Director Frank Perry with Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster decides to return home some few miles by swimming from pool to pool in Connecticut. It’s adapted from a John Cheever short story, which, on the page, could be read as a man’s breakdown or hallucination. (Other readings are no doubt available.) On the screen, though, the physical world is always before your eyes and it’s hard not to take it more literally. Not literally literally: it seemed to me to be an allegory – the flow of a man’s life from immense promise to the break-up of everything he was confident of. It takes place over the course of a day, from bright morning to twilight downpour. Much of the veneer of his perfect life he has peeled away himself: a neglectful friend, a poor employee, an unfaithful husband, cocksure, pushy and with an excruciating line in flirtation. Or perhaps it’s Man’s fall, from the Garden of Eden to the rusting gates and barred door of banishment.

I thought it a surprising film for its time. In other not-quite-mainstream Hollywood films of that period like The Graduate, Butch Cassidy or Easy Rider: the actors were all so young. The Swimmer, in contrast, has a middle-aged Lancaster (ageing fast as the day wanes) as its protagonist who has, by the end, few redeeming qualities. I also thought of it as a film from a male-dominated age, so that its skewering of a American man’s shortcomings/portrait of a man’s unravelling might have been more of a shock to a contemporary audience than today’s – when male, American, white and successful no longer equals manifest virtue.