Tonight I watched another Esther Williams movie, "On An Island With You" (1948), done up once again in the Romantic Fantasy style that MGM was so good at, and which they played to the hilt in "Bathing Beauty", Williams' first movie that I saw and reviewed last week. The enticement in these films is the alternate reality that is created. The world is an Island Paradise, with a classy nightclub where Xavier Cugat's orchestra is always playing. This time his little pet chihuahua is part of the act, to add to the Cuteness Factor and thus the draw. Last week in "Bathing Beauty", the fantasy world was an all-female college campus where one man (Red Skelton) is lucky enough to find himself enrolled.
So these films are all about Romantic Fantasy, and the exclusion of the Real World. That's the draw, and it works like a charm. This time, Esther Williams is making a movie on a tropical island. So right there, it's a movie about making a movie. Her leading man is the Handsome Ricardo Montalban, of "Cordoba" fame (can you say "rich Corinthian leather"?), and later, "Fantasy Island"
So right there, you have the same theme! And I didn't even conceive this in advance. "Fantasy Island", a hit TV show in the late 1970s, and an Island Fantasy in 1948, tonight's movie.
In the movie-within-a-movie, Montalban is playing a Navy Lieutenant who is in love with Island Girl Williams. However, he has a rival. The director has called in, for the purpose of accuracy, a real Navy Lieutenant (the ill-fated Peter Lawford) who is acting as a technical advisor to the production. And of course he falls in love with Williams, too. And as it turns out, he had been carrying a torch for a long time, and for a reason.
On the sidelines are the old Schnozzola himself, Jimmy Durante, as an ex-vaudevillian who is the assistant director, and the beautiful Cyd Charisse as another Island Girl, who is secretly in love with Montalban. A lot of story plays out, including Lawford's plot to kidnap Esther Williams by flying her away in his Navy plane to yet another island, where he can confess his reason for becoming attached to her. It's a desperate plan on his part, but it just may work........because Ricardo Montalban is slowly but surely falling for the quiet Charisse, with whom he shares a couple of electric dance numbers.
Just like in last week's "Bathing Beauty", the formula is Non-Stop Extravaganza, and so we are always ready to return to the nightclub, where Xavier Cugat is waiting, dog in hand, to welcome us. Anybody might jump up onstage and break into song and dance : last week it was Red Skelton, this time Durante. And because these movies are vehicles for Esther Williams, you know you are gonna have Swimming Pool Spectaculars at the beginning and more importantly at the end, when there will be a grand finale water ballet.
I mentioned last week that Williams was a huge Cash Cow for MGM. Having now seen two of her films, it is easy to see why, and easy to see why they stuck with this formula and made a bunch of them, I think the number was eleven movies (give or take). A huge part of the films' success is the way they look, from the set design to the costuming to the Technicolor saturation and the candy-coated matching color schemes in every frame.
The Esther Williams movie series are simply for fun, and fun they are, especially if you like movies about romance. I have seen two so far, and I have another two on order from the Libe, to be reviewed as soon as I see 'em.
That was really all the news for the day. It was a Tuesday, so yer basic Golden Agers schedule predominated. I am reading two new books : one is called "Drugs As Weapons Against Us" by John L. Potash, in which he has compiled a lot of evidence to suggest that the change in 1960s student political culture, from activism to Hippie burnout, was a result of the LSD supplied covertly by the CIA, in an effort to disrupt the nationwide anti-war movement. If you recall the heavily reported stories in the 1980s about how the crack cocaine epidemic in the inner cities was fueled by undercover CIA drug shipments, in order to get the impoverished class addicted (as in the Chinese opium wars of the early 1900s), then picture the same thing in this case. Students in the mid-60s were beginning to organise against a war in which they faced a mandatory draft to go and fight. An obvious BS war at that, not like WW2. And so they organised rallies at college campuses, like right here at CSUN.
But then, by 1968 and 1969, the whole movement of the 1960s was all burnt out on hard drugs, heroin and especially LSD. And their anti-war movement was mostly toast after that.
The book by John Potash details how this happened. It is a very important book.
My own research and reading has shown me just how sophisticated the Intelligence apparatus is, in this country and in England, and no doubt around the world in the major powers. They can pull off stuff that you'd never think they could pull off. And they can do it because these guys are incredibly bright people who think so far outside the box that it's hard to keep up with them.
At any rate, don't take drugs. Don't even smoke marijuana. That way you are not playing anybody's game.
My other new book is called "Ratline" by Peter Levenda. I got it from the Libe, and it deals with the possible escape of Adolf Hitler at the end of WW2.
With Martin Bormann, there is some substantial evidence that he escaped. With Hitler, well, I've never heard of any evidence, but Peter Levenda is a great researcher and a hell of a writer, so we'll see.
See you in the morning. :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment