SIX years ago, after establishing a beachhead for a different, more comprehensive approach to film noir with THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT (a ninth edition is coming this November) and its international companion A RARE NOIR IS GOOD TO FIND (plans are afoot for its third iteration in ‘23), I put on a quirky series entitled MIDCENTURY ECLECTIC, which purported to explore just how the still rather murky concept of “arthouse cinema” came about.
That was a bit of a cheat in that it used a sub-species of films that clearly did not fall approvingly under the definition of “arthouse” as it has come into common practice, but it featured titles (with maybe one exception) were as far off the radar from the accepted scholarship as it seemed possible to find. The deliberately loose connections held for the audience, however; it served to prove that a coterie of film lovers who come to trust their programmer will take the plunge into uncharted waters even if the concept is defiantly insular.
SO it is rare for me to present a film that has already been taken up by many critics and filmgoers after it having been “lost” or “forgotten” for some time; but that is what’s happening this Saturday at the Roxie, when we’ll screen THE SWIMMER.
The ECLECTIC one-off (or “twelve-off,” if you prefer) served as a model for MID/MAD, which has a similar subterranean “definitional anarchy” at its root. The definition ultimately being weighed, however, isn’t solely a cinema term (“arthouse”) but instead is something more basic (and possibly even more elusive). It’s the definition of “midcentury” itself, and what it can possibly mean to us now that we are at least a half-century removed from it.
What I think THE SWIMMER (and, by extension, Frank Perry’s even more incendiary follow-up, LAST SUMMER) depicts for us in its escalating crescendo of American cruelty is the exact break-point when “midcentury” attitudes/assumptions come to a point of no return.
As played out in the film, Old Hollywood sex symbol Burt Lancaster is captured in the last possible manifestation of his hunky swagger—a stand-in for the lingering, licentious post-WWII bravado of America itself. The cracks in his façade develop slowly, and then accelerate. The utterly wrenching final scene (no spoilers!) suggests to me an overwhelming existential despair beyond even what the events of the film portray; I may well be overreaching, but I see it as the basis for the pitiable but increasingly invidious attempts on the part of latter-day apologists for America’s terminal ruling-class structure to reimpose it by fiat on a nation that is determined to put it behind us once and for all.
As much as Lancaster dominates the film with his “fractured stallion” mien, it must be said that THE SWIMMER belongs to Eleanor Perry, the too-often-unsung screenwriter wife, who interjects the sexual politics into the film that are only latent in John Cheever’s short story. And as the tone of the film darkens, she reveals the innate cruelty of America’s peculiar, pernicious class system and throws it in Ned’s face (ours, too).
As we watch Ned try to use his tried-and-true hollow charm, we realize that the Perrys are telling us that the midcentury mask obscuring and propping up America’s upper-class rot can no longer cover up its fatal flaws. That's why—to me, at least—THE SWIMMER captures that moment of dislocation…and is more relevant than ever.
AND its “companion piece in cruelty,” LAST SUMMER, shows us how the inheritors of that upper-class rot take a disturbing turn into sociopathy. When ennui and alienation take root in youth disaffected by the ugly realities of the adult world, it can unleash monstrosities.
Which is, of course, what ultimately occurs. Shielded by the myths of the midcentuty mindset, but scornfully mindful of their hollowness, the three beautiful miscreants who bond chemically but not spiritually during an indolent but ultimately incendiary summer on Fire Island (playground for privileged idlers) demonstrate the coming breach in values that has continued to plague America in the decades to follow.
Eleanor Perry again gets to the root of things by atomizing her characters. We have no “mean girl” cliques or pack of “lost boys” to contend with in LAST SUMMER—only those who learn how to weaponize their lonely woundedness in order to “do unto others before they do it you.” The fact that their escalating cruelty is still adolescent in nature does not mitigate its devastating effect; nor will it comfort its victim (who, in the post-midcentury mindset of America, is conveniently blamable and is quickly characterized as someone “who had it coming.”)
Barbara Hershey’s beauty is both bewitching and repellent, and she is the youthful counterpart to Burt Lancaster, driving the action with her own twisted sense of reality. That she can manipulate two strangely bonded boys (Richard Thomas, his character callow but callous; Bruce Davison, projecting a feral flipness that will be all too soon put “into service” by Hershey) is not as surprising or wrenching as how she does it and what she is able to make them do.
All of that, by extrapolation into America’s increasingly grim present, is prescient in terms of the sociopathy (and outright evil) that has been propped up in a desperate hope to turn back the clock to a simpler time, when certain people (women, minorities) “knew their place” and there was no need to “normalize” the reigning cruelty that shapes the soft white underbelly of America. The Perrys are unwilling to see any light at the end of the tunnel, which narrows the scope of their mission but does not limit its corrosive value—we will always live in a dangerous world, and we must find ways to protect what is most valuable: access to an authentic sense of humanity.
LAST SUMMER’s adolescent parable demonstrates how fragile that access really is, and it is a bracing reminder that the essentially adolescent fantasies that propped up midcentury America have not yet been overcome—their ghosts have risen up and are attempting to re-possess us. It is probably not an unrelated phenomenon that LAST SUMMER remains so obscure—prints of the film are notoriously scarce, and the materials that produced the lone VHS release of it have either disappeared or disintegrated. In a nation that now routinely practices unspeakable cruelty on its schoolchildren, we are loath to witness an even hoarier prospect: that we are literally drowning them (and their hopes for an authentic humanity) in a floodtide of cruelty.
MUCH of what has followed in the wake of the Perry’s work (which flamed out in the early 70s) is brutalized caricature of their slashingly nuanced perspective. Comic book hero(in)es with ennui issues are at enough of a remove for the public at large to swallow without holding a mirror up to their own world; whether surreal or scathing, their work is grounded in an inescapable actuality. As members of a wounded nation with bonds now more chemical than spiritual, we need to face up to what they have to say to us.