Bathing Beauty

Hoping to win back his estranged swimming coach wife (Esther Williams), a love-struck songwriter (Red Skelton) enrolls in a women's college, and graduates summa cum laude in comedy! Red's in rare form and Esther's in formfitting swimsuits in this delightfully musical farce. Bathing Beauty begins with a splash: Xavier Cugat plays, Red clowns and Esther plunges into a pool. And from there things go, well, swimmingly. The college is lauded with pretty M-G-M starlets. Cugie shakes up more hot South American rhythms. Harry James swings into help North American sounds, and a fine cast including Basil Rathbone, Donald Meek, Janis Paige, and Margaret Dumont give expert support. The finale is a wowser of a water ballet, featuring Hollywood's favorite bathing beauty swimming gracefully along alternating jets of water and flame. But Esther isn't the only artistic lovely. When production began, the film's title was "Mr. Co-Ed", with Skelton positioned to be the center of attraction, but M-G-M soon found out as filming continued, that the film was going to catapult Esther Williams into screen super-stardom, leading to the film being released with the title Bathing Beauty with Esther becoming one of the studio's biggest stars in a series of Technicolor aquatic entertainments for over a decade.

• comedy
• musical