Dangerous When Wet

I recorded several of the Esther Williams movies that I hadn't seen before the last time they showed up on TCM. I'm not the biggest fan of her films because the whole aquacade thing doesn't terribly interest me, but since she was certainly a phenomenon and I blog about well-known old movies I kind of feel the need to watch the movies to do posts on them. Next up is Dangerous When Wet, the movie which is also famous for Esther Williams' swim with Tom and Jerry.

The movie, of course, starts off long before the swim with the cartoon cat and mouse. Williams plays Katie Higgins, who lives with the sort of family like Debbie Reynolds' family in Athena a year or so later: seemingly bohemian with a fitness streak. The family makes a modest living with a dairy farm somewhere in the US south, while doing fitness training involving marathon swims. In addition to Katie, there are her parents (William Demarest and Charlotte Greenwood) and siblings Suzie (Barbara Whiting) and Junior (Donna Corcoran).

Into this life comes Windy Weebe (Jack Carson). He's someone from another time, in that you'd expect him in a 1930s movie as the sort of carny selling bogus tonics, but Dangerous When Wet was released in 1953. Windy is selling something called Liquipep, and having a family of fitness freaks like the Higgins family would be a great endorsement for the product. However, in a movie like this you know that's only have the reason Windy keeps pursing the Higginses. He also falls for Katie in a romantic way, although as Jack Carson is not the top-billed man here, you can expect that Windy won't wind up with Katie.

The leading man is actually Fernando Lamas, so how does he show up in the movie? Windy has an idea for a really lucrative endorsement for the family: knowing that they did a 14-mile swim in their local river, he sells them on the idea of entering a contest to swim across the English Channel (technically the Strait of Dover), with financial backing from Liquapep. So it's off to France to train, as the contest is going to go from Calais to Dover. One day, while training in the Channel, she gets onto the wrong boat, one being captained by André Lanet (that's Fernando Lamas, of course). The two fall in love, even though you'd think a French swimmer might be more up André's alley. Unsurprisingly, there's at least one young and nubile French woman in the contest, in the form of Gigi Mignon (Denise Darcel). Still, André and Katie fall in love, and her spending time with André threatens to interfere with her training for the Channel swim. The movie climaxes with the contest. Will Katie succeed in swimming the Channel?

I didn't mention the scene with Tom and Jerry in the actual synopsis, and that's because it's not really plot-related, but part of a dream sequence Katie has involving her, the cat and mouse, and a cartoon octopus that threatens to keep Katie underwater. The main story in the movie is fairly silly, although at least it doesn't have the elaborate aquacades that are as unrealistic as musical numbers in traditional musicals. Dangerous When Wet isn't my favorite movie, but I can certainly see why fans of Esther Williams would like it.