User reviews

The previous reviewer apparently thinks The Swinger is intended to be a social commentary on the 1960's. This is not that deep of a film. I would say that since the film was produced in 1966, it is reflective of the times. The fashion and music of the movie is indicative of what people were wearing and listening to in 1966. The Woodstock era and the follow on Easy Rider type films were several years away. In 1966, psychedelic was a term more associated with loud colored fashion, and also alluded to a promiscuous lifestyle, rather than LSD. This film is in touch with the lifestyle of the majority of young people in 1966.

The Swinger was a daring film for 1966, as far as innuendo and scanty clothing are concerned. The nudity portrayed later in the decade and on into the 70's, was not present in American film yet. By today's standards for mainstream film, the clothing (or lack there of) of Ann-Margret is far more daring than what you would see a female star do today. This is a very sexy movie for the period, with Miss Margret performing two elongated song and dance numbers (one as a stripper) in which she gets down to bare essentials. This probably had a lot to do with the films box office, as it was probably a bit too risqué for middle America at the time.

This film is shown often on AMC, but the version shown now is an edited one, in which a couple of the dance scenes have been cut short. I have not seen the unedited version for more than 30 years, and doubt that copies of it still exist.

Ann-Margret alternates between come-hither pussycat and uptight do-gooder playing a would-be writer who attempts to pass herself off as sexually depraved in order to get a deal with a sleazy men's magazine. The problem with this picture is the very same predicament Annie faces: it's a square piece of goods palming itself off as naughty. The opening montage of sex-clubs is amusing, and A-M is energetic bouncing around on a trampoline, but the movie is talky, draggy, and seemingly produced on the cheap. Tony Franciosa doesn't work very well with Ann-Margret (he squirms too much, which isn't good for the romantic sub-plot). A few clever gimmicks--like the teaser ending, which caught me off guard--and Ann-Margret's shapely figure compensate, but "The Swinger" just doesn't swing. Perhaps a director with a sharper flair for visual slapstick and satire (like Frank Tashlin) may have brought out a more cartoony sensibility to these proceedings. George Sidney certainly tries, but he's too literal for the flighty material; while staging a mock-orgy, he has Ann-Margret writhing around on the floor slathered in paint...wouldn't straight sex be cleaner? ** from ****

The Quick Pitch: In order to get her story published in a girly magazine, good girl Kelly Olsson (Ann-Margret) decides to turn herself into the swingingest swinger who ever swung.

As a movie, The Swinger disappoints at just about every turn. It's not funny, it's outdated (a term I usually hate to use but it's definitely appropriate here), it's horribly predictable, and there really isn't much of plot. So, if it's that bad, why haven't I rated it any lower than a 4/10? Well, because as a vehicle to watch Ann-Margret, The Swinger is a wild success. The scenes featuring Ann-Margaret dancing, rolling around in paint, or trying on a variety of revealing, kitchy outfits - those are the highlights. I think my favorite bit had to be where Ann is walking through the house she shares with a variety of other people. There's some sort of choreographed dance practice going on. Ann flawlessly moves into place and out-dances everyone else without ever once looking up from the book she's reading. Her dancing and outfit are just amazing. Unfortunately, however, it all ends quickly and we're back to the tired, unfunny old movie.

So, to sum it up, if you want to see a good movie, keep looking. But, if you want to see Ann-Margret in her prime, The Swinger just might be the thing for you.

4/10

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.

Attention all bad movie lovers this one's for you! Part bad photo shoot-part wildly politically incorrect girlie show. The kind of lame brained junk the studios thought would connect with the youth of the sixties, the only people you can imagine this would speak to are lovers of camp. Be prepared to be practically blinded by the overload of color, some scenes have so much neon yellow and red you'll need sunglasses. That this horror show was directed by George Sidney who in better times was responsible for Show Boat, Kiss Me Kate and other classics boggles the mind. Leering and sexist as well as stupid and absurd this is an outlandish artifact of it's time. It is truly bad from beginning to the very end complete with Batman fight graphics such as POOWWW!!!!!! and ZAP!!

Anyone who sees this movie thinking it's about the sexual revolution will likely conclude it was a phony war. Here's a movie about the swinging '60's that was made by people still stuck in the '50's. There's lots of leering and sniggering with enough innuendo for two films, but nothing that comes even close to being arousing. Well, I guess Ann-Margret would be sexy even in a nun's habit, but that's about it. She's a writer trying to sell her story to 'Girl Lure' magazine but the editor (Tony Franciosa) won't buy it, so to get him interested she pretends to be the role model for the story's hedonistic heroine. Margret and Franciosa seem perfectly cast for this movie; unfortunately it comes off like an early version of 'Dumb and Dumber.'

