Esther Williams

I’ve come to be an Esther Williams fan by stages, and it wasn’t until recently that she completely won me over. Strangely enough, when I had the epiphany about her it was in Moscow last week, when I saw “Easy to Love” as part of a series the Moscow Film Festival was having on American Musicals. Naughty me, to go to Moscow and see an American film, but with the jet lag and the stress and the long plane trip, all I wanted was a little mindless amusement, and a few Busby Berkeley water ballet numbers seemed just the ticket to forgetting my troubles.

Perhaps it was partly the delirium of seeing the film as “exotic,” through the eyes of the Russians, that made me realized what a strange and intricate art form the American musical indeed is, and it made me see the whole thing as an elaborate art piece instead of the popular entertainment it was originally intended to be.

In this striking Technicolor gem, Esther Williams goes back and forth between three men. She is aggressive, athletic, and healthy, with no coyness about her: you might almost say she is brazen, but she retains her full femininity and manages to be sexy and yielding at the same time. She is in love with Van Johnson, her workaholic boss that has to be trained to see her charms and be interested in sex, and is courted by her swimming partner, a male tan bodybuilder who is pictured almost exclusively in ridiculous little swimming briefs, and an overly charming nightclub crooner, played by Tony Martin.

Although the script indulges in many innuendos about Esther and her charms, and the camera lingers on her in one skimpy costume after another, including close-ups of stockings, underwear, etc., we somehow get the feeling that the film is about beefcake rather than cheesecake. She deflects the camera’s lurid gaze with her cheerful vitality and good nature, and focuses the audience’s attention instead on her own appetites, which are purely the appetites of the all-American girl, and on her own gaze and manhunt. Of course, this part of the plot is intentionally played for comic effect, but Esther is the girl to pull it off.

There is less water ballet in this film than usual, and more water skiing. Esther is shown to be resolutely strong and athletic, and the film seems to fetishize her ability to do and be anything, much in the way that “A Star is Born” fetishized Judy Garland. And, like Judy, she is given the ultimate vaudeville honor: she gets to perform in CLOWN DRAG. This number tests Berkeley’s outrageous talent for pushing the boundaries of taste almost too far.

Reminiscent of the deleted cornfield scene in “The Wizard of Oz, which utilized Bolger’s rubbery skills to the maximum in gravity-defying feats of movement, Berkeley combines Williams’ natural talents with absurd and impossible flights. In water-proof clown white with red rubber nose and curly wig, she bounces onto lilypads, does somersaults in the air, is chased by a fake alligator with snapping jaws, and seems to fly as well as swim. At the end of the scene, in a stroke of genius, she has a serious talk with her massive-shouldered fiancé (John Bromfield) in his tiny shorts, still in her grotesque makeup. In her tenderest scene, she rejects this man not as a woman, not even as a person—but as a scary, wet clown.


In ensuing scenes, we see Tony Martin become subtly feminized as he woos a roomful of elderly ladies with his relentless crooning (almost every song in the film is sung by him alone!), Van Johnson eating supper alone like an old maid, and the bodybuilder guy always in his little shorts, always more undressed and more ridiculous than anyone else onscreen. The sense of the men as objects of Williams’ desire is enhanced by her polymorphous flitting from one to the other, and by her sunny resiliency regarding love, fate, and the male flavor of the evening.

Esther Williams is a lady the in the best sense, who personifies strength and health in gender construction. Her pleasure in her craft and in being alive is apparent, and when she mugs, swims, dances, makes love, dresses and undresses, and clowns for the camera, she does not appear to be in the service of male needs or commands, but only of her own desires. She is an unabashedly female 1950’s type, strong and feminine, maternal and tomboyish, and totally without self-deprecation, that I very much miss in culture and in women today. In my next film I plan to feature women like this, women who have hips and brains and know how to use them, but that are before the time when we had to fear them and apologize for their power.