The Swimmer
Feverish Drama ā¢ 95 Minutes ā¢ United States ā¢ 15 May 1968
Director: Frank Perry ā¢ Screenplay by: Eleanor Perry ā¢ Based on: ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever ā¢ Produced by: Frank Perry, Roger Lewis ā¢ Starring: Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule ā¢ Cinematography: David L. Quaid ā¢ Edited by: Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset ā¢ Music by: Marvin Hamlisch
Ned Merrill is a lover of youth, a cad about town, a dreamer and in some ways an idealist plus one hell of a swimmer. He will be called a ‘suburban stud’ and a ‘Peter Pan’ by a woman who wonders aloud whether he will ever grow up, but for the meantime he is enjoying the Connecticut summer and has dropped in on a couple of friends, or more precisely in on their pool where he has swam a couple of laps and is now with a gin and tonic in hand, about to settle upon a grand idea.
Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill the titular character of The Swimmer and perversely enough – a thought which crossed my mind while watching the picture – the legendary actor who had already played a fading prince in The Leopard, an esteemed but romantically ill-fated sergeant in From Here to Eternity and a couple of conmen in The Rainmaker and Elmer Gantry for this role had to be taught how to swim. Fearful of the water owing to a near-drowning incident in his childhood, he contacted Bob Horn the swimming and water polo coach at UCLA, with Lancaster proving a fast learner under Horn’s tutelage as the two athletes became firm friends.
The Swimmer is based on a John Cheever story and was written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry, who already had the Oscar-nominated drama David and Lisa under their belts. Yet the film had a troubled production whose various issues were highlighted in the five-part 2014 documentary The Story of the Swimmer, with Frank Perry and his cinematographer David L. Quaid being fired after principal photography and replaced by Sydney Pollack and Michael Nebbia, who recast some of the roles and carried out substantial reshoots.
The film doesn’t feel like a patchwork and is of one piece, but this knowledge sheds light on some of the sequences, as those scenes starring Kim Hunter, Charles Drake, Bernie Hamilton and finally and most substantially Janice Rule – all of whom replaced original cast members in Pollack’s reshoots – are more conversational and more conventional too in terms of framing and exposition.
Relishing the cyan water and the spryness of his body in the summer sun, the idea which strikes Neddy like manna from heaven is to swim a ‘string of pools that curves clear across the county to our house’, which he apparently shares with his wife Lucinda and occasionally their two adult daughters. In this milieu of upper class Connecticut almost everybody owns a pool, with the Grahams in the next house over having conveniently installed one last June so that if Ned only takes ‘a sort of dogleg to the southwest’ he can wander from one property to another – starting here, cocktail in hand at the Westerhazys – and figuratively swim his way back home while running into a few old friends to boot.
‘Pool by pool they form a river, all the way to our house’ he says rhapsodically, adding ‘I could do it, I could really do it’. He dubs the ribbon of pools which is already clear in his mind’s eye ‘the Lucinda River’ in tribute to his wife and says decisively ‘This is the day Ned Merrill swims across the county’ before diving in for one last lap at the Westerhazys, leaving his hosts in some confusion as they wonder aloud whether he means what he says or is simply playing the fool.
Remarkably this is the only adaption of John Cheever on film, which makes it a must watch for fans of the author, short stories or literary adaptations in general as Cheever was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great writers of short fiction.
The Swimmer faithfully interprets the themes and manners of the story while considerably padding its twelve-page length. Like in the film, the third-person narrative is shaped by Merrill’s realisation that ‘by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water [. . .] He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country’. In fact the Merrill of the short story successfully traverses more households and pools than he does in the film, and Cheever’s text is stronger on fragrances and the passage of time, indicating a surreptitious change in the season from high summer to dreary autumn, while the film allows us to spend longer with a diverse cast of supporting characters and introduces dreamy or surreal sequences as well as the figure of the twenty-year-old Julie, who briefly accompanies Ned on his voyage.
Lucinda Merrill, only a vestige in the film, even appears in the first paragraph of Cheever’s story, which reads more like a series of discrete incidents as Ned’s stated mission and timeframe is undercut by the darkening skies and yellowing leaves as his fortification of choice turns from cold gin to neat whiskey. That is to say that on film, The Swimmer plays out as the events of one day with a surreal bent or a thick layer of symbolism whereas the events of Cheever’s story seem almost like a mirage, just like the ‘massive stand of cumulus cloud’ on the opening page which is ‘so like a city seen from distance – from the bow of an approaching ship – that it might have had a name’.
In turn the reveal or ending on the page is both foreshadowed and brusque, whereas on the silvery screen it flows together more gradually and with dramatic swirls though the same air of inevitability is more or less present in both. However dashing and idealistic his vision seems, as though he were clasping on in a bid to memorialise or suspend the summer, Ned Merrill’s grand odyssey or divine comedy must reach its terminus.
Expanding on the world of the short story, the film allows us to see more of Ned’s unsuspecting hosts, who without exception receive at most only a couple of lines on the page. We get to witness them in all of their chummy and bewildered glory, lithe or paunchy, naked and besuited, embittered and scolding, social climbing or ready at hand with a fond greeting and a chilled drink. In fact each household or property represents its own small world, a microcosm of suburban and well-to-do Connecticut and we for the most part enjoy the time we get to spend there with these hosts even as The Swimmer satirises their many foibles. The film teems with talented character actors while presenting the starlet Janet Landgard and the breakout comedian Joan Rivers for the first time on the big screen.
