User Reviews

"The Swinger" is by any standard a traffic-accident of a comedy (literally so at the climax); you don't so much watch it as rubberneck in amazement at this gaudy cartoonish slapstick. Ann-Margret throws together a book on an endless roll of paper by stealing random incidents from trashy novels, and that's a perfect explanation for this movie. There's no coherent character behavior from one scene to the next, and although it borders on surreal, it more often crosses into dull. If the movie has any reason to exist, it's for A-M to wear a thousand outfits from Edith Head, dance in black tights, and sing "I Want to Be Loved" in orange sheets. One whole segment is nothing but modeling shots for five minutes! This is produced/directed by George "Bye Bye Birdie" Sidney and may be his worst film; some sequences look like unrelated close-ups cobbled together and dubbed in the editing room, but it's "stylish" by being tilted and dizzy.

That said, it's an ultimate example of that late 50s/60s genre I think of as "the chaste sex comedy"--movies in which everybody talks about sex and no one has any. Since it's devoid of all distracting plot and dialogue for any real purpose, we can see the pure distilled elements. Like "Sex and the Single Girl" and "The Love God", it's about smutty publishers and virginal poseurs, who sometimes are one and the same. The characters are like the movie itself: pretending to be what they are not, undercutting their own sophisticated pretension with safe traditional morality, so that good clean fun masquerades as something risque or vice versa. As one phony seduction by A-M of Tony Franciosa implies (phony both b/c Tony is not seduced and A-M doesn't intend to succeed), it's all just exercise.

All sexual situations are fabricated chases between aggressor and resistor, and all relations based on deception and opposites. Anyone can chase anyone else at any moment, with one or both characters always pretending. AM pretends to be a slut in order to be chased by the old-goat publisher and playboy editor; she chases them; then she runs from publisher chasing her because he believes her fraud, but he confesses he's a fraud as well; then she vamps editor, who exercises and jumps in the pool; then he discovers her fraud and chases her in turn, causing her to flee. The fact that she's confessed along the way makes no difference b/c the dynamic is nothing but chase and resist, resist and chase, until the inevitable all-cast car chase expels the repressed libido in kinetic frenzy. In the most creative (yet destructive) moment, they are killed in a head-on collision, so at least this movie is giving us the metaphorical auto-erotic orgasm. Then the image becomes a front page headline, then the film runs backward because the narrator says so, and a different ending is played instead. The "writer" must have been aware that the final romantic clinch is a naked convention unjustified by anything that went before and just mocked it in the name of the mod. (Shades of "Tom Jones" and "Paris When It Sizzles") Which leads to the question: how can there be so much to say about a bad movie?

The Swinger is one of those singular films which seem to define an era, reverently hewing to existing cinematic and narrative convention while radically subverting those elements, an amazing cultural artifact which may make you wonder, "how did something so unique and contrary escape the stifling clutches of studio Hollywood?" The film is, at first glance, a curious and perhaps unwieldy combination of parody and homage to unadulterated old-world sexism; a last gasp, perhaps, of the "old order." A cynic might even sniff that The Swinger is little more than "a psychedelic Don Knotts comedy with sex," but it is so much more.

In some wise, The Swinger is the logical extension of the bedroom comedies of the early 1960s (i.e., Pillow Talk), a "square" Hollywood sex farce that dares to burst its fetters to become something bold and daring; add to this a loving nod to the "youth counterculture" movement of the day, albeit from a strictly traditionalist (one might even say "puritanical") angle. The Hollywood "youth counterculture" film of the 1960s was a precarious, dangerous experiment, creating many casualties (think Skidoo or The Phynx), but The Swinger is a rare example of that diabolical experiment actually working.

The Swinger takes said Hollywood bedroom farce, and invigorates it with some avant-garde experiments in cinematic revisionism, using a formulaic screenplay liberally peppered with trenchant social commentary. The film borrows two common (even hoary) 60s tropes - the imposter pretending to be who he is not, and the time-honored "A Virgin in Babylon" narrative arc of the low sex comedy - and mutates them beyond recognition in the service of something modern and challenging.

