Director: Frank Perry / Year: 1968 / Color / English Language / MPA rating: M/PG / Runtime: 95 min.

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer’s experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man’s life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever’s swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Burt Lancaster is superb in his finest performance. In addition to being a fine actor, he is a plausible hero of the Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas type. And a hero is needed here. We must believe in the swimmer’s greatness if we are to find his fate tragic.

There are also fine performances by Janice Rule (previously buried in Matt Helms and Westerns) as the mistress, by Janet Landgard, as the young girl, and by a host of character actors. The screenplay and direction are by Eleanor and Frank Perry, respectively, and they are the same couple who made “David and Lisa.” Like that film, “The Swimmer,” is a strange, stylized work, a brilliant and disturbing one.

Excerpted from Roger Ebert’s 1968 review