THE SWIMMER
US, 1968, 95 minutes, Colour.
Burt Lancaster, Janice Rule, Janet Lindgren, Kim Hunter.
Directed by Frank Perry.
The Swimmer is taken from a short story by successful American novelist, John Cheever. Many consider it impossible to translate Cheever to the screen and say that Frank and Eleanor Perry have not overcome the impossible. However, The Swimmer is an unusual and interesting ftlm. It is an allegory of Purgatory, only here Ned Merril is still on earth and undergoes his purging amongst his acquaintances in his own neighbourhood. One fine Sunday morning he appears full of life at a friend's pool and decides to swim (wash?) all the way home. As he moves from pool to pool and encounter to encounter, he begins to bend and we begin to realise that he is a fake who is being jolted out of complacency into a recognition of what he has done and how he has affected people's lives. Thus, by the end of the film he is alone with his memories and his disillusionment, knocking in the rain on the door of his locked, abandoned home.
Burt Lancaster fits his role with ease and competence, showing that he is an actor with a wide range - Elmer Gantry, Blrdman of Alcatraz, Judgment at Nuremburg, The Professionals.
Direction is by Frank Perry, screenplay by his wife, Eleanor; they have made David and Lisa, Ladybug, Ladybug, Last Summer and Diary of a Mad Housewife.
1. How much of this film was intended as story and how much as a kind of parable?
2. What was the symbolic value of making the central character a swimmer (the physical exertion and struggling with and moving with the element of water) ?
3. The Swimmer has been considered as a parable of a kind of purgatory -a man re-living his past, going through it again in suffering to a new purging and understanding. How well do you agree with this interpretation of the film?
4. What was your first impression of Ned Merrill - his physical condition, his joviality, his goals and ambitions and his proposal to swim home? Why did swimming appeal to him?
5. What comment on the Connecticut style of life and attitudes began to emerge as he began to swim home?
6. When did Ned Merrill begin to appear more mysterious to you? Why?
7. How did his encounter with each of the following help you to piece together his life better and help you to understand him better: - the woman who hated him and his lack of interest in her son who is dead;
- the socialite friends;
- the African American chauffeur who answered the door;
- the nudists and their fad; thinking he was after a touch;
- Julie Ann Hooper - a friend; her girlish story of the shirt and romance; their running together and leaping hurdles} Ned outrunning the horse; her fright at his flirting;
- (his limp)
- his mistress - their past relationship: memories; she was hurt, he was callous. She is cold;
- the crowded party, his rowdy behaviour, the question, the trolley, his being thrown out;
- the boy, the empty pool; making what you believe to be the truths (his running back when the boy was on the board);
- the crowd at the pool - humiliating him and making him wash, forcing him to struggle through crowded humanity. Fifty cents borrowed, taunted about his debts; the crowd taunting that his daughters were arrogant and thought their father a fool.
8. What was the meaning of the ending as Ned, in the stom, imagines the girls playing on the tennis court and, locked out, batters on his door?
9. Did you find the film a thoughtful, persuasive and imaginative parable?
