Un uomo a nudo.
US © 1968 Horizon Dover, Inc. D: Frank Perry. Dal racconto omonimo di John Cheever. SC: Eleanor Perry. DP: David L. Quaid. ED: Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset. AD: Peter Dohanos. M: Marvin Hamlisch. S: Jack Fitzstephens, Willard Goodman.
C: Burt Lancaster (Ned Merrill), Janet Landgard (Julie Ann Hooper), Janice Rule (Shirley Abbott), Tony Bickley (Donald Westerhazy), Marge Champion (Peggy Forsburgh), Nancy Cushman (Mrs. Halloran), Bill Fiore (Howie Hunsacker), John Garfield Jr. (Ticket Seller), Kim Hunter (Betty Graham). P: Roger Lewis, Frank Perry per Columbia Pictures, Horizon Pictures, Dover Productions.
Loc: Connecticut.
Premiere: 15 maggio 1968.
Restored by Sony Columbia. Following preservation work done at Cineric in New York, a new interpositive was scanned at 4K. This was followed by digital image restoration in Los Angeles and audio restoration at Chace Audio by Deluxe. The new DCP was created at Colorworks at Sony Pictures
2K DCP. 95'. Col.
Da: Sony Columbia per concessione di Park Circus. E-subtitles in Italian.
Cinema Arlecchino (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna), 1 July 2013
Paola Cristalli (Il Cinema Ritrovato): "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying 'I drank too much last night'". There are many characters in American fiction who tell their life stories working through the after effects of a binge - in Fitzgerald and in Jay McInerney, in the commuters with grey flannel suits of Wilson Sloan and in the conjugal unhappiness of John Updike and Raymond Carver.
These opening words from John Cheever's story, are therefore full of familiar resonance, and have a clarity so charged with foreboding that it was naturally used to establish the tone of the film produced in 1966, with several changes, two directors, sequences filmed again, a long wait before distribution, upon which it flopped (over time it would gather support).
Ned Merrill, played by Burt Lancaster, has definitely been drinking too much at the many parties he goes to, but what he is facing now is "a moral hangover", as the reviewer from "Variety" noted. He is a man in swimming trunks, who finds himself at a friend's swimming pool, who as soon as he emerges from the water is greeted by a glass of gin and ice, and there, dripping wet and over euphoric, he gets the inspiration to go back home passing by, and swimming through, all his friends' swimming pools in the county, a rich and hypocritical community which has colonized that part of Connecticut.
The liquid track made of water, chlorine but also more Martini, champagne, even lemonade, is scattered with gloomy shadows: friends look less and less familiar, the leaves on the trees seem less and less green, it begins to get cold and Gilmartins' swimming pool has already been emptied.
Someone suggests what might have happened in Ned's life, which he cannot recall, or his memory has been buried under a suspicious vitalism, an only apparent youth, his sexual vanity or a psychosis that comes from his ability to delude himself.
While the sky fills with clouds, the idea of coming back home turns cold in the nightmare. Swimming pools are spaces devoted to allegory (Nanni Moretti's Palombella rossa...). A sequence marks the threshold. At the edges of the last swimming pool, the main character meets a woman with whom he had previously had an affair, at a time which he cannot remember well. The sequence, which the director Frank Perry had filmed with Barbera Loden, is later entrusted to Sydney Pollack by Sam Spiegel.
Something changes in the visual rhythm. Those "glamour mechanisms" that irritated Manny Farber (the slow motions, the blurring) are gone; it is as if the film undergoes a sudden densification. We understand that something has happened between this man and woman, maybe a bitter love story, that his insecurity has divided them, that perhaps this is where his undoing began.
The emotional truth in this female character, very much in Pollack's style, shines a stark light on the mechanical nature of the others: the Westerhazys, the Hallorans, the Binswangers, who stand permanently on their mowed lawns, at the edges of their swimming pools, almost not even living beings and more strange replicants, sinister extras who have been called in to magnify the joke in this American suburban tragedy.
"The Swimmer is based on a John Cheever story from the 'New Yorker', and it's the sort of allegory the 'New Yorker' favors. Cheever's swimmer is a tragic hero disguised as an upper-class suburbanite. There are a lot of tragic heroes hidden in suburbia, I guess, perhaps because so many of them subscribe to the 'New Yorker'. You are what you read. What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March. And Burt Lancaster is superb in his finest performance" (Roger Ebert, 1942-2013, we miss him a lot)." Paola Cristalli
AA: La dolce vita all'americana.
A haunting, original work following the quest format, based on the short story of John Cheever. The swimming odyssey takes Ned to eight different pools. We start with the happy appearances, the plastic permanent smiles, dialogue repeating details of expensive consumer goods.
Little by little we realize that Ned does not know what season it is, what year it is, and what has happened to his wife and children. He seems to be living in a past period maybe two or three years ago. He meets his children's former babysitter Julie Ann (Janet Landgard) who had had a schoolgirl crush on him; she is now a young woman.
Ned meets a lonely kid whom he teaches swimming strokes in an empty pool. He crashes a big pool party and learns he is not welcome. He meets his ex-mistress (Janice Rule), who is full of resentment. At a public swimming pool Ned is humiliated by being ordered to wash his feet twice; the pool is so crowded that swimming is impossible; acquaintances there remind him of unpaid bills and offer terrible revelations of his failed home life.
Ned, who has been barefooted and wearing only swimming trunks during the entire story, has to cross a motorway. When he finally reaches home, the gate is rusty, autumn leaves fill the tennis court, a rainstorm begins, and the exhausted Ned collapses in front of the locked door on the porch of the dilapidated house where nobody has lived for a long time.
One of Burt Lancaster's best films, we see him in the beginning as a man at the top of his form, racing with a horse, admired by women. Overdoing his exercises to show his prowess to Julie Ann he starts to limp. By the middle of the journey he starts to shiver. His strength fails him, his swimming pace gets slower, and he can no longer lift himself from the pool with manual force. It ends in tragedy, but as this is a story of exposed self-deception, a new self-awareness could ensue.
Visually, the most haunting aspect is the alternation of the swimming in the pools and the jogging (and later limping) in the autumnal wood. Both the water and the autumn leaves carry a potent symbolic force.
Memorable details: - Julie Ann tells that she has "met a guy on the computer - everybody's doing it". - The giant Sunday issue of a newspaper, now an endangered species. - At the nudists' home we see Burt, too, al fresco, from the back. - The scene with the lonesome boy reveals the best aspects of Ned's character. - The ghost voices at the abandoned tennis court bring to mind Blow-Up.
A remarkable current movie which occurred to me while watching The Swimmer is Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine.
A brilliant restoration from Sony Columbia. I feel a little disorientated by nature footage in digital. Here it is well done, but it looks a little different than in photochemical, subtly yet fundamentally.
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