Bathing Beauty (1944)

Hoping to win back his estranged swimming-coach wife (Esther Williams), a lovestruck songwriter (Red Skelton) enrolls in a women's college, and graduates "summa cum laude" in Comedy! Red's in rare form and Esther's in form-fitting swimsuite in this delighfully dizzy musical farce. BATHING BEAUTY begins with a splash: Xavier Cugat plays, Red clowns and Esther plunges into a pool. From there, things go, well... swimmingly. The college is loaded with pretty MGM starlets. Cugie shakes up more hot South American rhythms. A fine cast, including Basil Rathbone, Donald Meek, Janis Paige, and Groucho Marx's favorite foil, Margaret Dumont, gives expert support. The finale is a wowser of a water ballet featuring the movies' favoring bathing beauty swimming gracefully along alternating jets of water and falme. But Esther isn't the only artistic lovely. Red dons a pink tutu for a college ballet class and reduces Tchaikovsky to chopped liver. Dive in!