb when it was released. It was much to surreal and inaccessible to mainstream audiences.

But I thought it was a very good film, and it was one of Lancaster's best performances. And his ass was very nice.

It was also Joan Rivers' movie debut!

[quote]In school, someone told me that they didn’t want the roads well-marked because they wanted only people who lived in these areas to be able to navigate them. The idea was “if you don’t know where to go, you shouldn’t be here”.

R13? That's [italic]exactly[/italic] what I said about the roads around Storrs, CT when I was in grad school at UConn.

I lived lived in a number of different areas in my life, but without a doubt, Connecticut was the weirdest. Weirder, in fact, than Deplorable Haven, FL!

That said, I saw The Swimmer on TV once many years ago. I too found it Twilight Zone-ish. I was (probably) in my early 20s and I didn't really "get" it. Maybe I should watch it again.

Burt had a fine daddy muscle ass in that movie.

Thanks, OP, for this thread. It led me down a rabbit hole reading about the homosexuality and bisexuality of many connected directly or indirectly to the film, including:

John Cheever

Ned Rorem

Leonard Bernstein

Noel Coward

Tennessee Williams

And perhaps...

Burt Lancaster

It's "of its time."

I was absolutely blown away by the short story when I read it.

The movie is also excellent in that it doesn't attempt to transpose everything from the story into the movie. The teenage girl in the movie isn't in the short story at all, but having her there combines a lot of the themes cinematically and allows us to watch Lancaster act and react to this character.

The Marvin Hamlisch score is very beautiful and moving. Janice Rule is OK as the mistress, but it's too bad that Elia Kazan had his wife Barbara Loden fired earlier from this role.

Good movie with a excellent performance by Lancaster as usual. Burt was one of stars - like Anthony Hopkins- who was always so good that people just look pass his film and performances.

Love Burt in Louis Malle's Atlantic City which netted him his last Oscar nomination.