Million Dollar Mermaid

By Richard Corliss | September 22, 2011 | +

Everett Collection

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Year Released: 1952

Cast: Esther Williams, Victor Mature, Walter Pidgeon

Holder of a national record for the 100-m freestyle in 1939, Esther Williams didn’t get to compete in the 1940 Olympics — they were called off because of World War II — so she took the short trip from her Los Angeles home to Hollywood. After 20th Century Fox made some hit films starring Olympic figure skater Sonja Henie, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer told his minions, “Melt the ice, get a swimmer, make it pretty.” Olympic gold medalists Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe had played Tarzan in movies, but neither starred in films built around their specialty sport. Williams did, with a popular series of Technicolor swimming musicals, a genre never duplicated or even imitated. She cheerfully acknowledged that she couldn’t act, dance or sing, yet she anchored such watery wonders as Fiesta, On an Island with You and Neptune’s Daughter (in which she did sing the Oscar-winning hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”). Whatever Williams’ limitations, her attractions were obvious. Sleek as a seal, with gorgeously toned arms, a beachcomber’s tan and a lustrous smile, she exemplified the athletic young dazzler to a country weary of war. She was Doris Day underwater.

In Million Dollar Mermaid, a biopic of Annette Kellerman, the American swim star met the Australian swim star. A crippled 6-year-old in New South Wales, Kellerman wore steel braces and took swimming lessons as a corrective. At 15 she won the local mile and 100-yd. championships; by 20 she was an international stage star, giving exhibitions of high diving and water ballet (a genre she invented, which presaged the synchronized swimming of Williams and later Olympians). Kellerman’s status as a fashion icon stoked two scandals: she popularized the one-piece bathing suit — no more pantaloons on the beach! — and was the first movie star to appear nude, in the 1914 Daughter of the Gods.

In Williams’ all-talking, all-color, all-wet version, the leading lady doesn’t show enough skin to cause a blush at the Hays Office; otherwise, she’s the perfect embodiment of Kellerman’s all-around allure. But beauty comes at a price: while executing a 50-ft. dive in a gold swimsuit, Williams broke her neck, and director Mervyn LeRoy had to call a six-month delay to the production. The movie came out, was a hit and gave Williams the title for her chattily R-rated autobiography. She’s still around today, at 90, telling her fans, “I was just a swimmer who got lucky.”

Next: Olympia

Related Topics: Biopic, Drama, Million Dollar Mermaid, Musical, Swimming

Olympia

By Richard Corliss | September 22, 2011 | +

Everett Collection

Director: Leni Riefenstahl

Year Released: 1938

Cast: David Albritton, Arvo Askola, Jack Beresford

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In her previous feature-length documentary, Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl made Adolf Hitler a movie star. In Olympia, her two-part record of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games — titled Festival of the Nations and Festival of Beauty — the German director laid the same blessing on the American black athlete Jesse Owens. For Riefenstahl, perhaps the finest female director in cinema history and certainly its most notorious, really had no politics. Rather, she was a prime rhapsodizer of both geometric spectacle (Nazi architect Albert Speer was Triumph‘s production designer) and the glorious human body in action (in Olympia). An athlete from her youth, Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer in Ways to Strength and Beauty, then became the silent star of Germany’s mountain films, her svelte, handsome form clambering over precipices and skiing down treacherous slopes. She admired athletic prowess from the inside and knew, instinctively, how to photograph it.

All televised sport, not to mention nearly every sports film, is indebted to Olympia. It pioneered such techniques as placing cameras in balloons, in ditches, on a track racing with the sprinters, underwater as divers slice into the Olympic pool. More important, the film personalized the athletes: the glint of confidence on Owens’ face, the exhaustion of the marathoners as each painful step leads toward the stadium. In a way, Riefenstahl’s achievements here are more impressive than those of fiction-film directors. They had a script; she had only miles of footage (250 miles) to be scanned and scissored into art. She did it, controlling every frame of both films herself.

Olympia was a worldwide hit, but Riefenstahl’s reputation as “Hitler’s Pin-Up Girl” (the title of Budd Schulberg’s 1946 article on her for the Saturday Evening Post) stymied her film career. In the second half of her long life she took photographs of Nuba tribesmen and, in her 90s, still astonishingly spry and curious, worked on a scuba-diving documentary — starring, of course, herself. Underwater Impressions was released in 2002 on her 100th birthday; she died a year later.

Next: Raging Bull

Related Topics: Documentary, Gymnastics, Olympia, Swimming, Track