Friday, October 11, 2024

Come on in! The show's fine


BATHING BEAUTY

1944
Directed by George Sidney
Written by Joseph Schrank, Kenneth Earl, M.M. Musselman, Curtis Kenyon, Allen Boretz, Frank Waldman, and Dorothy Kingsley

Spoilers: moderate


Esther Williams had been in movies before Bathing Beauty, but it was the first movie she ever starred in where she actually did what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had hired her for in the first place.  The record-holding swimmer had been born in (literally inside) a miserable home in Inglewood, then endured a miserable rise to notability before suffering a miserable star career, and in her later youth and middle age enjoyed what's always sounded to me like a still-pretty-miserable third marriage to Fernando Lamas, even if she claimed to the contrary that she actually liked it, before finally receiving, as her reward, a placid widowhood and fourth marriage that she maintained until her passing in 2013.  She first made waves as part of the San Francisco branch of Billy Rose's Aquacade, established in 1937, and, starting in late 1940, she'd been courted by an impressed Louis B. Mayer, seeking for his studio a counterweight to Fox's actor-athlete superstar, Olympian ice skater Sonja Henie.

With the outbreak of World War II cancelling her own Olympic dreams, Williams signed with MGM in 1941, with the proviso that they provide a months-long "MGM University" to teach her acting, diction, singing, and dancing, possibly as a result of having actually seen any of Henie's performances, though at least Williams already spoke English.*  This delayed her debut, which wound up being an Andy Hardy movie, while her major utility to the studio for many months appears to have been using her ingenue potential as a stick to metaphorically beat Lana Turner with.**  Finally, they found a leading role for her in a Red Skelton comedy called Mr. Co-ed, which was foundering until a bulb lit up above somebody's head, perhaps producer Jack Cummings, and they said "maybe we should do something related to swimming," which nevertheless remained such an afterthought that it wasn't until previews proved that Williams's aquaballet was the draw here that it was even retitled Bathing Beauty.  Now, it was given an enormous, Williams-centric marketing push involving, for example, a huge Times Square billboard with Williams's likeness that invited you for a swim.  (It's something that, somehow, two separate Wikipedia articles misquoteI've seen the photo of the adwith one of them reciting the tagline as "Come on in!  The water's fine!", while the other would've been my favorite of its permutations, because it goes "Come on in!  The story's fine!", which is a memorably pitiful come-on as well as a highly arguable claim.)  In every case, the studio was rather badly overstating how much of their aquamusical's content actually involved water, though it turned out it didn't matter.  It was one of the year's biggest hits.  The show was certainly fine.


Story
-wise, it's slightly awe-inspiring how much it feels like effortless dream factory product, with the weaknesses that still implies, and not like the "should we just shut the fucker down?" nightmare it was, with seven writers just in the on-screen credits (including one mysteriously credited with the "adaptation" of a movie that appears to have been based on nothing, including reality).  The last and most important of these writers was Dorothy Kingsley, for whom Bathing Beauty was likewise a career-maker.  The former underpaid radio show gag-woman, now tenuous MGM employee, was brought on at the last moment after other options had been exhausted, and I doubt she was expected to succeed; but she did, putting order to chaos and establishing her reputation as the one at MGM you went to when things weren't working.  Bathing Beauty is possibly the screenplay that demonstrates her skillset the best, considering how, while it's very goofy and stupid, it's still entirely coherent.  (She would go on to write many of Williams's movies, and by no means are they all entirely coherent.)

That does mean that, irrespective of Williams's giant bathing body hovering menacingly above New York, what we've got remains principally a romantic comedy, that itself is principally a Red Skelton comedy-comedy.  Williams is still the most important of his co-stars, but only because you don't want to accord that function to a hot jazz trumpet player (Harry Adams) whose participation is of no narrative consequence, or to a Latin band leader (Xavier Cugat) whose participation is of even less, or even to the amorphous cluster of college girls that "Mr. Co-ed" winds up befriending, though Jean Porter, given the most opportunity for hi-jinx, emerges as the cutiest pie and a somewhat individuated figure.  I don't intend any of the foregoing as a negative.


