Dir. Richard Thorpe. Starring Esther Williams, Jimmy Durante, Peter Lawford

It’s not a hard and fast rule. Exceptions include movies like Blazing Saddles, the Monty Python films, Once Upon a Time in America. But when I see four separate writers credited for a screenplay I get nervous. It’s romantic to think that when only one or two people are credited that just those individuals did every bit of the writing for a film down to the last mark of punctuation, but that’s kind of the point. If it’s got four names on it, it’s a cinch that it’s got more than four sets of hands working the typewriters. There’s a documentary about this phenomenon that I recommend.

The premise of On an Island with You, which I think we may safely chalk up to Charles Martin and Hans Wilheim, begins with the obsession of a youngish naval officer. He is on the receiving end of a stage kiss from a beautiful actress during a USO tour. He then devotes his life to this woman, dreaming of her until the day he successfully applies to be the military technical advisor on a film starring this blissfully ignorant star. He is unable to contain himself around this actress while on set, who is now engaged to her co-star. After shooting, where he’s standing in to run lines with her and sneaks in a kiss, she refuses to give him a dance when he asks because, she explains after the fact, she doesn’t want to encourage him. Thus slighted, the military officer bides his time until he is called upon to fly a plane that she stows away on, in costume and, depressingly, makeup meant to signify that she’s playing someone from the Pacific islands. (I was a little blindsided by how much of the movie she and Cyd Charisse spend wearing that getup.) At this point, he decides to fly her hundreds of miles away from the set to the island she gave him the stage kiss on, without her consent, using American military property, serving as a representative of that military, and to the great displeasure of her fiance and the crew of the film.

One goes into the film knowing that it’s about Peter Lawford kidnapping Esther Williams in a particularly adventuresome fashion, but that pales to the experience of watching it happen. It’s a romantic comedy, the only genre where Larry Kingslee is not a psychopath, and better yet, the only genre where Larry Kingslee is pretty well-adjusted based on the conventions thereof. (Peter Lawford here and Kathy Bates from Misery are, of course, playing fairly similar people, which is its own commentary on the romantic comedy.) It’s only supposed to be a mild kidnapping, with a stay on the island only an hour or so if Rosalind (Williams) will give Larry the dance he’s so intent on getting. I had these hopes going into the film that the majority of the picture would be about this strange island getaway for Lawford and Williams, because if that were the case there’d be some meat to that nut. Alas that so much of it takes place in relatively safe places, such as the nightclub where Xavier Cugat emcees.

There are funnier moments elsewhere in the film. There’s more charm between Jimmy Durante and a chihuahua he talks to than there is between the leads. (If the “oral history” were as popular in 1974 as it is in 2024, I’d read one about Esther Williams and pay careful attention to the part where we learn what she thought about being thrown into movies with MGM’s biggest hams: Durante twice, my blameless friend Mickey Rooney in her screen debut, Red Skelton three times.) No one has ever written good dialogue for scenes explaining why Stockholm syndrome takes less time to set in than a hangover, and On an Island with You doesn’t break ground there, or elsewhere, in its dialogue. Ricardo Montalban is underserved; Charisse gets two dance numbers and still comes off like Jan Brady. We’re even a ways off from the glorious swimming routines of Dangerous When Wet, Easy to Love, and Jupiter’s Darling; there’s nothing in On an Island with You that compares with her work from the early ’50s. That leaves us with Rosalind and Larry, on an island with themselves and some native people who are as confused about what’s going on in this movie as I am.

What this movie dips its toes into is a discussion of fandom, one which is especially noteworthy because of the sexes of the obsessed and the obsessed over. Larry, an adult man who has survived the Pacific theater in World War II, is exhibiting the kind of ludicrous obsession that, in his time, was probably best understood with the kind of obsession teenagers had with Frank Sinatra. In the linked article there’s a line about a girl who camped out to watch eight consecutive days of Sinatra performances, which sounds kooky, but at least she didn’t steal an airplane, Frank Sinatra, or both at once. Larry happens to steamroll his way into this job as a technical advisor because it’s the opportunity in front of him, but if the best way to make contact with Rosalind Reynolds was to camp out somewhere for over a week and not move, there’s no doubt that he’d be doing that instead. The article also mentions the obsession that mostly female moviegoers had regarding Rudolph Valentino. Richard Dyer writes about fan clubs and the way that female fans would model themselves after Deanna Durbin or Joan Crawford, would work to make their eyebrows arch as Bette Davis arched hers. For the audience of 1948, there would be something infantilizing and feminizing in Larry’s pursuit of Rosalind. While they’re on the island together, Rosalind disappears into a hole in the ground and in so doing ruins her costume. For modesty’s sake he hands over his coat, which she wears like it’s her boyfriend’s t-shirt between laundry cycles. Given what the ribbons on his jacket signify, there’s something to be said about the possibility that she’s pulling rank on him, too.

Off the island, Larry finds himself at Rosalind’s mercy multiple times, which grinds his gears because Rosalind left in the arms of her fiance rather than leaving because of his ingenuity. The moment that’s most uncomfortable for him comes when he finally gets brought in front of his commanding officer, Harrison (Leon Ames), who is given to understand from Rosalind’s report that she convinced him to fly her to the island and that this was no kidnapping. Harrison, who is highly appreciative of the gift that Rosalind has dropped in his lap, refuses to let Larry respond to the contrary. Yet even at the end of the film, when it’s clear that his devotion has won her heart, he needs Rosalind to pull him up from the bottom of a swimming pool that he’s been shoved into. Lawford did not get a bunch of opportunities to play he-men in his time, and this is no exception; Larry Kingslee is a follower, a stalker rather than a hunter. He is the one who is dictated to in this relationship, rather than the other way around. The position of fan puts him on uneven footing that he never really gets back on, not even when he miraculously gets what he wants.

During World War II and in the postwar years, the kiss that Larry gets is the apogee of what a fan can hope for. For the members of the service who got an identical kiss from Rosalind during the same bit at a different USO show, the ones who do not evince an overwhelming need for therapy, that kiss is plenty. For Larry, it’s obviously not nearly enough. One wonders if dating Rosalind, having sex with her, or even marrying her will be enough for Larry, who spends a not insignificant percentage of his life figuring out how to get close to Rosalind a second time. Larry is a fan ahead of his time. This feeling that it will never be enough, that he is owed something because of his devotion, is a sentiment much easier to connect to our time than his. There’s nothing innocent about Larry’s obsession even if the film calls for Lawford to play him as a mooning, starstruck fellow. The difference between then and now is that in 1948, there’s just one Larry. In 2024, we have millions of them, and every one of them is following Rosalind’s Instagram account in the belief that there’s a shared bond between the two of them that none of the other followers share.