Team Experience is celebrating Esther Williams' Centennial.
by Nathaniel R
"Do you mind if I watch, too?" a businessman in a parked car shouts from outside a swimming pool -- a pretty swimming instructor, has asked her students to watch her do a swan dive. "Not at all," she says with a dulcet tone and flirty smile. Moments later the businessman is grilling the child to tell him everything he knows about his teacher including where she lives (!) This is the opening scene from 1945's Thrill of a Romance and courtship was, um, different. Who knows about this fictional swimming instructor but the actress playing her was already used to being gawked at, even before movie cameras arrived.
Esther Williams, the athlete turned movie star, was born on this day one hundred years ago in Inglewood, California. By the time she was 16 she was a national swimming champion with Olympic dreams. A couple of years later she was a star in the Aquacade (paired with another swimming champion, Johnny Weismuller, already a movie star). MGM signed her in 1941 and she became a popular WW II pin-up girl in her endless swimsuit photos. Meanwhile the movies back home were making her yet more famous.
Which brings us to Thrill of a Romance (1945)...
It was not quite her first hit but the first that really put her over as a headliner that wasn't retro-engineered to focus on her, like her previous success which was renamed Bathing Beauty (1944) before release. It's easy to see why she (and her film) were a hit with audiences in the summer of '45 even if it's difficult to understand what Cynthia, that swimming instructor, saw in Bob (Carleton G Young), that businessman in the car.
Fifteen minutes after they meet and he proves his stalker bonafides (he knows everything about her and that she lives with her ditzy aunt, played by Spring Byington) he tells her they're going to be married. Her response is an "oh!" rather than "I do" ...which, well, fair. It's only after the wedding that we realize that this first romance is not producing the titular thrills. Bob is as obnoxious as we thought and proves it by being too pissed off that she is a sweet woman who doesn't think twice about hugging a wet student (little Julio who brought her a gift of the bravest dive he's ever attempted for her wedding present).
BOB: You'll ruin your dress!
CYNTHIA: I won't need it again.
Esther nails that clapback. It's a bit snappish but also full of warmth; she plans to be a devoted wife.
Bob won't prove as devoted since he leaves her stranded alone on their honeymoon for an emergency business trip. Alone for days on end, Cynthia gets to know the other vacationers at the resort to pass the time which include comic relief players like an opera star Nils Knudsen (real life opera star Lauritz Melchior) with a large appetite and a sharp-tongued single girl (Frances Gifford). Soon Cythia meets war hero Tommy Milvain (Van Johnson) whose sense of humor, decency, and humility wins her over. Cue: the actual titular romance.
Tommy conveniently doesn't know how to swim, which gives the stars excuses to keep touching platonically as she teaches him. The war hero is a catch in every way and, what's more, he's nothing like her pompous stuffed-shirt husband though Cynthia/Esther is way behind the audience on this point. She keeps resisting Tommy but since he's played by the ever charming Van Johnson you don't want her to!
This was Johnson and Williams second pairing and proved so popular (Thrill of a Romance was one of the top ten box office hits of 1945) that the studio brought them back together thrice more.
CYNTHIA: You were a big help to me too, Tommy. I'd have been quite lonely if I hadn't picked you up in the pool.
TOMMY: But I picked you up.
CYNTHIA: Well, we picked each other up.
TOMMY: And now we have to put each other down.
One of the joys of Thrill of a Romance from a modern perspective is watching the how hard the film's screenplay has to work in order to make Cynthia absolutely faultless for what is essentially an adultery plot (sans adultery!). She never leads Tommy on. She's always honest with him that she's married. They're sort of dating, very chastely, without admitting it, because she's been abandoned and she needs dinner dates, etcetera. She gives absent Bob multiple chances despite how horribly he treats her. The screenplay is doing more acrobatics than Esther when she's diving... if not as gracefully.
Still the movie offers pleasant chuckles, old fashioned swoon, and some good lines sold well especially by Van Johnson. When a bellboy offers to clean his dirty coat just after guilt-ridden Cynthia has asked him to leave the hotel for good. "No thanks, I've already been brushed off."
For her part, Esther Williams is consistently winning on camera. While the dramatic notes were never going to win her an Oscar, she was decidedly capable. This is especially true in the water scenes -- I hadn't quite believed this before seeing one of her pictures as it felt like such a Hollywood machine fabricated mythology. Ye when she's in the pool, all her gifts -- physical expressiveness, screen magnetism, real warmth, and skill at light feeling / banter -- come together in a unique enough way that major stardom emerged.
the bellboy and the opera star
The most curious thing about this particular hit musical is that none of the songs are sung by the movie stars themselves. The bulk of the numbers go to the real-life opera star Lauritz Melchior, but there's also music from big band leader Tommy Dorsey (playing himself) and his orchestra. There are also one off numbers from real life drummer Buddy Rich, Helene Stanley as Susan Dorsey, and Jerry Scott playing a beautiful voiced bellboy (Tangent: I couldn't find any information about this African American teen actor -- this was his only movie -- but he's a highlight and it's nice / surprising that the movie has two sympathetic speaking roles for young actors of color way back in '45)
All ends happily -- that's only a spoiler alert if you've never seen a movie before -- with the correct couple getting their happily ever after. Make that couples, plural. In addition to Cynthia & Tommy the other emerging lovers were Esther & Moviegoers. Whenever Esther donned her suit, audiences didn't ask how the water/movie was, but just dove in.
Tomorrow: Neptune's Daughter (1949)