Esther Williams, our Star of the Month for May, once said, "If they ever teach a duck to act, I'm in big trouble." Well, Disney did have Donald and Warner Bros. had Daffy but neither of those fowl fellows ever tried to seriously compete with Bogart, Brando or Esther, and rarely in their films did either of them ever go near the one place MGM's "Million Dollar Mermaid" reigned supreme: water. (Wise guys, those ducks).

Come to think of it, no one has ever tried to duplicate Esther Williams' success when it came to H2O. She is, if you check the history books, the one Hollywood star who has never had a challenger. Everyone from Jimmy Cagney and Shirley Temple to Fred Astaire and Donald Duck (who inspired the creation of Daffy) has had challengers and/or imitators. Not Esther. Even the Olympic iceskating champ Sonja Henie, whose phenomenal success as a movie star at the 20th Century-Fox studios inspired MGM to try to do the same with a swimmer, had her share of copy-cats, weak as they were. (Republic studios, for instance, made ice-skating films with Vera Hruba Ralston and others with a pint-sized skating moppet named Twinkle Watts; Monogram attempted to do the same with dancerturner- skater Belita). But Esther was truly one-of-a-kind; no one even tried to do what she did. And for a thirteen-year stretch between 1943's Bathing Beauty and 1955's Jupiter's Darling, those initials of MGM, in the minds of the studio's stockholders, stood for Metro's Golden Mermaid because her films were such consistent moneymakers.

Every Thursday this month we'll be showing Esther movies, twenty-one in total, including sixteen which are fun, splashy Technicolored musicals, each with inventive ways to get Esther on a diving board and into a pool, plus others more diverse: her very first (1942's Andy Hardy's Double Life), her initial try at a black-and-white drama (1946's The Hoodlum Saint), and, on May 26, an Esther Williams movie we've never shown before on TCM, 1956's The Unguarded Moment. It's a dark, psychological suspenser based on a story written by (surprisingly) Rosalind Russell, done up in Technicolor but with nary a hint of a bathing suit; instead, a film that shows what a good actress Esther could be. (For the record, that quip long said to be about Esther, "Wet she's a star, dry she ain't"? That was coined in the 1930s by comedienne Fanny Brice, not about EW, but about an Olympic swimmer named Eleanor Holm after Holm had married Brice's ex-husband Billy Rose).

Here at TCM we have many reasons for adoring Esther above and beyond all those swan dives and breast strokes. She was one of the first to become a drumbeater for Turner Classic Movies and helped us, early on, to promote the channel with viewers and cable operators. She and I traveled together to many cities around the country, shook many hands and shared many lively times, so she's a very much a part of the family. What comes as a shocker is that we've only once before given her a TCM Star of the Month tribute - in January, 1995. Maybe it's because in our eyes she is a TCM Star Emeritus, with no expiration date implied or involved. That said, we're very pleased to be bringing you a full retrospective this month of the films starring the movie world's first and only underwater gold mine.

by Robert Osborne