Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

moonspinner55 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 ****

crappy5pam 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!

michael.e.barrett "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?

BrianG "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.