There's an attempt to give the film a wacky, madcap ending, but that's not much more successful than the rest of the attempts at humor. Make that intended humor. There are plenty of unintentional laughs. Films like this could give the '60's a bad name. It's hard to believe that three years after this one, audiences were watching 'Easy Rider.'

Mores and values change. Things like misogyny are still very prevalent, but we HAVE made some progress, albeit not enough. When we look back on the past, while we're understandably offended at a lot of things that aren't accepted anymore, but we can't judge people TOO harshly, as they simply didn't live in a time that forced them to confront or even consider ideas that we take for granted now. What's misogynistic now was simply the norm in the past.

So when I say that The Swinger is nauseatingly misogynistic, that's not a judgment made purely on the norms of the present day. After watching Ann Margaret dance around in what is actually a pretty cool into, we're treated to an opening scene where the men of an office actively try to rape (or at least seriously grope) the clearly unwilling women in the office. One woman is literally used in a tug-of-war. This is obviously intended to be light hearted, complete with sped up film that makes it look like the Keystone Cops, but...DAMN.

This makes early James Bond look downright respectful. I'm not just throwing that out there, I mean that there is literally no scene in any James Bond film that I can remember that even approaches this degree of contempt for women (and I know the Bond films inside out.)

I'm usually dismissive of people who leave a film early and call it crap. If they don't see the whole thing, how can they know the film doesn't improve, or even turn itself around and justify the "bad" beginning? Well, unless director George Sidney was making a post-modern deconstruction on society's attitudes, and was using the audience's acceptance of the offensive beginning as a way of showing how complicit we all are in accepting the unacceptable, I feel comfortable saying that The Swinger is sexist crap. And he wasn't.

I'm not even offended, just a bit caught off guard and shaking my head.Who knows, maybe I'm over-sensitive. But man, I don't think so.

I am a great fan of mid 60's American films by the likes of Elvis and Jerry Lewis and was surprised that I had missed this gem. It almost felt like sequel to an Elvis film and the eye candy of Ann-Margret draws you in. You could almost take this as a serious film at the start, but it soon becomes toungue in cheek.

What becomes a good plot rapidly goes weird in the final reel. Its as if the director had run out of ideas and decided to make the final part of the film as some mad wacky chase scene. Fine, thats the way a lot of films end, but in this instance you are left wondering what's going on and how did we get there?

Brilliant 60's decor, but silly ending lets it down.

Recommended you watch it once, just to say you have seen it, but I will stick to my Elvis films ongoing.

"The Swinger" is quite a relic, the film that begs the question, "Is there any emulsified substance we haven't seen Ann-Margret slather her body with?" Dated, with lots of sexist humour and lots of egregiously tacky 60's fashions, it actually has the feel of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedy (but not as funny, at least not in the way the writers intended!) but with lots of leering double-entendres. The premise concerns writer A-M trying to sell her stories to a Playboy-type magazine, but editor Tony Franciosa believes her to be too sweet and innocent, so she goes out of her way to portray herself as a "swinger". Only in the sixties! What more can you say about a film that contains not one, but *two* photo montage sequences? The most memorable scene is of course the orgy, the wacky opening and closing credits are lots of silly fun as well.

In this 1966 comedy about a 'good girl' trying to get published in a 'bad girl' magazine, Kelly Olsson (Ann Margret) plays a newbie writer with an obsession to get published. Figuring on the "sex sells" angle Kelly writes a sexually provocative story called 'The Swinger' for a popular girlie magazine. When she is turned down by the magazine's sexist editor because she is "too innocent to know about such things". Kelly sets out to prove him wrong by setting up an elaborate hoax to show him just how "debased" her life really is. Although before she even begins to try to pull the wool over the editors eyes, its hard to imagine she is so innocent. Dancing around in nothing more than a blouse and pantyhose for the first part of the movie tends to make her character harder to believe. None the less I loved the movie, although I love most campy 60's flicks! ...and Ann Marget is absolutely gorgeous! Viva Las Vegas is another favorite! I'm pretty sure she wears a lot of the same outfits in that one too!

Delightful romp whose sole purpose is to showcase the body and talents of Ann Margaret. Very stylish production clashes wittily with a very dated story line. Ann Margaret is a demure fantasy, the accessible all-American girl, pretending to be a wild swinger so she can get published in a Playboy-type men's skin rag. This is one of the last movies directed by George Sidney who directed early titillations such as "Showboat" and "Ziegfield Follies." His obsession with Miss Margaret is apparent and she responds by letting it all hang out. From the opening credits, where she jumps on a trampoline in a cat suit, to zipping around her hip pad in sheer black pantyhose, her performance is frenetically sexy and out of control. She gets used as a paintbrush in a silly orgy and even does a strip-tease. The centerpiece of the movie, however, is the long photo montage sequence that dresses up Ann Margaret in every conceivable look from freckled school-girl to exotic femme fatale. For fans of Ann-Margaret this movie is a indulgent feast!

