In short: Man on a Swing (1974)

Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson), the chief of police in an American small town, encounters one of the worst crimes his home has ever seen. A teenage girl has been murdered and later disposed off in a somewhat ritualistic seeming manner. Tucker – clearly a professional – starts on a methodical investigation that does not seem to be leading anywhere. Normal proceedings are very much interrupted when a man called Franklin Wills (Joel Grey) contacts the police. Factory worker by day and psychic in his free time, Wills has a strange charisma, and even stranger habits. He also seems to know details about the crime nobody but the police and the killer know about, which is of course the sort of thing Tucker is bound to notice.

Tucker begins to treat Wills like a puzzle to solve, at times using him like a genuine source, at times as a suspect, always as the sort of object that doesn’t quite fit into any category he – or anyone with a rational mindset – can completely comprehend.

On paper, Frank Perry’s Man on a Swing is a police procedural “based on true case”. The direction most often emphasises the detail-oriented elements of Tucker’s style of police work with a near documentarian eye, really focussing camera and audience eye on the way lines of investigation are arrived at and explored. Perry’s doing his best not to bore with this, though, often getting in and out of scenes with some kind of elegant or clever edit or another, never wasting his or our time on the details that have no bearing on cases or characters.

It’s only around Wills when the film seems to loosen its nearly documentary belt, music and camera work becoming much more consciously dramatic; that same contrast is mirrored in the acting styles of the film’s main characters: Cliff Robertson is all laid back and thoughtful, with small, precise gestures, where Grey is all nerve and shaking, quaking and jittering, mood-swings and tension.

These contrasts in style seem to me to be rather the point of the film, a successful if not always easy to watch attempt to portray a moment where two very different views of the world – a practical materialism and irrationalism – come into contact and onto a collision course. Throughout the film, there’s always the impression that Tucker and Wills can’t come to grips with each other because their respective toolboxes for viewing the world are simply not made to comprehend one another. So as much as Tucker tries to rationally understand Wills, and Wills tries to emotionally manipulate Tucker, they never do manage to get the other really as deeply into their grasps as they want to, not even with the film’s cold reveal at the end that suggests so many serial killer media to come.