So: in sunny California, by the pool, we find a courtship reaching its culmination, with songwriter Steve Elliot (Skelton) sending Carlos Ramírez (Carlos Ramírez) to serenade his fiancée Caroline Brooks (Williams), swimming instructor at the all-girls Victoria College in one of the mid-Atlantic states that didn't have a real Seven Sister already.  Caroline, embarrassed by the attention, absconds into the pool for a semi-improvised Williams "routine" that involves some strikingly cleanly-presented underwater/above-water camerawork from director George Sidney and cinematographer Henry Stradling, though it's really just Williams swimming, and the best part of it is the joke kiss with Skelton at the end.  It'll still be the last time she'll be so immersed till the end of the movie.  Caroline and Steve are to be wed in the morning, but they've not counted on George Adams (Basil Rathbone).  George is an evil version of Billy Rose, it seems, who will go on to have use for Caroline in his aquacade, as a matter of permitting Williams her aquamusical number, but he needs, right away, his "best friend" Steve to finish writing the music for it.  Concerned that marriage will unduly distract Steve, George secretly frames his friend for bigamy, sending in "Maria Dorango" (Jacqueline Dalya), a woman of his acquaintance from, approximately, Flatbush, presently posing as a Latin American singer, to pretend to be Steve's "wife."  The illusion is completed by three random redheaded children.  Insanely, this works, and Caroline storms off back to still-pretty-sunny New Jersey.

It's simultaneously annoying and charming how proudly Bathing Beauty admits it's a bunch of gauzy nonsense that will obviously resolve itself by the end, because it should've been resolved immediately, and wants only to put a comical premise out in front of it first.  That premise is this: totally baffled, but still in love, Steve heads to Victoria, yet, despite finding his entry barred, when he discovers that the school's charter technically does permit male students, he makes Victoria a Vassar before its time, single-handedly integrating his wife's college in the dubious hopes that hanging around and taking e.g. botany (and ballet) classes will give him the opportunity to win her back.  Caroline isn't having it, and neither is Victoria's uptight dean (Nana Bryant).  The faculty conspire to bury Steve in frivolous disciplinary demerits till they can expel himmeanwhile, George still wants his damnable aquacade songs, and meanwhile-meanwhile, Steve is too much of a gentleman, and this story could not handle it anyway, to ever say aloud, "hey, legally-speaking, that is my wife"but Steve and his new girl-friends aren't going to go down easily, even if Steve, in his enormous and visually-awkward Red Skelton body, literally cannot toe the line.


Some
of this involves Williams directly, but it mostly involves Skelton doing some well-structured comedy and musical-comedy, as inflected by some light-but-fairly-pervasive gender-bending, though the real underlying joke, especially when he winds up in dresses despite nothing about the scenario actually demanding it, is "Red Skelton is silly in anything, and non-standard attire merely gives him the opportunity to be moreso."  The most aggressive gender-political thing in it is just an extended mime routine (out of drag, because here drag would obviously ruin the joke) on the subject of "a woman waking up in the morning," with the comedy founded upon how tiresome makeup and women's clothes can be (especially in 1944), and even on these empathetic terms it's so gentle that it feels less like a routine for an audience than Skelton workshopping one for the entertainment of his colleagues before the cameras had started rolling, and since this is the narrative purpose of this scene, killing time before the start of class, it's even a bonus that it captures that vibe.  Alternatively, the most aggressive thing in it is Skelton in a pink tutu, yet the point of this scene is its wonderful physical comedy with a dozen moving parts impelled by Steve and his classmates' dire need to get a sticky candy wrapper off their bodies while still more-or-less adhering to the choreography, lest they be given demerits for littering.  Perhaps it needs to be seen to understand why it's funny, or even what it was I just described, but it's rather outstanding, and not the only sequence that is, fundamentally, silent comedy reborn for a Technicolor age: there's a whole slamming-doors farce with Skelton, Williams, and his dork professor "romantic rival" (Bill Goodwin), that quickly narrows down to a one-man slamming-doors farce, involving our abandoned hero, an adversarial dog, three portals, and two actual exits, its situation so impossible they couldn't even figure it out until Buster Keaton stopped by to solve it for them with a clever punchline.  (The dog, incidentally, failed to misidentify Steve as Caroline just because he put on Caroline's clothes.)

