@hoosier_cs@MountSaintPeal I caught that production! Super foundational to me— my first Julius Caesar I saw live and it cemented it as my fave Shakespeare.
I caught a screening of this in a tiny Brooklyn art space as part of a double-feature with The Firm, an early Gary Oldman tv movie. The Swimmer in particular has stayed locked in my brain since then. It’s surprisingly earnest, funny, then mundanely devastating. I love this film.
"THE SWIMMER [1968] is a surreal, unsettling, and highly stylized masterpiece, featuring an unforgettable performance by Burt Lancaster, and directed by Frank Perry. It is based on the 1964 short story of the same title by author John Cheever.
It follows a man’s delusional journey across suburban pools, which serves as a profound allegory for the decline of the American Dream, personal failure, and the loss of youth.
A "suburban odyssey" that blends a dreamy, sunny aesthetic with dark, psychological undercurrents, it acts as a blistering satire of upper-middle class affluence, vanity and denial. The film is known for its dream-like, sometimes disjointed narrative, with some viewers seeing it as an interpretation of the descent into Hell."