The Good

Esther Williams took her niche and turned it into something both big and special.

The Bad

Sort of hard to navigate around all the extras.

Esther Williams Collection: TCM Spotlight is an assortment of 5 movies that showcase this swimming beauty at her absolute best. Lensed so as to accentuate the myriad of colors and swimming scenes inherent in her movies, this set isn’t so much eclectic as it is an interesting mix of movies set around water. The 5 movies in this set are:

  • Bathing Beauty

  • Easy to Wed

  • On An Island With You

  • Neptune’s Daughter

  • Dangerous When Wet

In her first role, Bathing Beauty finds Williams teaching and spending a lot of her time in the pool. Things get shaken up a bit when Red Skelton makes his loving intentions known. Easy to Wed sees Williams in a love triangle that, among others, also involves Lucille Ball. On An Island With You finds Williams playing an actress who is shooting a movie on an island. She is joined in the fun by Ricardo Montalban and Jimmy “Ah Cha Cha” Durante. Neptune’s Daughter, while little more than a reason for Williams to be splashing around in the water, sees her again teamed up with the likes of Montalban and Red Skelton. Lastly, Dangerous When Wet is set around Williams trying to swim the English Channel and also gives us a pre- Roger Rabbit? appearance of Tom and Jerry.

Features

Bathing Beauty

Private Screenings With Esther Williams

Robert Osborne conducts a pretty in-depth interview with Williams. They talk about how her films inspired the Olympic sport of synchronized swimming, and how her goal in all her movies was the be “terrific… wet or dry.” After this Osborne steers the conversation into her early career and how she originally worked in the retail business. Interestingly, the grind of moviemaking got to her so much that at one point she thought about going back into that line of work. As it turns out somebody from MGM spotted her, they wanted to do a bunch of swimming movies, and the rest is film history.

Neptune’s Daughter and Dangerous When Wet

Outtakes

While not cleaned up the outtakes for Neptune’s Daughter and Dangerous When Wet seem to show ideas for various musical numbers. The feeling that I got was that the director’s wanted to shoot a version of a scene, only to then go back and see how a particular number could build on a character’s performance. I say this because in the outtake from Dangerous When Wet, Williams and Fernando Lamas both seem much more stationary than they would normally be in a number of this nature.

Radio Interview

Video

Standard Version. Presented in a format preserving the aspect ratio of their original theatrical exhibitions. Overall, I was very impressed with the quality of how these movies looked on DVD. The colors were rich and amazingly vibrant. The only time things looked a little awkward were in the sequences in Dangerous When Wet when the cartoon characters appeared. Aside from that, Warner Bros. seems like they have done a top notch job bringing all of these features to the DVD format.

Audio

Dolby Digital - English: Mono. Considering that music and musical numbers play such a strong role in many of these movies, decent sound for a release of this nature is a must. On the whole I thought that things sounded pretty solid. These movies all have a very clean quality to them. Everything plays pitch perfectly and it never seems like the audio has real room to breath. Nothing about the sound really takes us inside the character’s heads, however, the audio seems to keep our characters grounded and serves to allow them to be defined by various scores that are germane to them.

Package

Esther Williams, clad in a bathing suit and hanging off a diving board, presents a pristine image on the front of this slipcase cover. Behind her is a shot from one of the dance numbers in the films. The back cover gives us a shot of Williams in the pool, and it also lists out all the movies along with a small image of its poster. The five DVDs that make up this set pull out of this slipcase in one piece of packaging. Laid out on it is more artwork featuring Esther Williams and the swimming numbers from the films. There is one section that breaks down where the Extra Features are (titled “Esther Extras”), and there is another section that offers cast listings as well as technical specs.

Final Word

It would be pretty easy to dismiss the movies of Esther Williams as little more than excuses to get a pretty girl splashing around in the water. The mood of these films is so light, one would think that people in the 1940’s had not a care in the world. Of course we all know that this wasn’t the case, but it would be hard to tell based on the themes of the movies in the Esther Williams Collection. At the same time, who doesn’t love a little light entertainment from time to time? It’s quite fun seeing Williams get into one situation after another, and working in her favor is that she has people like Ricardo Montalban, Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to help carry the movies. These aren’t really dramatic pieces per se, but the characters that these people embody seem to offer a nice counterpoint to Williams’ simplistic characterizations.

I completely understand that what is presented in movies is different from real life. That is just how it is and the sooner we accept that the better. At the same time, the movies in the Esther Williams Collection: TCM Spotlight seem to show us an America that is striving for a more idealistic world. A world where one day our problems will be as simplistic as those presented in these films.

Dangerous When Wet was released June 18, 1953.