Gratuitous photo thread

TCM is promoting a new DVD box set of Esther Williams movies tonight in prime time, with five of the six movies in the set being shown. I'm not personally a fan of the water musical movies, but they're inoffensive enough, and I can certainly understand why other people might be a fan of such movies. TCM can't program for me or any other viewer alone, and so of course there are going to be days with movies for which I don't particularly care. That having been said, a night of Esther Williams is a good excuse for posting a photo of her in those skimpy bathing suits.

Today also marks the 67th birthday of actress Britt Ekland. Probably her most famous role is as Goodnight, the CIA agent and love interest of James Bond, in the movie The Man With the Golden Gun. It's an excuse to show another photo of a scantily-clad woman, although I could just as easily have mentioned another of Ekland's movies: Scandal. This out-of-print movie deals with the Profumo Affair, an incident in the early 1960s when the British Minister of War, John Profumo, was discovered to have been sleeping with a showgirl. That's somewhat problematic, but the bigger problem is that the woman, Christine Keeler, had also been sleeping with a military attaché from the Soviet embassy. Oops. Scandal is an interesting but very racy look at London when it was at the beginning of the Swingin' 60s.