1h 46min | Comedy, Romance | 25 July 1946 | Color
Directors: Edward Buzzell, Buster Keaton (uncredited), Edward (uncredited)
Stars: Van Johnson, Esther Williams, Lucille Ball, Keenan Wynn, Cecil Kellaway, Carlos Ramírez, Ben Blue.
Jack Donohue ... dance director
Remake of Libeled Lady ('36), with same character names, and leading roles replaced as follows:
Jean Harlow :: Lucille Ball
William Powell :: Van Johnson
Myrna Loy :: Esther Williams
Spencer Tracy :: Keenan Wynn
At the moment, Libeled Lady has rating 7.9 with almost 6,000 votes (my rating 7).
Easy to Wed has rating 6.3 with 543 votes (including my prior 6).
Dear MGM, Why remake an A movie with a B cast? Throwing in some musical numbers does not necessarily spice it up, especially when they're not strong musical performers. Any dancing that LB, EW and VJ do is very tame.
EW gets wet a couple of times; she slides down an enormously tall slide into a pool. Later, she swims around VJ on a small inflatable raft in a pool. No water ballet.
The musical numbers consist of:
- Continental Polka, Sung and Danced by Lucille Ball (dubbed by Virginia Rees) and chorus
- Acercate más (Come Closer To Me), Sung by Carlos Ramírez in a nightclub
- Acercate más, later sung by Esther Williams in Spanish to VJ in hunting cabin
- Toca Tu Samba, Performed on the organ by Ethel Smith
- Bonecu de Pixe, Performed on the Organ by Ethel Smith, then Danced by Van Johnson, Esther Williams and chorus, sung by them in Spanish!
Carlos Ramirez has a few lines in the story; Ethel Smith has none. By my own very liberal definition of Musical, where you get some numbers performed by characters in the story, this only has 3 such numbers, and is therefore borderline. So I'm not going to suggest this should have the Musical tag. (Even with Mae West films, I only lobbied for films with at least 4 songs, sung by her.)
IMDb lists a production date of 1.Feb.45, so all the Spanish songs and lyrics (sung by Anglos) are still wartime Good Neighbor holdovers. However, I don't remember any reference to the war.
If this had no antecedent film, it would be of even less interest. The story is unpleasant: to prevent the libel suit, the newspaper tries to entrap EW in a compromising situation so she cannot claim her reputation is damaged by their prior erroneous story (in other words, give her a false bad reputation to nullify her damages claim). She's not completely innocent, but the whole thing is a bit nasty. And when this cast does nasty, it feels a bit nastier than when the '36 cast does it.
MGM, dir. Buzzell+; 6
