ShareThisBy JOHN BEIFUSS
Scripps Howard News Service
Monday, August 06, 2007
The only actress from the golden age of the Hollywood glamour factories to be photographed with bubbles coming out of her nose, Esther Williams remains unique. She never won an Oscar but in 1967 she was inducted into the Swimming Pool Hall of Fame -- an honor that somehow seems more appropriate.
Williams (who turns 86 on Aug. 8) apparently was drier off-screen than on. "All they ever did for me at MGM was change my leading man and the water in my pool," she once commented.
Five of Williams' aqua-batic musicals have been collected on DVD for the first time in "TCM Spotlight: Esther Williams -- Volume 1," an attractive box set released this week by Warner Home Video. ("TCM," of course, refers to the Turner Classic Movies cable network.) The set is being promoted by Warner Home Video with this appropriate ad line: "Laughs, Romance, Music -- Just Add Water!"
A champion swimmer as a teenager and a star of live "Aquacade" spectacles, Williams was groomed by MGM as a soggy alternative to ice-skater Sonja Henie, the sports-champ-turned-starlet who was a top box-office draw for 20th Century Fox.
Unsure if she'd sink or swim, MGM initially threw Williams into the shallow end of the pool, where she floated through small parts in such films as "Andy Hardy's Double Life" (1942). Convinced of her buoyancy, the studio next placed its pulchritudinous contract porpoise in a series of often-elaborate Technicolor musicals guaranteed to get Williams wet at least once every half-hour.
Her movies seem almost like precursors to the colorful Elvis musicals of the 1960s: They offer pure escapism while giving their attractive star only limited opportunities to display any acting range. Even so, the movies made a splash, and Williams was one of MGM's most bankable stars in the 1940s and early '50s.
The actress' first starring role is in probably the most entertaining film in the set: "Bathing Beauty" (1942), directed by George Sidney (whose lengthy career helming musicals would include "Annie Get Your Gun" and -- speaking of Elvis -- "Viva Las Vegas").
Not yet established as "the Million-Dollar Mermaid," "America's Mermaid" or "MGM's Underwater Gold Mine," Williams is second-billed here to Red Skelton, who plays a swing songwriter whose hits include "Beat Me Daddy with a Boogie Brush" and "Dig Me Sister with a Solid Spade."
The almost-nonexistent plot leaves plenty of room for wonderful musical performances by Harry James and His Music Makers (with vocalist Helen Forrest); Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra ("Let's go below the border for some South American jive!"); "Hit Parade" organist Ethel Smith; and Carlos Ramirez, "the famous Colombian baritone." These moments of musical foreplay lead to an outrageous concluding set piece: an extravagant water pageant of dazzling color and almost surreal silliness in which Williams leads an armada of pretty synchronized swimmers who float in Busby Berkeleylike kaleidoscope patterns amid fountains of water and flame.
The set's second film, "Easy to Wed" (1946), is described as "gal-amorous," "laughterrific" and "songsational," but it's actually a lackluster remake of the 1936 screwball comedy "Libeled Lady," which starred William Powell, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy. Whatever their talents, the remake's stars -- Williams, Keenan Wynn, Van Johnson and Lucille Ball -- can't compete with that quartet.
Williams finally gets top billing in "On an Island with You" (1948), a supposedly lighthearted romance that now seems almost reprehensibly sexist. Williams plays a movie star who falls in love with the smitten Navy lieutenant (Peter Lawford) who kidnaps her and flies her to a remote tropical island for the slow dance she earlier had refused him.
"Neptune's Daughter" (1949) is something of a return to shapely form. "I'd like to tell you a story about a guy, a girl and a bathing suit," says narrator Keenan Wynn, introducing Williams as a bathing-suit entrepreneur who pooh-poohs romance until she meets "famous South American polo player" Ricardo Montalban. The movie is perhaps best-remembered for introducing the Oscar-winning song "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
The final film in the box, "Dangerous When Wet" (1953), is fairly bizarre, especially when its unbelievable story is reduced to one sentence: Esther Williams is a milkmaid who swims the English Channel, when not ducking the woo being pitched her way by Fernando Lamas. The movie includes an eight-minute dream sequence in which Williams swims in a cartoon world with Tom and Jerry.
As one expects from Warner Home Video, the box set is loaded with extras. In addition to trailers, the bonuses include some incredibly funny "Pete Smith Specialty" shorts; MGM cartoons featuring Barney Bear, Tom and Jerry and other characters; radio interviews; musical-number outtakes and demos; and an almost hourlong 1996 "Private Screenings" interview with Williams, hosted by TCM's Robert Osborne. The box lists at $49.98.
(Read John Beifuss' movie blog, "The Bloodshot Eye," at www.thebloodshoteye.com.)
