THE WADER

THE SWIMMER (1968)
dir: Frank Perry

THE WADER
Sick #65, February 1969
w: Fred Wolfe (Paul Laikin)
a: Harry “The Professor” Borgman

1968 drama about Neddy Merrill (Burt Lancaster) realizing that all the pools in his town lead to his home, and he can get back home by swimming there. The story is mainly a symbol of a man trying to relive his past, with various chapters of his life told through the homes he visits. The women he's had affairs with, families that have haven't lost faith in him, all people who seem to know scandalous things about his past he's seemed to have forgotten—all leading to him coming home to find it abandonned, and along he may or may not be deluded into thinking he was someone he's not while his neighbors see who he truly is.

Another film that did fair-to-middling at the box office that you wonder why Sick parodied. My theory is that it had Burt Lancaster in it, and they chose to parody movies with stars that had been in several movies parodied by MAD, so they could use those caricatures as reference to make a pre-teen audience think something was drawn by someone they could never afford.