What we have with The Swinger is a fascinating example of the changing of the guards, the old Hollywood formula merging with new techniques and contrarian sensibilities to form a curious hybrid - a form completely new and exciting to some. Corny scenes such as the old lech publisher chasing young starlets around his desk - something almost out of the burlesque era - crash into stunningly modern montage sequences, creating an aesthetic disorientation completely energizing to the rapt viewer.

The heart of The Swinger, of course, and arguably the sole reason for its existence, is the extraordinary talent of Ms Ann-Margret. She is not so much actress or singer or dancer here as a force of nature, and her electrifying presence performs a ritual alchemy which energizes the entire film, bringing the tawdry script and the avant-garde montage together in a blissful harmony which serves as vicarious "yin-yang" invocation of powerful socio-cultural forces. Ann-Margret is the embodiment of the divine goddess-warrior, an implacable, unstoppable force with the capacity to revolutionize or overthrow existing social structures; her character Kelly Olsson* radically changes the corrupt phallocentric environment which entraps her - and on her own terms - so in some wise could be considered a strong proto-feminist archetype, all the more ironic in that she uses her "sex" as her main weapon of conquest.

The fact that Kelly eerily mirrors the actress' own travails in Hollywood makes the character virtually jump off the screen (*even more ironic when you consider that Olsson is Ann-Margret's real surname!). One could even argue that The Swinger is semi-autobiographical - at least in an archetypal sense - concerning the treacherous waters a young lady must navigate successfully to flourish (or even survive) in show business. Yet The Swinger doesn't merely showcase its main character: it fetishizes, even obsesses on her, the camera following her around like a love-struck stalker.

In sharp (and crucial) counterpoint to Kelly's blunt sexuality, Tony Franciosa plays a character which - for all his pretensions to progressive liberalism, is strictly a straight-laced, 9-to-5 kinda guy, the perfect conservative foil and dimwit muse for the demonically mischievous Kelly.

Structurally, The Swinger interrupts the narrative frequently to offer some breathtaking, highly stylized montage sequences (including one of the greatest pre-credits sequences of all time); either you appreciate these radical editorial splashes, or you really have no business calling yourself a film buff. The Swinger also features, like its ostensible prototype Bye Bye Birdie, high-energy dance numbers with great choreography, plus several winning examples of breaking "the fourth wall," a not uncommon trick during this time period but done brilliantly here.

Amongst several strong contenders, the infamous "body painting" sequence is likely The Swinger's single greatest set-piece, in essence a subversive attempt to sneak a full-blown sex orgy into a mainstream Hollywood film; in this reckless conceit it succeeds wildly. Also worth noting is a montage of Kelly shopping at swanky Saks Fifth Avenue, an adorable collage of still shots animated to show our heroine's ability to effortlessly alternate between stunning beauty and tomboyish charm.

After baffling and challenging and delighting it's stupefied audience for 80 minutes, The Swinger ends on a deliriously strange high note: after chasing each other around for a bit (with Ann-Margret riding her own motorcycle!), the star-crossed lovers collide, dying horribly in a shocking, gruesome car crash. Just when the audience is recoiling in shock from this traumatic calamity, the film literally rewinds and apologizes, stating that "it" would never end a film in such a downbeat (or lazy) manner. Kelly and Ric end up living happily ever after, in true fairy tale fashion, albeit within a post-modern meta-fable for a new generation.

It is no wonder that a film as "in your face" as The Swinger had trouble finding its rightful audience; some might find its confrontational tone, arty editorial pretensions and shamelessly retrograde aspects just "too much." But others celebrate delicious cinematic anomalies like The Swinger, glorious exceptions to the rule which come along so rarely, and are cherished with fierce devotion when they do. Like Lord Love a Duck and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Swinger is a unique cultural marker of its era, both reflecting and revising its predecessors in ways memorable and uncanny.