Esther Williams Box Set, Vol. 2
TCM Spotlight: Esther Williams, Vol. 2 (Thrill of a Romance / Fiesta / This Time for Keeps / Pagan Love Song / Million Dollar Mermaid / Easy to Love)
Twenty-first century moviegoers don’t understand Esther Williams, and you get funny looks when you try to explain her appeal. Why on earth would you go to the movies just to see someone swim? It must be admitted that, as an attraction, Williams’ aquatic frolicking is not exactly Indiana Jones fleeing a runaway boulder. But it’s important to remember that in a world before anyone had access to so much as a football game a week the opportunity to watch any feat of athleticism was a rare thing.
Movie audiences’ need to see physical dynamism was taken for granted by studios, producers and directors in the pre-television age; meeting this need led to many of the glories of classic Hollywood, such as … Well, even the back-of-the-class, computer-solitaire junkies raise their hands here and call out "Musicals! Musicals!" and they’re right, of course. But the expectation that mass entertainment should include the pleasure of witnessing expressive physical movement was more often satisfied with much simpler (though remarkably subtle) tricks: actors who were allowed to roam around the set, use all the space available to them — from their ankles at the bottom of the frame to the empty 8 inches above their heads at the top — as their field of play, or deliver dialogue while lighting cigarettes or pouring drinks.
That kind of thing wasn’t an imperative, but more of a reflex; so when a swimmer who also (more or less) acts comes along, no one — from Louis B. Meyer all the way down to some auto mechanic in the smoking section of the Orpheum Theatre in Pensacola — bats an eye. Of course people will go to the movies to watch a girl swim. Why wouldn’t they?
Nevertheless, while Williams may be the main event of her vehicles, she isn’t the only one. Most of her scenes on dry land sink like a stone, and the brains behind the camera seem to have recognized that, all things considered, it’s tough to build a whole movie around the backstroke. Consequently, most of the features included in TCM Spotlight: Esther Williams, Vol. 2 feel more like compilations of short films; just the narrowest of narrative threads connect the various attractions vying for the post-war spectator’s attention.
You get a quick listen at the top of the pops (Tommy Dorsey in Thrill of a Romance, Tony Martin in Easy to Love), plenty of travelogue (excellent color location footage of Mackinac Island (This Time for Keeps), Mexico (Fiesta), Cypress Gardens (Easy to Love again)), even a bit of kulcha (Lauritz Melchior, credited as "the Metropolitan Opera Star!", plagues both Thrill of a Romance and This Time for Keeps with overlong and overfrequent opera numbers; meanwhile, a new Aaron Copland piece is premiered in Fiesta).
What you get in these movies, in other words, is a parade of the cultural aspirations, hopes, ambitions and desires of the new upwardly mobile mass audience. A lot of it is pretty goofy, but I resisted (for the most part) the urge to have a cheap laugh at the expense of the past — the people who bought tickets for these films had just emerged from nearly two decades of economic and political upheaval the likes of which few reading this review could imagine.
Had I been around in, say, 1948, I probably would have found these movies’ willingness to blatantly pander to the audience’s consumerist fantasies both insulting and irritating; now, it’s almost touching to see the timid hopes people had for their lives in the aftermath of economic depression and world war, and with the brand new threat of nuclear annihilation to accommodate themselves to. The films in this box set span the layover between World War II and rock and roll; a five-day vacation in Cypress Gardens was as close to demanding the impossible as anyone was willing to dare.
More information about: classic movies, Esther Williams, Esther Williams Vol. 2, Lauritz Melchior, TCM, Tommy Dorsey
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