Lucinda River Blues
Imagine a suburban idyll unravelled one pool at a time – Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill swims not towards memory, but its ruin.
Frank and Eleanor Perry’s 1968 allegory, The Swimmer, charts a descent camouflaged as a grand afternoon adventure. Lancaster, just past fifty, trained under UCLA’s Bob Horn to master the water, and the result? His finest performance – a chiseled physique masking a man’s unravelled psyche.
Each pool in Connecticut isn’t just water – it’s a mirror, reflecting Ned’s illusions. “If you believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true, for you,” he insists, and we watch that conviction crash under the weight of suburban scrutiny. He jumps into party pools, flirts with a young admirer, and teaches a boy to “swim” in an empty basin – only to be met with suspicion, debts, even chilled indifference.
Visually, the film drips with surreal tension: weather shifts, superimposed images, tonal disruptions – the Perrys and later Sydney Pollack engineer Ned’s descent from classical hero to a figure of modern disillusionment
pastemagazine.com. Roger Ebert called it “a brilliant and disturbing” hybrid of hypnosis and fable.
By film’s end, Ned’s home lies broken, his family gone, the house shuttered on a rainy twilight. That final shot isn’t just melancholy – it’s indictment: the hollowness beneath America’s manicured lawns.
The Swimmer isn’t vintage escapism – it’s a slow-motion implosion, a critique of image and entitlement. It doesn’t just unfold on screen – it swims up to you, stark and unfiltered, and won’t let you dive back in unchanged.
