"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?
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?