The Swinger (1966)

Ann-Margret looks lovely in this campy in this musical comedy from the 60's! She opens and closes the fim singing as she did in "Bye Bye Birdie"! Mary La Roach plays her mther again also! Its a real period piece.the clothes and the hairdos are very 60's! If you love Ann- Margret you will love "The Swinger"!

"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 (1966) C-81m Paramount. Directed by George Sidney (MGM's Pete Smith Specialties, Our Gang shorts, BATHING BEAUTY, ANCHORS AWEIGH, THE HARVEY GIRLS, KISS ME KATE, BYE BY BIRDIE, VIVA LAS VEGAS.) Sidney was president of Hanna-Barbera Productions for several years in the 1960's. THE SWINGER stars Ann-Margret (THE FLINTSTONES, KITTEN WITH A WHIP, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, TOMMY, MAGIC) and Tony Franciosa (TV's Valentine's Day, THE NAME OF THE GAME, THE PLEASURE SEEKERS, A MAN COULD GET KILLED, FATHOM). There is a pencil thin plot involving Ann not getting noticed as a women writer, so she pretends to be a `swinger' to draw attention to herself. Surely this was inspired by Russ Meyer's THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (1962) and MONDO TOPLESS (1966), released the same year as THE SWINGER! THE SWINGER opens with a loud, boisterous narrator and scenes of traffic in the streets, storefronts, advertising signs, etc., just like TEAS and TOPLESS (Virtually all of Meyer's work.) Add a splash of TV's BATMAN (which premiered 01/66) with BATMAN-like camera angles throughout and even cartoon Pow! Zow! Zap!s at the end. There are still photos made into stop-motion montages and sped-up photography. It has wild, razor sharp color and is full of pop icons. It's very lurid for it's time with a pseudo-Playboy magazine setting and imagery, dirty old bosses chasing secretaries around desks, hot-rods, Ann on a motorcycle, Ann in really sheer tight-fitting pants. Ann-Margret's character uses her own real last name. (OLSSON). Don't look for many good cameos. There are some semi-familiar TV faces- but none are 1st string. With Robert Coote (GUNGA DIN, GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, THE COOL ONES, THEATRE OF BLOOD), Horace McMahon (THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE, BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, THE DETECTIVE), Nydia Westman (KING OF THE JUNGLE, THE INVISIBLE RAY, CAT AND THE CANARY), former stripper Barbara Nichols (SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, PAJAMA GAME, WHERE THE BOYS ARE, THE HUMAN DUPLICATORS, THE LOVED ONE) The musical theme song and opening number copy the opening of BYE BYE BIRDIE. The logo and poster were done by Al Hirschfield (who did the cover for Aerosmith's DRAW THE LINE LP.) TV Movies and even Psychotronic dismiss this with poor reviews. Not a great story, but a great piece of pop culture. I don't think anyone has actually seen this film since the advent of the Psychotronic Encyclopedia-era or they couldn't miss it as an early link between Mondo movies and Hollywood. *Before* BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. More important for it's visuals than plot. It's a big-budget, major studio Russ Meyer film- before he actually made one!. I can't believe this is not mentioned in reference books. Russ Meyer should be either furious or honored at the homage. It's too close for comfort. Don't miss it!(Don't look now- the Psychotronic Encyclopedia will be 20 years old in 2002!)

I am a huge Ann-Margret fan, and I finally got to see this movie, not available on video, on AMC. The 'plot' concerns good girl journalist Kelly Olsson (A-M's real last name) who wants to be published in "Girl-lure" men's magazine, and she wants her story published, not her photo. She writes a lurid expose of a wild swinger girl and tells the horny editor the girl in the story is her, to try to get it printed. So, she has to spend the rest of the movie convincing the Girl-lure staff she is for real. Please note that this plot summary makes the movie's plot sound much more coherent than it actually is.Terrible continuity, the main actors are nothing special, very corny jokes, and there seems to be no discernable script. However, who cares? We've got an opening montage of Ann-Margret singing the title song and jumping on a trampoline wearing a black catsuit, turning on the sex appeal full force. We've got a house she lives in with a bunch of beatniks including the dance group billed in the opening credits as the"Swinger's Dozen" who spend their time doing choreographed dance routines in the living room, and when A-M passes through, she just has to join in and go-go dance. For the guys, we have A-M covered in paint and used as a human paintbrush (though not nude as the Playboy pictorial would have you beleive-sorry guys, Playboy doctored the photos) by a bunch of beatniks wearing jungle loinclothes. We have Edith Head doing the absolutely to-die-for 60's costumes, some of which are showcased in those photo montages. We have A-M wearing a different outrageous 60's hair extension/style in almost every scene. We have a magazine headquarters obviously modeled on Playboy Enterprises where models walk around in bikinis and there is a framed photo on the wall of a groovy chick that actually rotates on a mechanical roller to show a different model every 5 seconds. And that's just for starters.George Sidney directed the movie and it shows. He was the director of Bye Bye Birdie, totally smitten with Ann-Margret, who saw her talent when she was still fairly unknown and used his own money to shoot a new beginning and ending for BBB showcasing A-M. He was completely in love with A-M, and so for all the guys out there who feel the same way about her, watch this movie and you'll be in heaven.