The only thing Bostonist likes more than a film festival is an unscheduled one. Two weeks after the Harvard Film Archive showed The Professionals, the Brattle is screening The Swimmer today as part of its "Disturbed Suburbs" series, giving Cambridge residents and Boston movie watchers something of an impromptu Burt Lancaster retrospective.

It's hard to picture Lancaster as anything other than a symbol of youth. His love scene on the beach in 1953's From Here to Eternity is one of the most famous moments in film history, immediately recognizable even to those who've never seen the movie. Yet both of these films find Lancaster in an awkward middle age. In the unduly obscure The Professionals (1966), Lancaster plays a hired gun beaten down by too many years and too many disappointments. He doesn't so much struggle with the loss of his moral code as much as he wonders whether or not it existed in the first place.

The Professionals is in part an allegory of its time: a Mexican revolution subplot resounds with Vietnam overtones, while the lead characters make blatant statements on desegregation (the posse leader is asked point blank, "Any objections to working with a negro?") and second-wave feminism (Lancaster says of a female Mexican gunslinger, "That Chiquita. She can lick a whole regiment, but she can't dance worth a lick"). Thankfully, sharp direction by Robert Brooks and impeccable cinematography by the legendary Conrad Hall keep the movie focused and clean, and the movie doesn't stray too far from its genre conventions.

If the The Professionals subconsciously uses Lancaster as a substitute for a generation suddenly growing old, The Swimmer (1968) makes the connection explicit. Based on the John Cheever short story (full text available here), The Swimmer delicately reveals the mental and social collapse of Neddy, an affable middle-aged suburban man who tries to get home by swimming across the pools of Westchester county one midsummer Sunday. Cheever describes his character's sun-bronzed skin with words that could just as easily apply to Lancaster in From Here to Eternity: "He seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth... He might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one."

Neddy, like Lancaster, is a type, a caricature of Cheever's many WASP protagonists before being fleshed out and made whole. Lancaster grasped this and played with his own iconic status in The Swimmer, finding the person beneath the impossibly beautiful shell. Cheever's story is only ten pages long, and adapting Cheever's beautiful and languid prose was no doubt challenging, but in casting Lancaster, the producers found someone who embodied the essence of the character.

The Professionals is available on DVD. The Swimmer is playing Wednesday, July 30 (today!) at the Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge, at 3:00, 5:00, and 7:00 PM.

Film preview contributed by Eitan Kensky