WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

richspenc Actually I give it a 7.5 but since it won't let us do that, I rounded it off to an 8. This is a good clean early 1950s film. Esther is great in a lot of her things. Many of her films are sweet fictional comedy/romances such as "Bathing beauty" and "This time for keeps" (those two films have her most wonderful water ballets of all). My favorite Esther films are the two I just mentioned, "Thrill of a romance", "Neptune's daughter", and "Easy to love" (which has her great skiing escapade). I also like her couple of competitive events style films such as "Million dollar mermaid" (which also has 2 great water ballets) and "Dangerous when wet". I also enjoyed "On an island with you" and "Pagan love song" with their tropical Pacific island locations. The film starts with Esther's enthusiastic athletic family led by her pa who's played by William Demearest (who was also great in Twilight zone episode "What's in the box" which he starred with a much older looking Joan Blondell, who was great in her young beauty days in Busby Berkeley's 1930s films). They march out of their country farm home to their backyard swimming hole singing "I got outta bed on the right side" to go swim laps. After their morning routine, Esther sees a small truck driver who is blocked from driving by her family's cows in the road. I liked Esther's couple of witty sarcastic funny remarks she makes at driver Jack Carson (Jack: "you gotta go milk those cows?" Esther: "No, they're very clever, they milk themselves". And then, Jack: "can I meet you?" Esther: "go to the corner of fifth and Main and wait, if you don't see me by next Thursday, you'll know something happened".). Jack's response is "boy, the farm girl's really with it". Jack advertises liquapep (a health tonic) and is hosting a rally in town. The family attends the liquapep rally. Esther's sister Katy goes on stage to sing "I like men". This is the second film where Esther had a very boy crazy sister who seemed way ahead of her time with that assertive boy chasing attitude. The other one was Esther's sister Betty Garrett in "Neptune's daughter". Anyways, Katy's number wins them a ribbon, and the whole family is then chosen to go to England to swim the English channel. When over there, with Jack in tow, we meet some other characters such as a pretty French woman with an eye for Jack, and Fernando Lamas (Esther's soon real life husband to be) with an eye for Esther. The family soon learns that what was thought to be a 20 mile swim, is actually more 30-40 miles due to the channel currents making you zigzag. Then the fam finds out how everyone except Esther has been disqualified, much to pa's upset. Romance begins to bloom between Esther and Fernando, and the acting between them two I'm sure didn't have to be practiced much due to their real life romance. I think I could tell the naturalness between them. This movie of course contains the famous Esther swimming with Tom and Jerry sequence, which was Esther's dream one night soon before the channel swim. I like how Esther's family is a family of seahorses, the French lady is a charming sea creature, and Fernando is an octopus (who sings "In my wildest dreams" as Fernando while Esther's awake on his yaht, and he sings it in the dream as the octopus). I liked the mixing cartoons with real life, "Anchors aweigh" with Jerry mouse and Gene Kelly was another classic. The race across the channel with Esther and the following boats keeping an eye on her and the other swimmers was very good and interesting, and there were some similarities there to Esther's river Thames swim in "Million dollar mermaid". Esther having been an almost Olympic swimmer (which didn't happen due to the Olympics being cancelled due to the war) really helped Esther get the opportunity to do something great with her swimming in another way. Becoming a famous swimmer and water ballet girl on films was in a sense just as if not maybe more exciting than competing in the Olympics, since she was trying something entirely new. She also officially started synchronised swimming as an official sport. That and her water ballets in her films. She was America's mermaid.