At the same time we learn precious little as to the backgrounds or inner lives of these characters. Lancaster as Ned Merrill is present in every scene yet he offers no real perspective on the people he meets, at most throwing up a few tidbits more as a reflection of his own character, which seems suspended in a world of youthfulness and games as when – in one of the opening scenes of the picture – he comes across an ‘old bunkmate’ who attended the same camp as him when they were both kids.
Likewise this motley cast of characters largely keeps us in the dark when it comes to Ned. At least until the latter stages of the picture, everything is on a surface level with only the odd glimmer or ripple as to what lies beneath. The Swimmer therefore inverts the Rashomon effect whereby we are given a series of differing perspectives on the same incident, as instead we are left to grope for some semblance of one man who seems largely inscrutable, his true nature mired in pleasantries or hesitations or the odd curt aside, though on repeat viewings we might begin to notice a few more knowing looks or bitten tongues or quizzical glances from the female characters in the film.
Beyond the expansion of these brief visits and their hosts, the major addition or innovation of the film lies in its introduction of Janet Landgard as Julie Ann Hooper, a twenty-year-old girl who previously babysat for the Merrills and harboured a youthful crush for Ned, who encourages her to join him on his journey. She accepts but this brief dalliance marks a turning point in the film, as the naive admiration bordering on hero worship which she felt for Ned as a child gives way to fear and knowing, and we go from seeing Merrill as a fit and virile man still possessing the glow of youth to hapless and groping in his middle age, as after a fall he traipses away from the scene with a gammy leg.
Formally the film makes a great deal out of connecting scenes or intermezzos, those moments where Ned is simply making his way from one pool to the next. The Swimmer opens not in fact under azure skies and upon the clear blues or aquamarines of pool water, but on a mottled palette of parched browns and greens with a furtive crunching underfoot as Ned, audible only by his footsteps, makes his way briskly through the foliage. A deer starts while drinking from a stream, a rabbit twitches its nose and scampers in the direction of its burrow, an owl hoots and the leaves daub out the sun – all of which is accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch’s score which shifts subtly between lavish strings and baroque melancholy – before a flock of birds sweep up from a lake and Ned, visible now from the back, hops up a few rocks and emerges to take his first dip in the pool of the Westerhazys.
At other junctures Ned will jog across fields or barrel down veritable boulevards made up of dirt paths and looming rows of oak trees, the music and the gauziness and the overall contours of the scene a reflection of his state of mind following his most recent poolside interaction. As these connecting sequences begin to take on a character of their own, images of Ned’s beatific face as he gambols in the fields or races strapping black horses or hurdles fences in a kind of mock-heroic montage emphasise the absurd and surreal qualities of The Swimmer.
In his mind’s eye Ned sees himself as a lone stallion running buck wild and home free, and we might laugh at the novelty and absurdity of these sequences as well as at his gilded sense of self. But these connecting scenes or intermezzos are harrowing too as they seem to hover on the precipice which lies between youthfulness and ageing, suggesting a golden span of time which might not be recognisable but is anyway no longer recoverable. The Swimmer brings up our own fears about how other people see us, the costliness of our mistakes, the strength of our relationships and whether we will grow up to earn the enduring love and support or even the barest respect of our kids.
Later a flagging Ned, wearing only his swimming trunks, will be forced to cross a busy and litter-strewn highway in a scene which is drawn directly from Cheever’s short story. The noise of the road – which follows a rough meeting with an old flame – once more intrudes upon the sun-kissed fantasy. Speaking in sure tones Ned has previously drawn from the Song of Songs, that biblical book of erotic poetry, cupping and then kissing Helen Westerhazy’s feet as he recites ‘How beautiful are thy feet in sandals, O prince’s daughter’ then telling a somewhat perplexed Julie how ‘Thy belly is like a heap of wheat, fenced about with lilies’ in an ode to symbols of fertility and purity. For her part Julie regales Ned with a childish fantasy which bears some resemblance to Audrey Hepburn’s infatuation with William Holden’s playboy character in Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy Sabrina.
Burt Lancaster as Ned is tasked with expressing a range of emotions always at a kind of wilful or muddled remove. With his bronzed physique and velvety speech he approaches the task admirably. The earlier impromptu poolside rendezvous for the most part allow him to star as a charming interloper, frolicsome and fancy-free but he will later be viewed as a gatecrasher or mooch and a love rat while also briefly showing a degree of compassion as a willing if somewhat immature father figure. Shot at high, low and Dutch angles we get a growing sense of a man all askew, looked at askance by the world around him. Life as he knows it or would wish to know it has somehow slipped through his fingers.
Describing his general attitude at the home of his former flame, Cheever writes ‘It seemed in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony’. Yet come the conclusion of this encounter Merrill will seem depleted and dispossessed. A subsequent confrontation at a public pool – with its strange admixture of officiousness and indecorousness as Ned struggles to complete his lap amid scenes of disorder – proves bristling even for the viewer.
In all The Swimmer is an intoxicating and unusually memorable film, whose folly and idealism owes as much to Don Quixote and Citizen Kane while it presages everything from Picnic at Hanging Rock to Mad Men to the emptiness or privileged obsolescence which are themes in some of the best films by Sofia Coppola. It is alluring even though it amounts in the end to much more than shimmering pools and a beyond prime Burt Lancaster. It comes from an era when men were men, and when manhood meant being somewhat rugged and idealistic rather than waking up at 4 am then hitting the gym after chowing down on the day’s first chicken breast. Swirling our hopes and dreams and fears and doubts like an elixir, behold the man The Swimmer says, even as it condemns that posture.
