“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is bad. The movie that introduced it to the world is worse

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has a well-deserved bad reputation. It’s a song about, as our Britt Hayes put it, “a woman being held hostage by some guy who may or may not have drugged her adult beverage.” But it didn’t simply spring, fully formed, out of our culture’s collective disrespect for women. Before “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” became a rapey Christmas classic, then was overcorrected into a Nice Guy anthem, it was the musical centerpiece of an equally terrible hit summer movie: Neptune’s Daughter.

Premiering 75 years ago—bringing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to a moviegoing public who, until then, had no song to put on when pressuring their date into sex—Neptune’s Daughter clearly had no idea that its single notable contribution to pop cultural history would become a holiday staple. Again, this was a June release. It’s not set during Christmas, in the winter, or even in a locale that actually ever gets cold. Neptune’s Daughter is a truly idiotic entry into MGM’s series of “aquamusicals,” starring Esther Williams. Yes, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” won an Oscar for Best Original Song for being in a movie that was mostly a vehicle for swimwear and racism.

Swimmer-turned actor Williams, “the godmother of synchronized swimming,” as the New York Times calls her, was on her third movie with Hollywood newcomer Ricardo Montalbán. Previously, they played thoroughly unconvincing twins in Fiesta before fending off Hawaiian cannibals in another racist aquamusical, On An Island With You.

In Neptune’s Daughter, Williams (playing a swimwear entrepreneur) and Montalbán (playing a “South American polo player”) get caught in a rom-com of mistaken identity (and cultural appropriation). But that only lasts for an hour before the movie gets bored with itself, adding in a mob subplot (also of mistaken identity and cultural appropriation) to kill time during its final 30 minutes.

The key incident of the film is when Montalbán’s identity is stolen by a virgin masseur (played like a spasmodic toddler by dough-faced comedian Red Skelton), which leads to all the horrible accent work you might expect as he parades around pretending to be a Latin lover.

What culture exactly is supposed to be put forth by Skelton’s literal costume, the movie doesn’t even attempt to guess at; it can barely narrow it down to a continent. (“Great country, South America,” Skelton says.) Montalbán’s character’s name, José O’Rourke, only makes things more confusing. This is capped off by a rare on-camera appearance by Looney Tunes’ Mel Blanc doing his own bit of brownface, unveiling a Mexican accent so cartoonish that it would later be used for Speedy Gonzales.

The script eventually called for a little romance to lubricate its humming race-joke engine, which meant finally putting the musical into “aquamusical.” That’s where Guys And Dolls songwriter Frank Loesser came in. But “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” wasn’t supposed to be in Neptune’s Daughter. According to Williams in that NYT piece, the filmmakers had a completely different Loesser song, “I’d Love to Get You (On a Slow Boat to China),” ready to go, but the Hays Code’s censors balked at its use of the word “get,” which they thought was too clearly a euphemism for “fuck.”

“I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China / All to myself alone,” Loesser’s song goes. “Get you and keep you in my arms evermore / Leave all your lovers weeping on the faraway shore.”

You’ve got to hand it to Joseph Breen and his puritanical production code lackeys: The implication is definitely romantic. Possibly sexual, if the boat-getter has their way. Something is definitely going to happen on that boat! It needed to be toned down, lest impressionable minds get the wrong idea about what could happen on a boat, or any vehicle en route to China.

Not to worry: Loesser and his wife had been performing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” at cocktail parties for years, splitting the song between the pursuing “wolf” and fleeing “mouse,” as the parts were originally marked in the sheet music. Nothing unseemly about the chaste lyrics to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which include such highlights as “Say, what’s in this drink?” and “The answer is no.” But the implication, it seems, was at least a little more obscured: The censors were sated, Neptune’s Daughter had its ‘40s-wholesome musical centerpiece, and its object of unwanted affection found herself trapped in an apartment instead of on a long sea voyage.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” isn’t the only song in Neptune’s Daughter, following “I Love Those Men” (a truly tragic display of instrument slapstick) and “My Heart Beats Faster” (a showcase for suave-as-hell Montalbán), but it’s clearly the focal point of the movie.

