Product Details

• Actors: Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion
• Directors: Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack
• Writers: Eleanor Perry, John Cheever
• Producers: Frank Perry, Roger Lewis
• Format: PAL
• Language: German (Dolby Digital 1.0), Italian (Dolby Digital 1.0), English (Dolby Digital 1.0), Spanish (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Subtitles: Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
• Region: Region 2 (Read more about DVD formats.)
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Columbia
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00008YNHD
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,378 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Swimmer [Region 2]" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Mono ), German ( Mono ), Italian ( Mono ), Spanish ( Mono ), Arabic ( Subtitles ), Czech ( Subtitles ), Danish ( Subtitles ), Dutch ( Subtitles ), English ( Subtitles ), Finnish ( Subtitles ), French ( Subtitles ), German ( Subtitles ), Greek ( Subtitles ), Hebrew ( Subtitles ), Hindi ( Subtitles ), Hungarian ( Subtitles ), Icelandic ( Subtitles ), Italian ( Subtitles ), Norwegian ( Subtitles ), Polish ( Subtitles ), Spanish ( Subtitles ), Swedish ( Subtitles ), Turkish ( Subtitles ), ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (1.85:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Anamorphic Widescreen, Interactive Menu, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: John Cheever's 'misery in suburbia' short stories, brief and to the point, have always proven excellent TV fodder. Director Frank Perry's The Swimmer, adapted for the screen by Perry's wife Eleanor, is a rare, and for the most part successful, attempt at offering a Cheever story in feature-length form. Dressed only in swimming trunks throughout the film, Burt Lancaster plays a wealthy, middle-aged advertising man, embarked on a long and revelatory journey through suburban Connecticut. Lancaster slowly makes his way to his split-level home by travelling from house to house, and from swimming pool to swimming pool. At each stop, Lancaster comes face to face with an incident in his past. Informing Kim Hunter that he once harbored a secret love for her, Lancaster is mildly upset by Hunter's indifference. Elderly Cornelia Otis Skinner is incensed at Lancaster's intrusion in her backyard and orders him to leave. At the next home, Lancaster tries to seduce the nubile Janet Landgard, who'd once baby-sat for his daughters, but she regards him as a silly old man. And so it goes: as each subsequent suburbanite peels off his self-protective veneer, ...The Swimmer

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Swim Into the Twilight Zone..., February 1, 2002

By 

R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swimmer [VHS] (VHS Tape)

It really is amazing how unknown this movie still is. If you are unfamiliar with it, you are in for a real experience. It is based on a classic short story by John Cheever, and it works like an extended, lost episode of the old "Twilight Zone" television series. A middle-aged suburban man (Burt Lancaster) decides to swim across his wealthy Connecticut county, through all the swimming pools of his neighbors back to his own home. As he makes his journey you gradually become aware that he is not all that he seems. Dark secrets keep getting revealed and it soon becomes apparent that we are witnessing a telescoping of the man's entire adult life into a few afternoon hours of an early autumn day. The film becomes a powerful allegory about disillusionment and tragedy, without being the least heavy-handed about it. Like Cheever's other great short story "The Enormous Radio", "The Swimmer" can be interpreted as a religious parable about the self-deception of fallen humanity. The comeuppance Lancaster receives is almost too intense to watch. This is a genuinely shattering movie that will stay with you.

66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd and Unsettling, September 26, 2000

By 

Kathy Fennessy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Swimmer [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Odd, unsettling film, based on a short story by John Cheever (from his Pulitzer Prize winning collection), about a middle aged man who swims from one end of suburban Westport, Connecticut to the other. Wearing only a snug pair of swim trunks, Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) swims in each of his neighbors' pools until he reaches his home which, as he tells almost everyone he encounters, has a tennis court rather than a pool. Along the way, the sky turns from blue to black (both literally and metaphorically), and he realizes his life isn't quite what he thought it was.

Despite the presence of Lancaster, who was still in terrific shape at the time (he was 55 in 1968), Frank Perry's film was far from successful. And it isn't hard to see why--this isn't a happy tale and there's barely even a glimmer of hope or redemption at the end. Nonetheless, it's powerful and original stuff and, although you might imagine otherwise, doesn't really have much in common with the suburban melodramas of the 1950s, like "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," or the suburban black comedies of the 1990s, like "American Beauty."

