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.

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!!!

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?