Mehdi Hoffman There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Art Vandelay I had no idea they'd made a movie of The Swimmer. But I'll watch anything with Burt Lancaster in it. My goodness, Lancaster is mid-50s and he's in great shape. He took swimming lessons for this role but he looks like a complete natural. Although over-baked in some regards - the gushy music, the ending, the zooms, the montages - this still drew me in. Since nobody else has mentioned her I have to give props to Janice Rule's performance as Shirley. That was the most affecting scene to me. She was dynamite.

hnt_dnl I've always thought that the 1960s overall wasn't a great decade in film, although ironically the film that I think to be the best film of all time, 2001:A space Odyssey, came in the 60s and in the same year of this film, THE SWIMMER (1968), that I'm reviewing. "The Swimmer", a hidden gem of a masterpiece starring one of the most iconic star-actors in all of film history, the great Burt Lancaster, features arguably his greatest accomplishment as an actor. Probably no surprise that Lancaster didn't garner a Best Actor nod for this as it's an extremely surreal, odd, unsettling film experience that doesn't shout for awards.Lancaster brilliantly essays the complex role of Ned Merrill, an athletic, successful family man, who through the course of the film, taking place on a summer day in a sizable suburban Connecticut community, swims from pool to pool of different neighbors trying to make his way home to his wife and 2 daughters. The boastful, middle-aged Ned begins the film talking of his "perfect" life, great job, loving family, but as the film progresses, layers of both Ned's character and personal life get methodically revealed that shed away his confident demeanor piece by piece.Along his journey, Ned runs into his neighbors who, through stimulating and involving conversations, each helps to piece together the puzzle of Ned's life while revealing their own true natures. Ned slowly sees the hypocrisy and phoniness in the middle-class world he's been living in and that he has no real friends that he can count on when the chips are down. Ned becomes more disoriented and confused as he progressively gets treated with more vitriol and contempt from people in the community as the day wanes on. By the time Ned finds his way home, a devastating revelation lays in wait for both Ned and the viewer.What makes "The Swimmer" so challenging is that it can be interpreted as either 1) a literal happening of Ned swimming across the community and running into old "friends", OR 2) an allegory of the trajectory of the downfall of Ned's life, told in surrealistic fashion using the pool journey as the storyteller. A third interpretation is that it could simply be the thoughts of Ned in his dying moments, his life flashing before his eyes close for the last time. I love movies like this with both ambiguity AND depth of character! Burt Lancaster's pitch perfect performance, along with the beautiful photography and setting and surreal atmosphere, makes the film one of the most interesting pieces of cinema in both the 1960s as well as in film history!

funkyfry "The Swimmer" is a brilliant one-man show for aging Burt Lancaster - - an impressionistic swirl of suburban alienation that hits vaguely like a reverse-image of "The Graduate." Director Frank Perry (most in- famous for TV films like "Mommie Dearest") allows his actors total free reign in their characterizations and this results in an uneven film that feels like it's supposed to be uneven. Lancaster holds the whole enterprise together.... he had long before figured out how, with films like "Sweet Smell of Success", to make himself less appealing. But all his performances are grandiose, and here he's given us a vision of the grand pathetic.... a sort of suburban Lear.The film thematically is very interesting, as you don't really see a film very often about personal failure. His professional failure is something that we figure out about halfway through the film, but we don't want to face the idea that he is a failure as a human being any more than he does. Every gesture that seems spontaneous early in the film, every moment that comes across as an expression of his will to power and his joy in living, later reveals itself as dull repetition and escapism. There is a thin line between the casual recklessness of the perpetual winner and the empty boasts of the fallen champion. There's more going on in the film's script than meets the eye, so I'll just take a single motif and look at it in that context.... how about, alcohol? In the first scene, Lancaster's character refuses a drink which is repeatedly being offered to him by his seemingly over-the- hill younger friends. Lancaster comes off in this scene as a winner, physically fit and envied by his friends who are dependent on alcohol to bond or relax or distract themselves. About halfway through his journey, he begins to reluctantly accept a drink ("just one, to be polite"), but by the time he arrives at his former lover's (Janice Rule) house, he admits "I need one." Looking back on the first scene in hindsight with what we know by the end, his friends come off a lot better. They're disturbed to see him in a state of denial, they want to hear "all about it" over a drink; they've gone from being the losers to the winners. The difference is one of perspective: as Julie's (Janet Landgard) cute crush on the guy she babysits for morphs into a dangerous situation where Ned (Lancaster) harbors unrequited affection for the nymph who is now even more inappropriate as a partner. I like the film a great deal, not so much as a finished product which is in many ways unevenly executed and deficient as entertainment (too episodic and without enough verve), but as a springboard for conversation and thought. I would compare it to a film like Joe Losey's "Boy with Green Hair", another "cult" film -- far from being "great" in any sense but also genuine and unconventional enough to resonate and take on a life of its own.

drystyx This film has more of "stage play" look to it than most films. It is a sort of odyssey of one character alone, with the other characters simply appearing in short bursts.Lancaster plays a man who is a big of a braggart, thinking he can "swim" home to the other side of town, on land, by borrowing everyone else's pools to do a lap.It's a very pompous statement that immediately sets one against his character, but along the way he shows us that he isn't really as pompous as he is simple. He really isn't a big brain, but has tasted much success. He isn't an evil character by any means, nor a hero, just a very simple man.He is as "gray" as a character can be. He doesn't want to harm anyone, and in his heart he thinks he can do good, but the fact is he is more helpless and useless than he realizes.He owes most of the people money or favors whom he visits, and doesn't seem to know how little they think of him. He's had a good life, and has had excellent health. It's hard to say he "wasted" it, because he more or less just went along life for the ride, with an attitude of live and let live.At times his pompous nature turns to a "superior" feeling, however. Not in a dangerous way, but still in a way that means he wants success at the expense of others.This isn't to defend him. Nor to attack him. He's not the man I would want to lead my work crew, but he is okay in the work crew.