Granted, "The Graduate," which was released only a year before, was just as cynical towards the Left Coast's version of swimming pool and cocktail culture, but that cynicism was leavened by humor and the point of view was, even more significantly, that of the young characters in the film rather than their parents. That isn't the case with "The Swimmer," which is more like a condensed version of "The Great Gatsby" or "Death of a Salesman." In other words, it's a fully realized character study and minor classic about the failure of the American Dream. Not to all tastes, but easily as relevant today as it was in 1968.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MASTERPIECE, Plain and Simple, February 2, 2004

By 

Eric J. Matluck (Hackettstown, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Swimmer [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Or not so plain and hardly simple.

My admiration for the shorter fiction of John Cheever knows no bounds, but this movie goes an already great short story one better. Great movies, of course, are made of very different stuff than great fiction. How, for example, to turn "Citizen Kane" into a great novel or "Ulysses" into a great film? Yet the reason this film works is "time"...

The story itself is well known: At the home of some friends one "midsummer Sunday," a successful, middle-aged advertising executive named Neddy Merrill decides, peculiarly perhaps (though with much symbolism, Freudian and otherwise), to swim the length of suburbia, from one friend's pool to another, until he reaches home, where his wife and daughters (he believes) are waiting for him. At each pool, however, his friends appear a little less friendly (and, by the end, downright hostile), and we begin to see that time is passing a little too quickly, that midsummer is turning into late fall, that there is a chill in the air and storm clouds in the sky, and that, by the time Ned reaches the end of his journey, his life is in ruin, and that his entire existence has been "drained" in the course of a single afternoon. Funny how realizations of a wasted lifetime creep up on us that way.

So here, perhaps, is the rub. In Cheever's story, a whole lifetime passes in one day, which passes in eight pages. In Frank Perry's movie, a whole lifetime passes in one day, which passes in about an hour and 40 minutes. The fifteen minutes or so required to read the original is too short, the time goes by too swiftly. This is a story that longs to be fleshed out (okay, pun intended), so that the shifting of Ned's fortunes and his realization of just how much he's lost seem more gradual, more subtle.

Each encounter at each pool is like a variation on a theme. As the people from the first pool come walking over to the second while Ned swims away, we get a superb sense of temporal dislocation (the original theme is still perceptible in the background, but already the changes are being wrought): It is still the same morning in the friends' world, but years have passed in Ned's life, and this is emphasized by his encounter at the third pool, where he finds himself unwelcome at the house of an old friend who has since died. Ned not only fails to realize this at first, he doesn't even remember his friend having been sick. Although the camaraderie is recovered at the next pool, the dark clouds have made their presence felt.

The encounter with his daughters' old baby-sitter, Julie (a naively beautiful Janet Landgard [and what an ironic name in this context!]), is a deviation from the original story, but works superbly as it serves at least two purposes: to bring home the unstoppable passage of time (as when Ned asks Julie if she can baby-sit his daughters that weekend even though, in "real" time, they've grown up already), and, when she flees his overweening embrace, to further illustrate just how much has escaped him, both figuratively and literally.

The most haunting scene, however, occurs when Ned reaches an empty swimming pool guarded over by a young, towheaded boy playing the flute, a vision that conjures up images of lost innocence and invokes an extraordinary emotional yearning (and as much emptiness as the cracked concrete below him can provide) that the original story could not quite match.

And who could fail to be moved by that final image of an irrevocably broken man, crouched in the fetal position and weeping in front of a house long-ago abandoned and left to molder, or the scene just before it, where Ned has to swim through the final dirty, crowded, but too-heavily chlorinated public pool (my, how the mighty have fallen!)? "Stings, doesn't it?" Jan Minor asks, and the line stings as well.

Burt Lancaster, by any stretch one of stardom's most exceptional actors, here gives the performance of his career. The gleam in the eye, that unrelentingly toothy grin, that look of sheer obsession. At first so full of the vigor of youth, but by the end a (self-)defeated, frightened man, straining against himself to understand what happened, when and where literally everything went wrong. Who but Burt Lancaster could have pulled off such a miracle? Kudos, too, to Janice Rule for her portrayal of Shirley Abbott, a one-time lover: a character in a situation that could so easily have seemed cliche here achieves the status of classical tragedy. And note the cameo appearance by John Cheever himself, looking somehow peculiarly diminutive but ever dapper; a standout in the type of crowd he so brilliantly portrayed.

And was there ever a more poignant score than that which Marvin Hamlish provided?

"The Swimmer," the short story, is a great work of fiction, but "The Swimmer," the movie, is a great work of art. "One man's shattering Sunday odyssey through suburbia," as TV Guide once so unforgettably put it. Cheever couldn't have said it better himself.