Adult swims

Our hero is, at first, conspicuously unseen. Is he a ghost? Foliage rustles and sundry wildlife go on the alert in his presence. When we finally catch sight of Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster), from above, perhaps from a tree, it’s as though the camera captured his movement covertly after holding prolonged vigil, like the director was tracking Bigfoot, not a legendary film star traversing the woods in nothing but swimming trunks. But soon enough Ned strolls into the back garden of some old friends and takes a dip in their pool. After a highly peculiar opening sequence, everything assumes the semblance of normality. But it’s only semblance. The Swimmer (1968), released by Grindhouse on DVD and BD last April, is a strange, eerie movie, and it’s to the movie’s credit that the eeriest moments are those that seem most normal.

John Cheever

‘The Swimmer’ remains John Cheever’s most famous and oft-anthologized story. It was originally intended to be a novel, but was whittled down until its singular conceit was drained of all obvious symbolism and its air of desperation suffused every paragraph. Seemingly on a whim, “Neddy” decides that he’s going to swim all the way to his home by moving from one back garden pool to another—he sees the series of pools as forming a river, one he names after his beloved wife Lucinda. Chronicling Neddy’s journey, his encounters with friends, lovers and neighbours, and the many drinks he imbibes en route, the story’s balance of bizarre and banal takes on surrealist hues. Over the course of a single afternoon, the season seems to change, and Neddy’s sozzled haute bourgeois social life changes too. Cheever was a prodigious drinker, and this story’s power comes in part from the way it apprehends the confusion and memory loss that accompanies advanced alcoholism. As Olivia Laing writes in her excellent The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, published earlier this year, ‘The Swimmer’ “catches in its strange compressions the full arc of an alcoholic’s life."

Thankfully, the film of The Swimmer, directed by Frank Perry from an adaptation by his spouse and collaborator Eleanor Perry, pushes that reading no more than the story does—though the booze certainly flows. The first line of Cheever’s story: “It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’” That exact line is uttered by two different characters within the film’s first few minutes, not ominously but, rather, jocularly, while more drinks are being served. Ned’s portage through the suburban wilderness takes him through few properties where drinks aren’t being served. Many characters remark on Ned’s terrific physique—Lancaster was in his mid-50s and in great shape—and some express their attraction to him, but others are unmistakably hostile, and perhaps afraid, and demand that he leave their property for reasons Ned can’t quite understand. Or remember. “Aren’t you a little confused this afternoon?” someone asks. Lancaster is perfectly cast as this chipper, charismatic socialite. There is a colossal block behind his eyes. His smile feels as developed and maintained and for-show as his biceps. His confidence feels calculated so as to carefully disguise an inner panic. What happened the last time he met these people? What did he do? What did he miss? And where are some of his old pals?

Perry died in 1995. His body of work gives little indication of experimentalist ambitions, but The Swimmer, is a cavalcade of oblique—if dated—strategies; of punchy colours; of slow-motion flocking and fence-jumping through blurry forests to overbearing scoring; of truly weird ultra-close-ups, including one of Lancaster’s eyeball, in which he discover a horse that Ned will later race. The film is much funnier than you might expect, yet not at the expense of the story’s integrity. It glides from pool to pool, always brimming with odd surprises, is unnerving in all the right ways, and finally kind of harrowing. It’s more successful than it had any right to be, I fully recommend it, and I tip my hat to Perry for pulling it off. Still, given the particular richness of Cheever’s idea and the milieu in which his tale unfolds, I can’t help but wonder what Luis Buñuel would have done with the material.

                      

Ex spots the mark

From an arial view of some anonymous stretch of Los Angeles we descend into a parking lot, and in that parking lot we find a man and a woman, hiding amidst the cars, speaking hushed and excitedly, and in the midst of this exchange we cut jarringly to the man’s point of view, to a close up-vision of the woman’s sculpted, lovely face, her eyes like luminous planets, and she’s looking right at him, at the camera, at us, and this is how, with great economy and elegance, we get locked from the very start into the almost dreamlike subjectivity of the doomed hero of Criss Cross (1949). We become lost in his longing as he watches the woman he desires dancing a rhumba in a club with Tony Curtis, and later become lost in the haze of a heist gone awry, a landscape made of smoke out of which figures in suits and gas masks and carrying guns appear and disappear. The hero’s voice-over narration speaks to us of the inescapability of fate—a thesis strengthened by the film’s subtle array of grid-like imagery—and, seeing events play out from his claustrophobic perspective, it becomes hard to argue with him.

