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.