atlasmb Jack Carson plays a traveling salesman, promoting a potion called Liqua-pep on the county fair circuit. While driving through Arkansas, he meets a family that owns a dairy farm and are dedicated to physical fitness.When Jack's character, Wendy, realizes the eldest daughter, Katy (that's how it's spelled in the credits)--played by Esther Williams--is a beauty and a tireless swimmer, he wants her to attempt the English Channel as a promotion for his snake oil. Eventually, she agrees.Along the way, she meets a Frenchman played by Fernando Lamas (who Esther marries sixteen years later) who becomes her love interest.Esther's films tend to be light fare, intending merely to entertain while allowing her to swim in a pool, a lagoon, or wherever the script might take her. "Dangerous When Wet" includes a few upbeat songs and the usual all-American touchstones. But it is best known for Esther's underwater swimming sequence with Tom and Jerry (Jerry danced nine years earlier with Gene Kelly).

mark.waltz The challenge of crossing the English channel becomes the focus for swimming champion Esther Williams who comes from an athletic family. Of course, when you've got Charlotte Greenwood as a mother who can kick her legs sideways up to her head without calling for Ben Gay then flies into a split, you know you've got to keep up. After they get out of bed on the right side, they face the challenges of training her for this competition, and find romantic entanglements as well, Williams with the handsome Argentinian Fernando Lamas, who in real life would eventually become her husband. Middle daughter Barbara Whiting is the typical Ann Miller/Betty Garrett/Janis Paige/Virginia O'Brien second lead and sings of her attraction to the opposite sex in the complicated song titled "I Like Men" (as opposed to Kathryn Grayson in the same year's "Kiss Me Kate" who declared just the opposite), and the entire cast, including Williams' brassy agent Jack Carson, papa William Demarest, younger sister Donna Corcoran and the French damsel Denise Darcel get together for the truly delightful "Ain't Nature Grand" where Greenwood gets to take center stage and show what she had done twenty years before on Broadway and ten years ago in Fox musicals with Betty Grable. A delightful cream puff of a musical, Williams shows that when she had a fun script and something to do except wear a bathing suit, she could have a ball on screen and let it show. Here, her big water number (other than the channel crossing in the finale) is an animated water ballet with none other than Tom and Jerry, making their first full length screen appearances ever since dancing with Gene Kelly in "Anchor's Aweigh". Here, Tom gets to do more than serve Jerry, and they are also joined by a cute turtle doing the back stroke and an amorous octopus who happens to sing like Lamas. Great fun. Take the kiddies.

Greg Couture For those who haven't seen this one there are, perhaps, a couple of mini-SPOILERS to follow:This bit of fluff opens with the Higgins family, Dad, Mom and their three daughters, rising and shining on the family's farm, for an early morning swim. Esther, the eldest daughter, seems to be reluctantly following the parade to the swimming hole, and the audience is in for a bit of a surprise. Each family executes a dive into a rustic backlot pool until Esther is at water's edge. But she dips a toe in the H2O and decides, naw!, opens the book she's been carrying, and curls up at the water's edge, contentedly immersed in her reading material! When I smiled at this clever way of postponing our expectations, I thought we were in for one of Esther's more rewarding vehicles, and it does have some rather good chuckles in store. Overall, though, it's not up to the best that the mermaid was required to do during her reign as one of M-G-M's box office queens.Some of the better moments include Esther slithering from the amorous clutches of Fernando Lamas (whom she eventually married a few years after this one was filmed) as he croons an insistent love song; Tom and Jerry, M-G-M's animated feline/rodent duo, joining Esther for an underwater ballet (this film's only equivalent of the usually extravagant production numbers in Esther's previous efforts); Denise Darcel, all impenetrable French accent and looking far-too-zaftig to ever be credible as Esther's rival in a crossing-the-English Channel swimming contest (Mlle. Darcel IS funny though!); and Jack Carson once again amusingly embodying a con man with a touch of lechery. Charles Walters directs with his usual lack of distinction and the production values aren't as luxurious as are on display in some other Esther aquacades. Several scenes occur at night, lending a rather dark look to a good portion of the proceedings, in contrast to the normally sunny Technicolor that radiates from the screen when Esther flashes her dazzling smile.As for who wins the Channel swimming contest, do you have to ask?!? I enjoyed its modest ninety-five minute running time and you probably will too.