As for Skelton's unusual size, the best utilization of that is not in drag at all, but in Robert Alton's choreography of a number put on for music class, using a tiered stage to highlight his mismatch with petite little Porter, who only doesn't look ludicrous dancing with Skelton when she's on a raised platform, and she's still much shorter than him.  There's a surprising amount of microscopic filigree like this to the visual construction here, sometimes on entirely tangential lines: one of the neatest non-bit bits, that couldn't possibly seem amusing if I described it, involves Skelton lost in the mysteries of a swinging gate in the school office.


Bathing Beauty
 is not Back To School before its time, nor Good News with a middle-aged man, but it's more collegiate comedy than romcom: Williams is good and Skelton's adorable, but as much or more effort is spent to make Steve a vital part of Victoria's social fabric (why, his new friends even attempt to induct him into a secret sororal society of witches).  It helps that his path has been conveniently paved for him already by virtue of his songwriting fame (one of the funnier visual jokes comes as Steve cleans his filthy quarters in the janitor's closet to find a new woman's grinning face behind the grime of each and every subdivision in his lattice window; the funniest dialogue joke in the movie is when one of the girls breathlessly praises one of his songs by nameit's called "Daddy, Beat Me With a Boogie Brush," and I'll admit I'm intrigued, and also confused how this ever got past the Code Office).

This 101 minute film with other priorities can't spend that much time on campus capers, but it absolutely has fun with its setting, notably in that aforementioned number with Porter (and many others) where the professional songwriterbacked by his new college pals but, more importantly, numerous old pals from the professional music industrymeets the challenge presented by his stuffy old music professor to render an improvement upon an archaic standard.  We will generously refrain from saying that by far the prettiest song in this musical still is that archaic standard, "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond," and that "I'll Take the High Note" is only a likeable travesty of it, because it's true you couldn't have gotten such high-energy dance-clowing out of the former.  Finally, though I don't think it makes for "a real emotional hook" (for better and worse Bathing Beauty doesn't have one), but Skelton is allowed to make it reasonably clear that while Steve's a very patient 41 year old virgin, he did have his bride run out of him on his wedding night.


Anyway, Skelton's great, and maybe not even the great thing about the pre-aquaballet phase of the film.  Sidney, I get the impression, is the least-loved of MGM's four major mid-century musical directors***, and that's an unfairness, likely born of Sidney winding up with so many of the most obviously vignettish and non-integrated ones.  "High Note's" "sing a song at the faculty and students" approach is the closest this one gets to "integrated"it at least has plot relevancewhile a startling amount of it is only a little better-motivated than Steve calling up Lina Romay and the Cugat Orchestra so he can listen to "Alma Llanera" over the phone (the one time that Kingsley's all-important need to encompass a bunch of already-shot musical numbers is blaringly obvious).  But the end years of World War II were an experimental time for Sidney that saw him, at least briefly, pursuing what looks like an auteur passion, namely for presenting musical performance as musical performance, but still in visually-ravishing ways.