Since Skelton’s aforementioned masseur has been passing himself off as José O’Rourke, Montalbán’s real José has been accused of some unsavory things by Williams’ character, Eve. Naturally, he uses this as an opportunity to put the moves on his accuser. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” comes up as Eve barges into his apartment, certain that he’s got her man-crazed sister hidden away inside (sidenote: This sister is played by Betty Garrett, inexplicably cast as a character named…Betty Barrett).

In context, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” isn’t just the plea of a creepy pest, but completely nonsensical. Even without knowing that the filmmakers weren’t originally planning to use this song at all, the whole thing becomes so absurd in context that you almost forget how gross it is.

Remember, there’s a ton of outdoor swimsuit modeling in this movie. Synchronized swimming and polo play major roles. The evening before they sing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” together, Eve and José drove around Hollywood with the top down, then did a little dance outside in the moonlight. How cold could we possibly be talking? We know there’s no fireplace roaring in this man’s tiny apartment, we just toured it as Eve looked for her sister. Oh, there are “no cabs to be had out there?” Because it’s so “bad out there?” No problem; again, when these two characters just went out in an earlier scene, they took Eve’s car! She’s good!

Listen, this cut-and-paste kind of musical problem happened. In fact, it happened in Bathing Beauty, Williams’ first musical. “They had shot the musical numbers and they had no story!” said screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley, who also wrote Neptune’s Daughter. “They had shot a great number with Xavier Cugat, only nobody in the script had any reason to be there to see this number! I had to think up something and then send a page down for them to shoot.” One imagines there was a similar rush to figure out how to shoehorn this ode to harassment into the film.

And yet, you can shoehorn all day, but you can’t overcome the qualities that keep “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the air at the end of every year. It didn’t become a Christmas classic by accident. It’s only got two elements: Sex-pest narration and winter ambience. Because the latter is so omnipresent, the song chafes against its cinematic setting more than most mandated replacements. Even as a strained mid-movie metaphor for men’s desperate excuses and women’s purity in the eyes of our terrible society, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is an utterly unwieldy patch job, the musical version of John Goodman shouting “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!” in the TV edit of The Big Lebowski. At least “I’d Love to Get You (On a Slow Boat to China)“ would’ve provided some nautical imagery to at least kind of tie into all the swimming.

And then, you’re shaken back to the predatory reality of the film. Eve is just trying to escape this strange man’s apartment for two full minutes. She gets more frustrated and concerned, while José, reflecting the lyrics, starts getting pissed. The whole time, he’s yanking her around his home while she tries to gather her things and exit.

When that becomes unbearable, Neptune’s Daughter flips it: It cuts to Skelton’s masseur and Eve’s horny sister, performing a version where she’s the captor. Oh, and Skelton is still doing his racist accent, now in song form. If you ever thought “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was bad on the radio, just imagine a pudgy white dude half-singing “your see-ster will be suspicious.” The movie clearly thinks a woman with sexual desire is hilarious, and Skelton’s attempts to flee are played for effeminate slapstick (he puts on her hat and jacket in his desperate confusion).

Both aggressors, eventually, seem to successfully wear down their quarry, and the movie pauses for applause. It’s a bad moment in a bad movie, one that quickly devolves, after this song, into endless Three Stooges bits about mounting a horse and a plot where organized criminals briefly kidnap the wrong José. It all amounts to nothing, and ends with the couples—now clear on everyone’s name and race and stance on “no” meaning “no”—engaged to be married.

Neptune’s Daughter is as hacky as anything MGM was putting out around then, and a fitting follow-up to the previous year’s Williams x Montalbán production. In On An Island With You, Williams’ character is literally kidnapped to a remote island by her love interest. This (and, y’know, all that xenophobia on display) paints a fitting picture of how the studio—and the powerful censors OKing everything—thought the world should work. But their time was running out. In just a few years, America would be flooded with movies from all over the world, movies that treated audiences like adults who live in the real world. Studio pictures would change in turn, their conservatism now often hiding out in the subtext of our blockbusters. But some of the cultural ephemera that kept it front-and-center, like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” continues to live on, increasingly anachronistic to our modern eyes and ears. It’s strange and uncomfortable, and it makes sense that it’s still the target of popular backlash, but as soon as you place the song back into its original context, you realize that it’s a miracle that a worse version hasn’t been haunting our holidays.