The Swimmer (1968)

This is the day Ned Merrill swims across the county...

Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphire-colored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them cold gin. Overhead, a red de Havilland trainer was circling around and around and around in the sky, with something like the glee of a child in a swing.

John Cheever, The Swimmer, The New Yorker (1964).

Here’s a great one for Late Summer. It’s The Swimmer (1968), directed by Frank Perry, starring Burt Lancaster and a pair of swimming trunks. It’s based on John Cheever’s short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1964— including bits nicked from another Cheever story, The Country Husband (1954). Tanned and buffed fifty-something Ned Merrill decides to ‘swim home’ via a series of swanky swimming pools— across an unnamed county in upmarket Connecticut, presumably Westport, Fairfield— a location also used in Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975). It’s endearingly bonkers. Ned’s curious idea is that his neighbour’s swimming pools form the ‘Lucinda River’ (named after his wife), a sort of chlorinated highway leading back to his desirable house, with its desirable garden, his desirable wife and his desirable children. That’s what’s waiting for him at the end of the ‘river’.

‘The Lucinda River…’

Burt Lancaster has a magnificent physique. Forget geriatric chair yoga; the man ‘performed as a circus acrobat’ in the 1930s. So, for a film which makes a costume designer almost redundant (apart from the Speedos), Burt more than gets away with it. Anyway. Ned suddenly appears out of nowhere, dives into his friend’s swimming pool, swigs down a gin and tonic (twist, not slice) and announces his bizarre plan to everybody and anybody. I’m not going to give away too much with this one— you will need to see the film, but what I can reveal is that as we swim down the ‘river’, the swimming pools and their owners get progressively less friendly. One by one, we meet various rich neighbours, Ned’s ex-mistress, a nubile babysitter and a couple of patrician nudists, which gives Ned the excuse to get his kit off— a nice little perk for readers of Health & Efficiency Monthly— culminating in a mob of sullen locals at the seedy and crowded public Lido, the sort of place to pick up verrucas.