EASY TO LOVE

US, 1953, 96 minutes, Colour.
Esther Williams, Tony Martin, Van Johnson.
Directed by Charles Walters.

Easy to Love is a pleasant, if inconsequential, Esther Williams swim musical. It came towards the end of her career as a celebrated film swim star. It also came at the end of M.G.M's musicals. She was to end this career with Howard Keel in Jupiter's Darling.

However, this slight concoction has Esther working very hard in Florida for Van Johnson - with whom she is in love but who does not notice her except to keep her working hard, pulling all kinds of tricks to keep her at it: modelling, advertising, swimming, acting as a hostess in Florida's Cypress Gardens which are used as a location. There are some entertaining aspects of this battle of the sexes. Esther Williams and Van Johnson had appeared together in Thrill of a Romance, Easy to Wed, Duchess of Idaho.

Tony Martin enters as a suave singer of songs - but does not win the girl. Incidentally, Carroll Baker appears briefly as his New York girlfriend. The film was directed by Charles Walters, choreographer and director of such films as Easier Parade, Texas Carnival, The Glass Slipper. The musical numbers were staged by Busby Berkeley. He also directed the swimming numbers in Million Dollar Mermaid, the biography of Australian Annette Kellerman. The sequences in this film are some of the most spectacular for Esther Williams (and were included in That's Entertainment). Entertaining enough, typical of M.G.M. popular entertainment of the time.