Bathing Beauty (1944)

Interesting facts

Bathing Beauty is a 1944 American musical romantic comedy film directed by George Sidney and starring Red Skelton and Esther Williams.

Production

Dorothy Kingsley, who wrote the script, had done some writing on Girl Crazy. Jack Cummings brought her on to Bathing Beauty.

There'd been a million writers on it [before me] but the script was just bleh, lying there. They couldn't shoot it, even though they had commitments with Esther Williams and Red Skelton, with Harry James the trumpet player, and with Xavier Cugat the cha-cha-cha man.

Skelton was advised to shave his red chest hair for the swimming sequences. He protested and after conferencing with his wife, only cut the hair once the studio paid him $200 in cash and saved all of the curls in a plastic bag. Another scene with Skelton proved difficult to complete with his character trapped in a house with a large aggressive dog outside.

The pool sequences were shot on location at the Lakeside Country Club in the San Fernando Valley. The film was shot during January and the grass on the rolling country club lawns was dead and brown. Director George Sidney brought in a paint crew and had the dead grass spray-painted green, which lasted the entire week of shooting. However, that ruined the grass, and the studio had to send in crews in the spring to reseed the lawn.

Williams' date to the first preview of the film in Pomona was her soon-to-be husband, Sergeant Ben Gage.

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