NEPTUNE'S DAUGHTER: Blu-ray (MGM, 1949) Warner Archive
Esther moons. Ricardo croons.
Skelton swoons. Garrett lampoons. Director, Edward Buzzell’s Neptune’s
Daughter (1949) is a fairly pedestrian 92-minutes of MGM froth off the top,
neatly packaged to capitalize on the exotic appeal of its star/America’s
mermaid, Miss Esther Williams as (wait for it) aqua-ballet star, Eve Barrett.
In a year when the studio was on the cusp of a major shake-up (its raja, Louis
B. Mayer, about to be unceremoniously deposed), with costs up and profits down,
Neptune’s Daughter sought to capitalize yet again on the aquacade craze
first inculcated in the spectacularly lavish, Bathing Beauty (1944), an
infinitely more charming movie in which Williams costarred to far better effect
with Red Skelton. On that outing Skelton was Williams’ noble suitor. Here, he
is Jack Spratt - in it, strictly for laughs – few and far between as they are –
attempting his grand amour, but getting stiffed by our leading lady as she
upgrades her standards for Latin lothario, José O'Rourke (Ricardo Montalban) while
Spratt settles for Betty Garrett’s man-crazy gal on the side – Eve’s sis’,
Betty. The best that can be said of Neptune’s Daughter is that it passes
the time quietly unnoticed, except for Frank Loesser’s Oscar-winning ditty,
‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ (since gone on to have a life of its own, covered
by virtually every major artist of the 20th century). Herein, the
song serves a dual purpose, first as a sinfully sexy duet between Eve and
José, who
plies his potential score of the night with liquor and lyrics as she attempts
to disengage from his seduction, and then, switching gears to infer Betty as
the aggressive seducer, luring Spratt to his romantic doom with brash barbs and
bawdy excess.
For me, Betty Garrett has always
been one of the most underutilized talents in all of Hollywood – partly,
perhaps, because she lacked the drop-dead good looks desirable in Tinsel Town
then to be considered an A-list leading lady, but more over for her affiliation
with the Communist Party, branding her a threat to democracy during the HUAC hearings
of the 1950’s and forcing her career into a nearly 2-decade-long moratorium.
Mercifully, by then, Garrett (then, wed to hubby, Larry Parks) did not need the
movies to survive. The couple’s lucrative real estate ventures and rental
properties all over Los Angeles ensured other means of survival. Garrett,
well-schooled in the performing arts by Graham and Anna Sokolow for dance,
Sandy Meisner for drama, Lehman Engel for music, and Margaret Webster for the
Shakespearean classics, joined Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre as an understudy,
performed with Martha Graham's dance company at Carnegie Hall and did, in fact,
join the Communist Party. Her inauspicious debut in a Broadway flop in 1942 nevertheless
garnered solid reviews, leading to her one-year Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract. Impressed
by her range and deft handling of comedy, L.B. Mayer extended that contract and
Garrett would appear, always in support, in such high-profile musicals as Words
and Music (1948), On the Town, Take Me Out To The Ball Game,
and, of course, Neptune's Daughter (all of them, in 1949).
The plot to this one is pretty
wafer-thin. After initially rejecting a lucrative business venture by swimsuit
mogul, Joe Backett (Keenan Wynn) Eve Barrett has a sudden change of heart. Joe
wastes no time planning a lucrative publicity junket to coincide with a
big polo match. Eve informs Betty about the arrival of the South American team and man-crazy Bette almost immediately sets her cap to date one of the players. Meanwhile, Jose O'Rourke,
the playboy/captain of the team is nursing an arm injury under Jack
Spratt, a pretty inept masseur. Spratt laments his lack of finesse with the
ladies. As recompense, Jose gives Jack some pretty sappy advice on how to bait
his lure – chiefly, by mastering Spanish…the language of love. Not long
thereafter, Betty mistakes Jack for Jose. To test Jose’s theory, Jack secretly
plays a Spanish language instruction record, mouthing the words to Betty.
Unaware Betty has not met the real Jose, Eve discourages her from having
a second date, and then, confronts the real Jose, ordering him to stay away
from her sister. Confused, Jose nevertheless agrees as he is wildly attracted
to Eve. When Jose makes a pass at Eve, she accepts, believing she has
successfully misdirected him away from Betty. Alas, the date goes well for Eve,
leaving her feeling extremely guilty for having ‘stolen’ her sister’s date. The
misdirection is further muddled when Eve’s maid, Matilda (Theresa Harris)
informs Eve, Betty is out on another date with Jose.
Believing her first instincts about
Jose being a notorious womanizer are true, Eve arrives at Jose’s apartment, but
is confounded when she discovers Betty is not there. The plot becomes
needlessly even more complicated when organized crime kingpin, Lukie Luzette
(Ted de Corsia) plots to foil the South American’s
chances to win the polo match by kidnapping their captain. Instead, he ends up taking
Spratt his prisoner. Meanwhile, Jose, fallen madly for Eve, proposes marriage. As Eve finds no trespass against her sister, she
accepts. However, in her attempt to break this news to Betty, Eve learns the
man Betty thinks is Jose (nee, Spratt) has become engaged to her. Again,
wounded feelings. Deeply confused by Eve’s standoffish behavior towards him,
Jose is abducted by Lukie’s henchmen while Spratt finds a way to escape his
captors. Learning of Lukie’s plans to foil the match, Betty gets Spratt, whom
she still believes is Jose, to mount a horse and lead the South American team
onto victory. At game’s end, Jose is liberated from Lukie’s grasp, Spratt
confesses his deceptions to Betty, the couples reconcile and a double wedding
takes place, culminating in a garishly appointed ‘riverboat’ water ballet finale.