60s sex kitten Ann-Margret teams up with legendary director George Sidney to craft the perfect 60s movie. The story of a good girl posing as a bad girl to get a bad boy who's secretly a good boy is perfectly executed. Forget the plot - bottom line, A-M sings, dances and seduces the heck out of perfect foil, Tony Franciosa. Watch for vintage 60s photo montages, Hollywood's version of hippies and beatniks, a Pygmalion rip-off, wholesome dancing kids sharing a house with a vice squad cop (Sgt. Hooker no less), chase scenes, snotty British characters, the ubiquitous climax at a befuddled police sergeant's desk, Andre Previn original music, A-M as a stripper and riding a motorcycle plus an hilarious staged orgy in which the star is covered in paint and offered up to a Neptune-like god. Now that's entertainment! Also note: whenever Ann-Margret breaks into dance in the film suddenly, out of nowhere, there's a fan blowing on her. Well, watching this classic 60s sex comedy will make a fan out of anyone who likes 60s movies, musicals, romantic comedies and the always brilliant Miss Ann-Margret. Swing away!!!

It is fun and campy, the music shakes, the clothes are cool, and who can resist Ann-Margaret in her kittenish youth! It has a cute love triangle, and A-M's character is easy to root for. She is sweet and funny, the exact opposite of the evil, snotty British babe that the Mr. Colby. I mean, she calls her folks and takes her vitamins, for Pete's sake.

Frankly, since Sir Hubert is kind of Hugh Hefner with irony, you'd think modern audiences would appreciate it. And since Tony Francioso just passed away, God rest his soul, I think they should be bringing all his performances out on DVD. A person who pans this movie has no sense of humor, and has been jaded by the sex mores of modern times.

I wish they'd bring it out on DVD!

"The Swinger" was an attempt by old-line Hollywood to cash in on the "youth movement" by making a movie that was "hip" and "relevant" and that the "young people" could "dig." It fails miserably on all counts. This movie was dated five minutes after it was released, and is now nothing more than a laughable relic of what people who had absolutely no idea of what the '60s were about thought the '60s were about.

Tony Franciosa plays a Hugh Hefner-type magazine publisher who rejects a story given to him by writer Ann-Margret about the "swinging" scene, because he doesn't think she knows enough about the subject to have written about it (while he, of course, knows EVERYTHING about it). So she sets out to become part of the swinging generation to show him up. The movie is nothing but leering, smarmy double-entendres, and the whole attitude is "ooh, aren't we being naughty?", which they aren't (as in the laughable "orgy" scene, where Ann-Margret gets her body painted).

Ann-Margaret has always seemed to me to be the Pamela Anderson of the '60s--a totally manufactured personality trading on her looks and what passes for sex appeal. Her image was the good girl who would stop just this side of sluttiness, because she was, after all, a good girl--which made her, basically, a tease, and that was what her entire career was built on. This movie is a perfect example of that. She's basically nothing more than a somewhat animated Barbie doll, which is pretty much all that she's ever been required to be.

If you want to get a feel for what the '60s was about, this movie isn't it, by any stretch of the imagination. It's fun in a goofball kind of way, but it's basically what a bunch of wealthy, middle-aged men (the people who made this movie) thought "the kids" would want to see. They didn't.

This is a movie that you will love if you love Barbarella and Doris Day because that's what this a cross of. If you don't like either of them you wouldn't like this movie. It's a cross between an exploitation film and a classic 50's morality tale. It's such a hot mess that it's absolutely delightful.

Ann-Margaret really is the star in every sense with a great sense of slapstick comedy and not to mention acting the innocent while where the sheer black stockings as pants. This is the most wholesome T&A show ever.

The plot is crazy and silly and over the top and the cinematography reflects the same style.

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"!

Dreadful sex farce that wishes it had the nerve to be soft-core.

Sixties starlet Ann-Margret plays an good-girl aspiring author who's determined to sell her stories to a girlie magazine, rather than one where people might read the text. It goes downhill from there, editor Tony Franciosa rejects her writing and asks her to pose semi-nude instead, and of course that makes her fall in love with him. And set out to convince him that she's enough of a slut to interest him, by doing things like letting some beefy guys dip her in paint and roll her around a canvas (an unforgettable scene), and pretend to be an alcoholic. So he kidnaps her and tries to rape her, and she runs home to mother (virtue intact) and they both die, and the film is reversed and they don't. I'm not making this up!

Amazingly bad in a very sixties way; if this was the sexual revolution give me the PC nineties.

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!)