by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Neptune’s Daughter
was a considerably more fun movie than Thrill of a Romance; directed by Edward Buzzell (who’d started out as an
actor — he played the star role in the 1930 film of George M. Cohan’s stage
musical Little Johnny Jones — and
when he graduated to director made two films with the Marx Brothers, At
the Circus and Go West) from a script by Dorothy Kingsley, not a great writer but certainly a reliable purveyor of musical
clichés, with “additional dialogue” credits to Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat.
It’s a musical based on the same sort of mistaken-identity gimmick as the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers films The Gay Divorcée (1934) and Top Hat (1935), though by 1949 the plot twist was pretty
threadbare. The film features a voice-over narration by Joe Backett (Keenan
Wynn), who recalls how he discovered ace swimmer Eve Barrett (Esther Williams)
and ultimately set her up in a swimsuit company they co-owned; he organized the
production while she designed the swimsuits and displayed them in public
appearances. The business is going swimmingly (pardon the pun) when a South
American polo team announces that they’re coming to the Everytown, U.S.A.
setting to play against the U.S. all-stars, and Eve Barrett’s scapegrace sister
Betty (Betty Garrett — that’s right, Betty Garrett is playing a character named
Betty Barrett!) decides she wants
to latch on to one of those rich, hot Latinos for herself. Eve is equally
determined to stop her, but as things turn out Betty ends up chasing Jack
Spratt (Red Skelton, re-teamed with Williams from Bathing Beauty, only this time the billing is “Esther Williams and
Red Skelton” instead of the other way around), the masseur at the stable where
the big polo match is supposed to be played, under the misapprehension that he
is Argentinian polo star José O’Rourke (Ricardo Montalban, whose presence here
puts Esther Williams one degree of separation from William Shatner!).
The
producer is Jack Cummings, who had the same portmanteau approach to structuring a movie as Joe Pasternack: a
Red Skelton comedy routine here, a musical number there, a bit of plot just to
keep the story moving, a swimsuit fashion show (staged to the song “On a Slow
Boat to China” by Frank Loesser), a bit of romantic intrigue as Eve decides, Gold
Diggers of 1933-style, to keep her sister
from falling into the clutches of South American playboy José O’Rourke by
romancing him herself (and of course she gets the right O’Rourke and genuinely falls in love with him), and
a big slapstick climax at the end in which Spratt, despite not even being able
to get on a horse, much less ride one, manages to impersonate O’Rourke (the
real one has been kidnapped by gangsters seeking to make a killing on the match
by betting against the South American team) and win the big match in a
spectacular finale, many of whose gags have the touch of Buster Keaton about
them. (He isn’t officially credited as having worked on this film but I suspect
he did; MGM was keeping him on salary to work out gags for Skelton, often in
remakes of Keaton’s old hits.) Neptune’s Daughter has four songs by Frank Loesser, who in the
character of super-gambler Lukie Luzette (Ted de Corsia) seems to have been
working up for his mega-success in the Broadway musical Guys and
Dolls a year later, and he originally
intended to use “On a Slow Boat to China” for a reluctant-seduction duet
between Williams and Montalban. MGM’s “suits” resisted because they didn’t
think the Production Code Administration would approve it, so Loesser took a
song he’d written five years earlier for himself and his wife to perform
together at parties, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and gave the studio that even
though its lyrics were even raunchier and more sexually explicit than those of
“On a Slow Boat to China.” The fact that Loesser sold “their” song to a studio
for professional performance in a movie pissed off Mrs. Loesser and helped
unravel their marriage, and when “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Original Song other songwriters protested that since
the piece was five years old and Mr. and Mrs. Loesser had been performing it
regularly at Hollywood parties, it should be disqualified because it wasn’t
really an “original” song. No, said the Academy; because it hadn’t been
performed professionally until
its appearance in Neptune’s Daughter,
it was eligible — and it went on to win the award.
Indeed, the sequence in
which “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is performed — Williams and Montalban are alone
in a room, having an argument in which he’s making advances and she’s fending
them off, and the melody steals in and the two start singing (in quite capable
if not “great” voices), following which director Buzzell cuts to a comedy
performance of it by Skelton and Garrett — is the best thing in the film,
revealing a sophistication common in Arthur Freed’s MGM musicals but unusual
for Cummings’ productions. Williams even gets a water ballet at the end, albeit
a relatively small-scale one by Jack Donohue hardly as astonishing as the one
by John Murray Anderson which ends Bathing Beauty or the Busby Berkeley extravaganzae she got to do
later, and that’s a lot of fun — as is Skelton’s unlikely emergence as a polo
star. Neptune’s Daughter borrowed
its title from a 1914 film featuring the movies’ first swimming star, Annette
Kellerman (whom Williams would play later in a 1952 biopic, Million
Dollar Mermaid), and given that its plot
had roots in two of the Astaire-Rogers musicals James Agee’s statement that
Williams, “dry and dressed, resembles Ginger Rogers” has rarely seemed truer —
even though Rogers was a genuinely talented comedienne while most of Williams’
talents seem to have been in her legs and her lungs; when she attempted a
non-swimming role in the 1956 Universal-International picture The
Unguarded Moment (in which she plays a
teacher sexually harassed by a student, played by John Saxon), it was a flop
and pretty much killed her big-screen career. I suspect Williams was the person
Mike Nichols and Elaine May were parodying when they did their routine of a
celebrity interviewer talking to a starlet who’s about to make Two
Gals in Paris, “the life story of Gertrude
Stein,” and she breathlessly explains to him, “This is a real departure for me
… I don’t swim in this picture at all.”