In the midst of all this hoopla,
MGM’s music-meisters find a way to incorporate Xavier Cugat into two heavily
truncated, if briefly mesmeric numbers: Sibonay, and the
voodoo-inspired, Jungle Rumba. For an MGM musical, Neptune’s Daughter
is surprisingly light on the tunes. Apart from the aforementioned songs, the
movie features just two more – both totally forgettable: I Love Those Men,
performed by Garrett and Skelton after the latter accidentally professes to
Cugat to be one of Latin America’s foremost entertainers, and, My Heart
Beats Faster, a thoroughly disposable love ballad sung by Montalban’s Jose
as he pursues Eve near the moonlit stables. Impossible to state for certain how
well the gags played in 1949, but most of the giddy burlesque and boisterous
slapstick herein does not hold up, despite Skelton’s ripe and leering
presence. Ironically, Skelton is at his best when he reins in his decision to
go big or go home. The scene where Spratt systematically becomes ensnared into
performing publicly at Cugat’s request by mistakenly agreeing to any and all of
the conductor’s Spanish-spoken queries with a very nervous, “Sí!” is a genuine
hoot.
At 92-mins., Dorothy Kingsley’s
screenplay does not have time enough to get across much more than a series of
loosely strung together vignettes, slavishly devoted to one zany misdirection. That
sort of farce works well for a half-hour sitcom – not, altogether as well for
an hour-and-a-half movie. Just prior to making the movie, Esther Williams
discovered she was expecting her first son. She kept her pregnancy a secret, although
she would later affectionately wax about having some difficulty fitting into
her skin-tight bathing attire. However, the picture had a profound impact on Williams’
decision to launch her own line of swimwear nearly a decade later,
incorporating designs and engineering borrowed from this movie.
The one talent worth noting in Neptune’s
Daughter is Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino, better known to
television audiences in his later years as Fantasy Island’s (1977-84)
benevolent master of ceremonies, Mr. Roarke. Spanning seven decades of
entertainment, Montalban had only just arrived in Hollywood a scant 2 years
before Neptune’s Daughter, part of Hollywood’s self-perceived ‘goodwill’
promotion of Latin American talent. The Torreón-born actor was heavily promoted
as a stud du jour, Montalban’s taut physicality (later, to be tested with a
perilous fall, resulting in life-long injury and pain) and charismatic voice,
making him an instant hot property. Achieving stardom in his native Mexico
first, Montalbán was quickly snatched up by MGM to appear opposite Esther
Williams in one of her rare non-aquatic roles, in Fiesta (1947). Sensing
a winning combination here, he was reteamed with Williams for On an Island
with You and featured prominently as a specialty act in The Kissing
Bandit (both in 1948). After Neptune’s Daughter, Montalbán's career
took an unexpected turn with his first ‘serious’ role in Border Incident
(1949), immediately followed by a cameo in Battleground the same year,
and then a star turn in the noir classic, Mystery Street (1950).
While an apocryphal tale has co-star,
Red Skelton stealing a ‘one of a kind’ piano built for the movie, then charging
MGM a thousand dollars a day to use it in the movie, there was, in fact, some
consternation about the Oscar nod for Loesser’s ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’
as the composer had actually authored it in 1944 to perform as a duet for him
and his wife at their house parties. Evidently, AMPAS chose to ignore this
oversight. The song, a substitute for another Loesser ditty, ‘I’d Love to
Get You on a Slow Boat to China’ which the studio considered too sexually
explicit, was nominated and took home the coveted award. As for ‘…Slow Boat
to China’, it can be heard orchestrally as background music in Neptune’s
Daughter.
Neptune’s
Daughter arrives on Blu-ray via the Warner Archive, in yet another
snazzy-looking 1080p transfer, cribbing from 3-strip Technicolor elements that
have obviously received much love and consideration. Zero misalignment and some
gorgeous saturation levels abound. Contrast is uniformly excellent. No
age-related artifacts. A light smattering of grain looking indigenous to its
source caps off another reference quality 1080p affair. This one looks
lightyears younger than it ought. The 2.0 DTS mono is in as excellent shape.
Prepare to enjoy. My fervent hope would be that more Esther Williams is on
WAC’s roster to remaster: Bathing Beauty and Easy to Love should
be top priorities for WAC going into the future, followed by On An Island
With You, Thrill of a Romance, This Time for Keeps, Duchess of Idaho and Easy
to Wed. For now, we count only two of Williams’ aquacade fantasies in
hi-def: Million Dollar Mermaid and Neptune’s Daughter. Only one
is worthy of reconsideration. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
1
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
0
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