Swimming down the ladder (The Swimmer 1968)

A 1968 movie with a 55year old well sculpted Burt Lancaster who plays the role of a swimmer who decide to swim from swimming pool to swimming pool from house to house all the way from a rich man's mansion atop a hill all the way down to his home down below at the foot of the hill. The story, in my interpretation, is a symbolic cerebral depiction of the social structure in our society, the various ways different strata of society deals with its fellow men. As the swimmer swims from pool to pool, his past is slowly unravelled. The story unfolds from a very happy note with everybody jovial and chirpy with each other at the first house. By the time he reaches the third house, we realize that something is not right- he being snubbed by hosts for being poor, his landing in his ex-girlfriend's(an extra-marital affair) house who had it enough with him and has a new lover now and hostile treatment from a host when gate crashes into a cavier gobbling crowd filled bourgeois pool side party.
As he scales down the symbolic hill, the day becomes colder and darker. We discover that he must have been successful but certain turn of events made him a failure and bankrupt. His clandestine affair is discovered and he chose family over lover. All these peeling of events just made me more curious in wanting to know what actually happened to this man who used to move around in the circle of the rich and famous.
he finally reaches his destination.
As he finally reaches a public pool, he is looked upon suspiciously. The grocers and restaurateur speak lowly of him for owing money and of his wife and daughters for their demands and bad upbringing!
At his final destination, we then realise that his house is actually a run down abandoned cheateau with disused tennis court and overgrown shrubs. He knocks on the door of a empty house and shrivels up in fetal position in his swimming trunk, hiding from the cold rain, crying like a baby!.

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