Ned Merrill, a former stock broker from the valley has been released from a mental hospital after suffering a break-down. No longer having a car he develops in his mind that his former wife and estranged grown daughters are leaving to play tennis. Delusional he thinks he has left his car on a quest to swim to his boarded up home in an imaginary 'river' of the valley's numerous swimming pools. At first a stranger, as he nears his former residence people begin to put him down: an alcoholic, mentally ill and not a good family man. He becomes challenged at a pool gathering that his wife and daughter sold off the estate months ago. He begins to shiver from hypothermia as rain sets in. Climbs a steep hill in back of the club's pool and finds the tennis court overgrown and the house locked and boarded. He collapses in his swim trunks in the rain. One of only a very few movies with a cameo by Joan Rivers and Kim Hunter outside her Planet of the Apes make-up.—ncsr11