MILLION DOLLAR MERMAID

MGM, 1952 | COLOR (TECHNICOLOR), 115 MINUTES

DIRECTOR: MERVYN LEROY PRODUCER: ARTHUR HORNBLOW JR. SCREENPLAY: EVERETT FREEMAN WATER BALLET DIRECTOR: BUSBY BERKELEY STARRING: ESTHER WILLIAMS (ANNETTE KELLERMAN), VICTOR MATURE (JAMES SULLIVAN), WALTER PIDGEON (FREDERICK KELLERMAN), DAVID BRIAN (ALFRED HARPER), DONNA CORCORAN (ANNETTE, AGE TEN), JESSE WHITE (DOC CRONNOL), MARIA TALLCHIEF (ANNA PAVLOVA), HOWARD FREEMAN (ALDRICH), CHARLES WATTS (POLICEMAN)

Annette Kellerman leaves Australia and finds fame as a swimmer, movie star, and advocate for the one-piece bathing suit.

Esther Williams swam, and the whole world watched. One of MGM’s elites for over a decade, she carved, or dived, out a niche that no one else has ever filled. Although only tangentially a musical, Million Dollar Mermaid is the movie that best explains to the world what she was all about.

Back in big-studio days, a musical didn’t necessarily depend on the greatest talents in song and dance. Voice and dance doubles were always ready to help, and a few performers thrived by having completely different skills. So it was with Ms. Williams, a champion swimmer who, without a great deal of fuss, ended up a major-league star. While the template for her career was that of Olympic skater Sonja Henie, Williams outdid the model by faring quite well, too, on dry land. She was pretty, could sing pleasantly and move attractively, and her scripts played to her assets by nearly always keeping things light and amusing. From Bathing Beauty, in 1944, onward, her films were monster hits, the kind of enterprises that easily absorbed the losses from some of MGM’s dicier ventures. Even her less inspired films, such as Fiesta, filled the studio coffers when other movies tanked, and the better Williams pictures were, and remain, genuinely entertaining. Neptune’s Daughter featured the classic song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” while Take Me Out to the Ball Game found her keeping up nicely with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. There’s much amusement, too, in such bonbons as On an Island with You, Easy to Love, and the inevitably titled Dangerous When Wet.

Although Million Dollar Mermaid was advertised as “MGM’s Miracle Technicolor Musical!” it should, more properly, be termed a lightly embellished biopic with a brief ballet (by the gorgeous Maria Tallchief) and two epic water spectacles. Early in the twentieth century, Annette Kellerman gained fame as a champion swimmer, vaudeville star, and crusader for comfortable bathing suits for women. A little later, she was the first swimming movie star, and who besides Esther Williams could possibly play her? Since Kellerman did her act in a glass tank at New York’s mammoth Hippodrome Theater, MGM did the Hollywood thing and engaged Busby Berkeley, who was as suited to spectacular staging as Williams was to play Kellerman. The resulting two sequences—one with colored smoke and trapezes, the other involving spraying water—were the most dazzling of Williams’s career. A generation later, when excerpted for MGM’s valedictory movie-musical salute, That’s Entertainment!, the Berkeley numbers stopped the show cold. Audiences who had not thought about Williams in years (she was retired by then) were entranced by her graceful physicality, Berkeley’s spectacle, and the sheer audacity of it all, which somehow transcended camp. It goes without saying that while the remainder of Million Dollar Mermaid is not quite as invigorating as these two scenes, its good-natured and sometimes poignant recounting of a fascinating career fits its star as well as any of her swimsuits.

Esther Williams and her supporting cast

One doesn’t go to Esther Williams films for greatness or profundity, but take them, and Ms. Williams, for what they are, and that will be plenty. She played a million dollar mermaid because she actually was one and, wet or dry, little else matters.

Victor Mature and Esther Williams

Maria Tallchief and EstherWilliams

Esther Williams, Walter Pidgeon, Wilton Graff, Jesse White, Victor Mature, Charles Watts