Apparently everyone but me knows that this title is the opening line from "Waltzing Matilda"; "swagman" is Australian slang for a hobo who wanders the Aussie bush. The movie is about Speedway motorcycle racing in the forties, a sport that originated in Australia and exerted a Nascar-type appeal over blue-collar English communities. The old, tired champion racer is Australian, although he doesn't speak with an accent (nor does his sister, who winds up marrying Bogarde's character), and he listens to the Australian anthem while shut up in a rest-home trying to recover from his career-ending injuries and resulting depression. That cleared up, the title still makes no sense, and, in fact, it was later changed to the more appropriate but truly awful Maniacs on Wheels.
This is a strange little film. Although it's British, it has one of those Hayes-Code-type internal wars going on: all the energy and excitement comes exclusively from the racing, with the rest of the world portrayed as grey, dull, and uninspired, a place to be escaped at all cost, but the pounding, reverberating moral to which the film keeps returning is something like, "Better to be miserable, broken, poverty-stricken and depressed than make a huge fortune from racing bikes." When the Bogarde character at the end bows to the moral and makes the decision to leave behind the one skill he has, the one thing in the world he does well (and he does it very well indeed), already having proven to himself and the world that he can find no other way to support himself much less the pending family he's about to father by returning to his estranged wife's arms, it feels like the most ridiculous, anti-rational decision in the world. Then, magnify the absurdity with the fact that the wife is perhaps the most astonishingly non-existent character I've ever seen take up more than a cameo's corner of space in a film. She recurs throughout, but her decisions never make a lick of sense. First she loves him, then she hates him, then she returns to him, then she leaves him,-- all well and good, humanity being the fickle and passionate thing that it is, except that the way it's played and the way it's written seem random, like William Burroughs' cut-up writings.
Characters and morals aside, the races are well-photographed, even incorporating POV shots from the bikes themselves, quite a feat at a time when cameras were huge, unwieldy beasts. There's a nice bit in the middle where Bogarde and Cyril Cusack spend a peaceful time on a naval ship in the midst of a war, woolgathering and watching clouds go by, and I was pulled along through the unfolding story by my own wonderment about whether it was ever going to make sense. A moment that stands out with particular horror is when our hero's mother takes him to the window to explain life to him, showing him girls and women caring tenderly for children, then showing him a group of boys fighting and tussling. This is what women do; that is what men do. Spine-chilling in its implications, and delivered up completely without irony: like a black-and-white jail cell that no one can escape.
All that said, my esteem for Bogarde grows in leaps the more I watch him, and I'm excited about these old things being scraped up out of some old vault and newly released for public consumption (Simba, Esther Waters, the Singer not the Song, So Long at the Fair, the Spanish Gardener). Watching this one feels very much like stepping back in time, into that post-war gloom that loured over England like a hunkered vulture until the Beatles single-handedly dispersed it and restored colour to the world. (Anyway, that's the history as it was taught to my American generation.)
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