While Esther Williams Is Touted as the Star of ‘Bathing Beauty,’ It’s the Musicians Who Grab the Spotlight

Director George Sidney’s “Bathing Beauty” (1944) is a delirious movie musical. It is, in many respects, an exemplar of the genre, and while It’s not the best, it ain’t bad. Sidney’s picture is particularly head-snapping in that it includes a dazzling array of musical talents — all of whom had to be accounted for in one way or another. The film is less a narrative continuum than a catch-as-catch-can variety show.“Bathing Beauty” was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a company that popularized the movie musical and ultimately proved itself the gold standard. The studio’s first musicals are marred by the limitations of early sound technology and a relative inflexibility of camera movement. Yet they are studded with performers who we remember today, including a tap-dancing Joan Crawford, a halting Jack Benny, and a pre-Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr. We all take time to find our sea legs; so, too, for movie studios.“The Wizard of Oz” (1939) was, arguably, the turning point. After that? MGM was unstoppable. Sometime directly before the end of World War II and the appearance of Sputnik, MGM couldn’t stop from topping itself. Count on your fingers and then add some toes for examples; here we go: “Cabin in the Sky” (1943), “Meet Me In St. Louis” (1944), “Anchors Aweigh” (1945), “The Pirate” (1948), “Easter Parade” (1948), “On the Town” (1949), “An American in Paris” (1951) — you get the point. Then there’s that epitome of the cinematic arts, “Singing in the Rain” (1952), and the almost as good “The Bandwagon” (1953). Readers can chime in with their own favorites.Will “Bathing Beauty,” a film soon to be available as a 4K Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, be among them? Maybe: Its denouement is among the most renowned scenes put on film. In velvety-rich technicolor, a lineup of young women dive, one-by-one, into a large swimming pool. We then watch as the champion swimmer Esther Williams emerges on a rising platform with trappings so ostentatious they make Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (circa 1484) look like amateur night at the swimming hole. After a swan dive, Williams engages in an underwater ballet with those other swimmers, all of whom circle around her. It’s sensational.“Bathing Beauty” was Williams’s first starring role, though just by a smidgen: the actress spends little of her time in a bathing suit. Instead, she plays the romantic lead to Red Skelton, a comedian for whom this film was originally conceived under the title “Mr. Co-Ed.” The suits at MGM got sight of the film’s rushes and decided that the comely swimmer needed more screen time. Changes were made to a screenplay that had already undergone myriad revisions. “There’d been a million writers on it …,” screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley said. “That’s not the way you should make a picture.”Red Skelton. Via Wikimedia CommonsThe true star of this film is Harry James and His Music Makers, a band that director Sidney lavished with real pictorial invention. During numbers like “Trumpet Blues and Cantabile,” “Hora staccato,” and “Boogie Woogie,” the camera shifts, stutters, and otherwise snakes around James and his big band. Sidney endows these scenes with a cartoonish vitality and daring stratifications of light.Not that he stiffs the other musicians in terms of directorial attention. Xavier Cugat and his orchestra have a pride of place and so, too, does the organist Ellen Smith: Her lightning-fast rendition of “Tico Tico” is so over-the-top that you’ll want to replay the scene almost instantly just to confirm that it really happened. Basil Rathbone is here as well, lending a requisite dose of menace to the proceedings. Still, this is the kind of thing in which no character is really bad. For his villainies, Rathbone’s comeuppance is to have his head dunked under water.The plot — so what about it? Skelton is a composer of hit songs who wants to write a symphony; Williams is his sweetheart and a sometime professor. Upon their exchanging wedding vows, a saucy Jacqueline Dalya storms into the ceremony and accuses Skelton of infidelity. Soon enough, we’re off to a New Jersey girls school at which Skelton becomes a student — yes, really. Improbable hijinks ensue and Skelton, though an amiable comic performer, is outclassed by the music, music, music. “Bathing Beauty” is as silly as it is majestic. Expect to have a great time watching it.

While Esther Williams Is Touted as the Star of ‘Bathing Beauty,’ It’s the Musicians Who Grab the Spotlight

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