The first movie I had seen Esther Williams in was 1956’s The Unguarded Moment. What was notable about that film is it was her first serious dramatic role. Prior to that, every picture she starred in emphasized her legendary swimming ability. This meant a whole lot of synchronized swimming routines—basically, musical numbers staged in and around water. It was an odd niche, but she longed to break out of it.
Now I have seen the first, and widely regarded as the best, of such films, 1953’s Dangerous When Wet. I’ll confess I am not a fan of musicals, though I have come to enjoy a few of them. I also thought the gimmick Williams was famous for would fail to impress me. Given all this, I was surprised I enjoyed some of this film as much as I did. That’s not to say it was a complete winner, and I’ll dive into the pros and cons, so to speak.
The plot has Williams as the eldest sister of rural dairy family. This is a family that is all about exercise, which they do to an earworm titled “I Got Out On The Right Side Of The Bed”. I had never heard this tune before, but it is still stuck in my head a couple of days later. I think the CDC needs to be alerted to this earworm, which is infectious to the degree of ”It’s A Small World After All”.
The first time the family jumps into the creek for their daily swim, the camera cuts to Williams sitting on the shore and reading a book. Even without knowing much about Williams, I at least was aware of the shtick she was famous for and so I got the joke.
She just wants to buy a prize bull for the farm, but a chance meeting with Jack Carson leads to the family getting roped into a stunt wherein they will swim the English Channel to promote Liquidpep, a questionable health elixir he has been shilling. It is no surprise when it comes down to Williams being the only member of the family to attempt the crossing. And I will not take any bets on the outcome of that attempt.
What is interesting to me is how quirky some of the humor is in this. When Carson arrives in England with Williams and company, the fog is so thick that they can’t see the crowds gathered to greet them, complete with brass band. Williams is given a speech to deliver, but she finds addressing it to a grey void too frustrating and so she wraps it up early.
Fog also intrudes on the first day of training. Carson was rowing a boat ahead of her but loses her in the fog. I guess that was inevitable, as he is so weak that she, swimming in the water, has to shove his boat onward at one point. Various characters are wondering around on and in the water in this fog, and the movie would have been vastly more interesting if the rest of it had just been bizarre meetings between these people.
Instead, Williams is pulled into a rowboat manned by a tuxedo-clad Fernando Lamas. He takes her to his yacht, where he delivers this unusual line, given what he is wearing, “Excuse me while I get out of my working clothes.” He is supposedly a champagne salesman.
Whatever he is (it doesn’t matter), he’s French and he will obviously be the love interest. I only learned after the movie he was also the real-life love interest for Williams. They married and remained so until his death, and their son is the actor Lorenzo Lamas.
From the first frame of the opening credits, it is obvious this movie will be weirder than I anticipated. The titles are over footage of fish swimming in a tank that is an explosion of Technicolor. And the lettering on those titles is bright yellow in front and a vibrant purple on the sides. It is so garish, but so thoroughly committed to this design, that it is a strange kind of beautiful. Also, there’s fish swimming in front of the letters, presumably through some sort of early bluescreen work. I like how I don’t really know how they did that.
The most memorable segment, by same distance, is an underwater sequence teaming Williams up with Tom and Jerry. This scene is extremely well-done and justifiably famous. It was vastly more enjoyable in every regard than the scene in My Dream Is Yours where Doris Day dances with Bugs Bunny. The Warner Archive bluray I watched this on has numerous special features, including the Tom and Jerry short The Cat and The Mermouse, from which many of the gags in the movie’s scene are repurposed.
I wish the movie had kept up the quirkiness it demonstrated early on, but it keeps falling back on tired cliches. It is almost like two different writers wrote scripts with entirely different tones, and somebody cherry-picked what they liked from each.
Even some of the filler that is meant to be quirky merely grates. One of Williams’s sisters is played by Barbara Whiting, whose sole defining characteristic is she likes men. She even has a pointless musical number titled “I Like Men” that pretty much says it all. Not even the woman in She’s Gotta Have It had to have it as much as Whiting seems to. Good thing this picture was made in a more innocent time, lest we see her gang-banged by every sailor in the vicinity.
Instead, I wish we could have seen more of Charlotte Greenwood, as the family matriarch. She wasn’t a spring chicken when this was made, but she has a brief and fascinating dance number where she kicks higher than I thought possible. Then her number ends in something odd that recalled to me nothing less than the “spider walk” scene from The Exorcist.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about Dangerous When Wet is that, compared to the more “serious” role she would take later in The Unguarded Moment, Wiliams has more agency in this film. Odd, since the later picture was supposed to be a serious drama, while this film is meant to be pure fluff. Make no mistake: this film is an incredibly light confection, but it is an enjoyable one. And this is coming from somebody who doesn’t usually enjoy musicals. If there is one aspect that distinguishes it from similar fare, it is the streak of weirdness that surfaces occasionally, and I really wanted to experience more of that.
Dir: Charles Walters
Starring Esther Williams, Fernando Lamas, Jack Carson
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray