Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (November 13, 2024)
Goofy-looking Red Skelton and lovely Esther Williams seem like an Improbable pair for a romantic comedy like 1944’s Bathing Beauty. But hey – it was the 40s! Anything went back then!
Songwriter Steve Elliot (Skelton) prepares to marry college swimming teacher Caroline Brooks (Williams). Both plan to retire from their careers, a choice that upsets musical producer George Adams (Basil Rathbone).
Worried that he’ll lose his best tunesmith, George hires Maria Dorango (Jacqueline Dalya) to pose as Steve’s wife to disrupt his relationship with Caroline. Unsurprisingly, this prompts Caroline to dump Steve, an action that sends him on a mission to get her back by any means necessary.
Hmm… that last sentence makes Beauty sound like a stalker movie, doesn’t it? Of course, you’ll find no sense of drama or psychological chills in a light combination of romance, music and comedy like this.
Though Beauty offers a less balanced mix than anticipated, mainly because it pours on non-narrative elements. The film opens with 10 minutes of music and Williams’ swimming.
We get to know virtually nothing about the characters or “plot” until that 10-minute mark. Beauty continues to ladle out tunes and other fluff the rest of the way, albeit in smaller doses.
Still, this leads to an awful lot of superfluous material. For instance, the “story” grinds to a halt at around the half-hour point to allow for a performance from organist Ethel Smith.
The movie could lose this entire semi-long sequence and no one would notice. I get that audiences in the 1940s liked it when movies mixed music and story, but the manner in which Beauty stretches to include these elements seems contrived to an extreme.
Not noted in my synopsis, Caroline works at a women’s college, and Steve exploits a flaw in the school’s charter to enroll there. This leads to some “fish out of water” gags along with other comedic beats.
Boy, does Beauty seem to go out of its way to avoid its actual plot. The filmmakers hunt for every excuse they can find to follow others paths and not explore the Steve/Caroline relationship.
Which might relate to the underdeveloped skills possessed by Williams. During a 1996 interview elsewhere on this disc, Williams opines that she would love Beauty more than her other films if she’d not been such a “lousy actress” at the time.
Who am I to disagree? Williams flares her nostrils and flicks her eyes a lot but otherwise fails to actually act.
To be fair, not only was Williams a mere 23 years old at the time. Beauty offered her debut as a lead, so it makes sense the filmmakers didn’t throw her into the proverbial deep end.
Still, the frequent absence of the theoretical leading lady – and title character! – becomes an issue. Bizarrely, Beauty only features Williams’ talents in the pool twice, a weird choice given she came to fame as a swimmer and the movie features so much filler.
When not a musical showcase for Xavier Cugat, Ethel Smith and others, Beauty focuses on Skelton’s skills as a physical comedian. These moments work fine for what they are, though again, they exist in a vacuum, as nearly none of them actually advance the “plot”.
Honestly, Beauty comes with maybe 20 minutes of story/character material that it stretches to nearly 102 minutes. Fans of circa 1940s music will like the plethora of tunes, but as an actual movie, it falters.