I do not want to make overenthusiastic claims about how unique this approach was, and my sense isone of these days I need to make a scholarly dive into the things for my own edification, if not anyone else'sthat he's building on the film language of jazz short films, which was leaking out into 30s musicals from time to time already.  (Fantasia's orchestral segments had to have been some influence, too.)  But while Bathing Beauty maybe doesn't have anything as monumental as his treatment of "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 5" in Anchors Aweigh, it might still be the peak of his impulse to just get gonzo with how one might film people playing instruments and, frequently, isolating the instruments as a subject in themselves.  He gets astounding stuff out of the physical substrate of James and his Music Makersthey're strong musicians too, this helpsbut especially the unseen crane he has James stand on that, without any warning at all, levitates the trumpet player into the air and parades him across his band, as if the act of playing (or listening to) hot jazz lifts you directly out of the physical plane.  He manages a completely different and just-as-intense strategy with Victoria College's organist (and they must be a good college, because they've got big-deal Latin jazz organist Ethel Smith on their payroll), and it's assaultively modern in its complexion: it just about feels like Sidney's inventing the ways a music video director should dynamically film somebody at a keyboard, with a combo of swirling camera (almost unbelievably impressive for 1944) and hyper-acute angles and quick insert shots, not to mention the rapt attention paid to Smith's incredible hands.  There's a superb focus upon abstracted geometry and the way light and darkness can be played with in these, tooconsider a dizzying image of banks of violinists where the spotlights turn them into what feels like double-exposure collage, and the dizzying part is that they aren'tso I couldn't blame anyone if the aquamusical number was not their favorite, but instead involved flinging surrealism at some horn player they'd never heard of.


But Williams's debut showcase (technically also a Cugat musical number, "The Thrill of a New Romance") is some tremendous stuff, the first of its kind in color, and certainly aware of the gigantic shoulders it's standing onwhy the aquamusical went unexploited for a decade, when "By a Waterfall" was the best thing in Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade, is a downright cosmic question.  Though bent towards Sidney's predilections, the whole movie's musical-visual personality is about as Berkleyesque as a musical could still get in 1944, but of course Williams and a corps of aquabelles swimming in synchrony is inevitably going to call back to Berkeley, and, indeed, we get all the high camera views and pretty circular symmetries we'd expect.

But the sequence was directed by John Murray Andersonwho might've rivaled Berkely, but had the misfortune to make the exceptional King of Jazz just as the film musical endured its first death in 1930and it surely has its own novelties, too.  (Even so, I prefer to think the exquisitely jaggedagain, excitingly modernistjump cuts that kick it off are Sidney and editor Blanche Sewell: the succession of ever-wider shot scales on an army of swimmers, musicians, and fashion models standing around as pure ornamentation do a sterling job of establishing the size of the setpiece, representing $250,000 of MGM's capital investment into Williams's art.)


It's a delight, anyhowif it has a story, it's "look at Esther Williams"so enjoy it for what it is: glittering Technicolor photography of a procession of shapes formed by Williams and her attending aquabelles (for novelty, look no further than the awesome synchronized "tiller" dive that the teal-and-pink-clad swimmers perform, where a line of them diving in series becomes a deliriously undulating form); Williams doing incredibly athletic things like swimming through a tunnel made of aquabelles while beaming at the camera courtesy radical new makeup technology; Williams evoking a delicate dreaminess with just how at home she can seem in the water, as if air isn't something she strictly needs.  Now, it doesn't have much to do with anything, except Williams's new stardom.  That'd be sufficient, but it does bring Skelton into it at the very end, for as lovely a final shot gag as you ever saw.  I'm not committing (right now) to Bathing Beauty as a masterpiece, nor even as Williams's best aquamusical; but this one's soared in my estimation, and, for the new subgenre it pioneered, it's as important to film musical history as any they ever made.

Score: 9/10

*For the record, I love Sonja Henie movies.
**I've never been quite able to figure out where her sequence in The Ziegfeld Follies fits in; I'd believed, due to that film's inordinately stretched-out assembly and the sequence's elemental simplicity"check out the swimsuit babe frolic amidst the phantasmogoric fake coral"that this was her first filmed aquaballet, but its production might have post-dated this.
***Sidney, Donen, Walters, and Minnelli.

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