Cover Girl

Cover Girl is a 1944 film, in Technicolor, directed by Charles Vidor. As they say, they don't make them like this anymore, but partly I think that's because audiences are too sophisticated these days for candy-colored, fizzy musicals.

Rita Hayworth stars, and it's really a showcase for her. She plays a chorus girl at a nightclub owned by Gene Kelly. They are in love, but she would like to expand her horizons. She enters a contest to be on the cover of a fashion magazine. When she is spotted by the publisher, Otto Kruger, he remembers a woman he was in love with, who looks just like her. Turns out that was her grandmother, and Hayworth plays her, too.

The film is then about where she belongs--on Broadway, married to a big-shot producer, or back in Brooklyn, with Kelly, where they eat oysters hoping to find a pearl? If you don't know the answer you've never seen a movie.

The film also has two sidekicks. Phil Silvers is the nightclub's comic, simply called Genius, while Kruger's assistant is Eve Arden, playing a wisecracking single woman, the type she would play for years.

But with a musical, you have to have good musical numbers. Kelly was allowed to choreograph (MGM never did, but this was a Columbia production and they let him) so the dance numbers are solid. The most innovative was Kelly dancing with a reflection of himself in storefront glass, with his image superimposed on the screen. Another is a number with Kelly, Hayworth, and Silvers that reminded me of the "Good Morning" number in Singin' In The Rain, only this one is out in the street. Like the title number in Singin' In The Rain, the dancers avoid a cop. Is there a law against dancing in the street?

The songs are by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, a formidable duo, but they are largely forgettable. "Long Ago (And Far Away)" was nominated for an Oscar, but the others didn't stick with me.

Hayworth is sensational. She didn't do her own singing, but she did her own dancing (how would you fake that) and she has several chance to show off her chops. Also, the film was cast with a bevy of real models of the period--Jinx Falkenburg and Anita Colby among them--and Hayworth still is the best looking woman in the movie. She had oomph.