For a total departure from the horrific TV news that continues to unfold, I escaped by watching a 1953 Hollywood film, Easy to Love.
This film, starring three 1950s Hollywood favorites, offered just the kind of escape I needed. The stars were three of my own favorites when I was growing up: Esther Williams, Van Johnson, and Tony Martin.
Set in the lush backdrop of Cypress Gardens, Florida (as it existed in the mid-fifties), the story transports us to a Technicolorful world where people faced the kind of simple problems we all wished we had right now.
Esther provides the dominant star power, charmingly swimming, diving, and singing her way through the silly plot. As an astonishing athletic female star during that era (for which she deserves far more attention and praise), she headlined a number of MGM films. Some of them frequently appear on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), and when I recently watched Easy to Love, the TCM host noted that Hollywood legend Busby Berkeley had choreographed Esther’s escapades in this film. The film opens, in fact, with a stunning example of just what Esther and Busby could do together. Berkeley later revealed that he loved being free of “the confines of the pool” in this film, here able to marshal 100 “troops” of water-skiers and swimmers, along with Esther, to perform astounding spectacles on water. What’s remarkable is that, before making this film, swimmer Esther had never water-skied and had to learn how.
Esther’s MGM films included Neptune’s Daughter (1949), in which she and Ricardo Montalban sing the Frank Loesser Oscar-winning song that decades later has been viewed by some as offensive: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” You probably know that the male singer tries to persuade the woman to stay with him despite her desire to leave. Truthfully, the sexual innuendo it splashes on the screen was pretty typical of many Hollywood films in that era.
Montalban, by the way, later became famous for his roles in StarTrek and Planet of the Apes films, as well as his role on TV’s Fantasy Island.
Esther’s co-star, Van Johnson, who usually played the quintessential good-guy, has a different role here. He ruthlessly runs the resort at Cypress Gardens, where he’s a tyrannical boss, ordering his employee Esther to work long hours while he ignores her romantic interest in him. He’s constantly surrounded in his domain by a bevy of countless other “girls” (no one’s a woman in this film). Esther frequently rages against his awful treatment, which he keeps on doing…. Until the very end.
Midway, along comes Tony Martin, the handsome singer I focused on in a post last year [https://susanjustwrites.com/2022/10/26/marlon-tony-and-cyd/]. He meets Esther during her brief stay in NYC, and romance ensues. As the film moves along, successful cabaret-headliner Tony sings a number of mostly forgettable numbers, with the notable exception of Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love.” Tony charmingly serenades Esther with that American-songbook standard at a pivotal point in the story.
[As I noted in my earlier post, my father wangled tickets for our family to watch Tony Martin perform at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas one year after the film Easy to Love appeared. In addition to singing “Luck Be a Lady” from the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (the song that forever left a powerful memory for me), he must have sung a wide range of other songs that I don’t remember. But I’ll bet that “Easy to Love” was one of them.]
Back to the film: What’s most escapist in this film today is its colorful portrayal of flower-filled Cypress Gardens, Florida, and the astounding swimming and water-skiing that it highlights. This made me wonder: Whatever became of Cypress Gardens?
I did a bit of research into the fascinating history of Cypress Gardens. During the 1930s, a couple named Pope created this new resort, opening in 1936 with 8,000 varieties of flowers and the first electric boats “gliding through” the canals they’d constructed. It became Central Florida’s major tourist attraction, especially the water ski show that evolved. Numerous movies were filmed there, including Easy to Love. Over the years, it’s been bought and sold many times. Today it’s the site of the theme park LEGOLAND Florida Resort.
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 