Following Double Indemnity (1944), the second film in Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series leaps ahead five years to a moment when both the major studios and poverty row were churning out moody crime thrillers like so many bratwursts. Yet it’s remarkable how consistently good these films were, as though whatever, in retrospect, makes these films noir—artful atmosphere, moral ambiguity, social commentary, hot sex—makes them good. Director Robert Siodmak and star Burt Lancaster had already collaborated on the sublimely fatalistic, extremely liberal adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers (1946), and while Criss Cross revisits somewhat similar thematic terrain, Daniel Fuchs’ script, based on Don Tracy’s novel of the same name, offers some fascinating variations on by-now familiar motifs. We’re back in the realm of secret affairs, criminal plans to escape or do away with an oppressive male power figure, and the femme fatale’s capacity to drain the hero’s better judgement—presuming he ever had any—familiar from Double Indemnity. But in this case the deadly female, played by Yvonne De Carlo, a considerably more angelic actress than Barbara Stanwyck, is no stranger taking advantage of the hero’s ignorance. She’s his ex-wife.

So Criss Cross is the story of a marriage. Lancaster’s beefy, hopelessly romantic armoured car guard already tried sharing a life with De Carlo’s object of desire, and, he says, they fought like cats and dogs. He left town for a while, then came back, and with one look at her on the dance floor, she not even knowing he’s watching her, he’s drawn in again. Since he went away she got herself glued to a very amusing douche bag crime lord, deliciously embodied by Dan Duryea, so she and Lancaster begin an affair—if you’re no good as spouses, maybe it’ll work as adulterous lovers. It doesn’t, of course. They want too much, nostalgic for what never really was. I hope I’m not spoiling things when I tell you that things end badly. But how do we get to that ending? Believe me, you’ve got to experience Criss Cross to really understand.

An odour as irresistible as it is odious (and one of the cinema's great portraits of New York): Sweet Smell of Success

A stack of newsprint smacks down on pavement, bound, tossed off a truck, like a kidnapping victim, in synch with the final pow! of Elmer Bernstein’s hysterical jazz aria, and we’re off to troll two bracing mid-fifties Manhattan nights. New from Criterion, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), directed by Alexander Mackendrick and scripted by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is one of the great New York movies, with relentlessly imaginative location photography by the legendary James Wong Howe. It’s riddled with razor-sharp dialogue (“The cat’s out of the bag and the bag’s in the river”). There’s an edge of seething violence, most of it coming through language and music. It’s a mercilessly cynical story where everybody’s stepping on everybody to get to the top of something. But that mercilessness has its costs.

We follow Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a press agent hanging by a thread. He leaves his topcoat in the office to save on coat checks. It’s unclear if he sleeps or ever finishes a hot dog. At least he has more than one suit: in a beautifully composed early scene the frame’s divided by a door, on one side Falco changes his pants, on the other his secretary lingers with concern. Falco’s frantic to suck up to J.J. Hunsecker (co-producer Burt Lancaster), the towering columnist who can make or break anybody, who can save Falco from ruin with a sentence about a client in the evening edition. Hunsecker has a sister named Suzie (Susan Harrison) who’s in love with a guitar player. She could be in love with a monk for all he cares. He wants her for himself, though for what purpose it’s ambiguous (if unambiguously repulsive). He assigns Falco the task of destroying the romance. Everything hinges on that.

Curtis is brilliant, nervous yet intensely focused, a dog that can bark and plead in the same sentence, twisting himself into pretzels to work magic, seated, in a key scene, just behind Lancaster as though perched at the heels of his master—or moments away from pushing him off his pedestal. Something in Curtis’ performance looks forward to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (90). His Falco starts with his soul already sullied, yet as his actions become more appalling we can’t help holding out for his return to sanity, though the bit where he pimps out the cigarette girl is tough to get past. Of course, we keep watching, riveted to the bitter end, even if by that point the artifice is showing.

The only true innocent in Sweet Smell is, of all people, a (white) jazz musician. Suzie, psychologically frail, shivering in her furs, is ostensibly innocent too, though with Hunsecker as her brother, and a final twist revealing her capacity for manipulation, we have to presume something seedy deep within. Anyway I can go along with these ingénues, but there’s something about Hunsecker I confess I never completely believe—though he’s precisely the sort of symbol of corruption and power Odets seemed to need to believe in.

Hunsecker’s based on real-life gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who was unhealthily obsessed with his daughter rather than his sister (which might explain why Suzie’s less than half her brother’s age). Hunsecker’s basis in Winchell inevitably recalls Citizen Kane (41) and Kane’s basis in real-life media titan William Randolph Hearst. We he cast in the role, Orson Welles surely would have identified with Hunsecker, smiled a little, had some fun, and for moments make us want to be Hunsecker, however uneasy the thought. Though rigidly compelling, Lancaster by contrast seems no fun at all. His contempt for Hunsecker’s all too clear. He seems uninterested in conveying much inner life, save a few moments involving Suzie, like that glance he casts through a crack in the curtains while she sleeps.

Turns out Welles was actually Lehman’s first choice to play Hunsecker, something I learned from the audio commentary by author James Naremore (whose More Than Night is one of the strongest books on film noir). The highlight of Criterion’s superb supplements, Naremore’s is a model commentary track. Without ever snowing us, he moves nimbly between historical context, production anecdotes, technical data and performance analysis, outlines which writer was responsible for what, and draws attention to so many subtle and terrific little bits of behaviour.