Word: mermaids
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Million Dollar Mermaid (MGM) is a splashy musical that casts Cinemermaid Esther Williams as Annette Kellerman, the foremost amphibian attraction of the early 1900s. The picture takes Annette, who is described as "half woman and half fish," from Sydney, Australia to London, where she makes a much publicized 26-mile swim down the Thames; then to the New York Hippodrome, where she is billed as a diving Venus in tank extravaganzas; and finally to Hollywood, where she is badly injured during the filming of an underwater picture. For romance, there is a conventional (and fictional) triangle involving the Hippodrome...
...picture is as tailored to Mermaid Williams' specifications as the one-piece bathing suits she wears in the picture (Annette Kellerman daringly introduced the one-piece suit 44 years ago). There are several spectacular Busby Berkeley water ballets, churning with sky-high fountains, Technicolored smoke effects and choruses of movie mermaids and mermen sliding down chutes and diving off swings. So long as it stays in the water, Million Dollar Mermaid is good fun. In its landlocked sequences, it is just another dry cinebiography...
...beautiful ballerina (Jeanmaire). In time, Andersen comes to realize that the ballerina is really in love with her ballet-master husband (Farley Granger). So he returns to Odense to continue telling his tales to tykes, but not before he has written a story for a ballet, The Little Mermaid, and Jeanmaire has danced it with crashing success...
...moviemaking. It is also his biggest and most expensive (109 shooting days, $4,000,000 budget) production. The picture has mammoth sets-e.g., a Copenhagen square complete with shops, canal, bridge, market and opera house. It has four lavish ballets, among them the 17-minute-long Little Mermaid number, danced by lively, poodle-topped French Ballerina Jeanmaire, Choreographer Roland Petit of the Ballets de Paris, and a chorus of mermaids among $400,000 worth of underwater caves, fish netting, giant shells, ship spars and Technicolored jetsam. Frank (Guys and Dolls) Loesser has written eight catchy songs, among them three...
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas (Kirsten Flagstad, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Thomas Hemsley; members of the Mermaid Theatre, London, conducted by Geraint Jones; H.M.V.). A charming short opera by the finest English composer of all time. Its attractions include a witches' dance, a laughing chorus, a sailors' dance, a hunt scene (with thunderstorm) and, of course, love both requited and tragic. Highlight: Flagstad singing When I Am Laid in Earth...