The Swimmer, 1968

My school district had a print of an short, 16mm version of The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. I had seen this in at least two classes, and both teachers thought he was supposed to be like a salmon on his last legs swimming upstream to spawn. I later saw the movie on TV and was surprised it was a feature film. Before that, I was surprised that Burt Lancaster was in a school movie.

Years earlier, in the fifth grade, they showed us a movie of Sidney Poitier reading a children's book. The story wasn't very interesting, he had an odd reading style and we were too old to have that sort of thing read to us. We didn't react well to it, so the teachers berated us. One of them said that Sidney Poitier was a big star and it cost them a lot of money to get him to read that book.

I'm sure Mr Poitier did it for free, but if he was paid a lot, it seems like all the more reason to laugh at him.

If the teachers knew he did it for free, they could have told us that Sidney Poitier was a big star and he did us a favor reading that book.

It might have been better with Rod Steiger. He could have worked himself up and started crying by the end.

I don't know how I reacted to The Swimmer. I might have been a bit uneasy about Burt Lancaster in a bathing suit.

The Swimmer was about a middle aged rich guy who's somewhere in a bathing suit. There are a lot of backyard swimming pools around there, and he thinks it would be fun to swim home by going from swimming pool to swimming pool. In doing this, he meets people he's known and confronts his past. I think. I was in high school and probably didn't understand it.

With Joan Rivers.