MGM colleague Fanny Brice on Esther Williams: "Wet she's a star. Dry she ain't." She's mostly dry in this halfhearted Jack Cummings musical, and while she acts competently and even sounds like she's doing her own singing on "Baby, It's Cold Outside," hers isn't a dynamic screen personality. It's an assembly-line plot with a few good gags, and the cast -- handsome Ricardo Montalban, appealing Betty Garrett, silly Red Skelton, I'll-play-anything-to-keep-my-contract Keenan Wynn -- is game. But there's barely enough Frank Loesser to keep it feeling like a musical, and the plotting is so casual that Wynn, as the guy who doesn't get the girl, has to turn unaccountably into a good sport in the last reel just to make the happy ending feel happier. The color's pretty, and director Edward Buzzell (whose other big MGM musical, "Best Foot Forward," is far superior) keeps things moving. And Skelton, so annoying in so much studio product, is marginally less so here. But the sexism of the day (Williams, a career gal, is still man-controlled) is irritating, and even the underwater ballet feels perfunctory. One compensation: a superbly dirty, how-did-it-get-past-the-censors verbal exchange between Skelton and Garrett ("and now you will please turn over"), early on.
Review of Neptune's Daughter
