Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) runs a small club where he performs with his girl Rusty (Rita Hayworth) and best friend Genius (Phil Silvers), as well as six chorus girls. He’s a firm believer that the only way to “make it big” is slowly, through hard work, and he also likes to keep Rusty close at hand. When the publisher of a fashion magazine (Otto Kruger) spots her, and notices her resemblance to a past love (also played by Hayworth in flashbacks), he puts her on the cover of his magazine, making her an instant star and creating tension between her and Danny. That tension is increased by the publisher’s desire to give her the life the earlier woman rejected, and he pushes to get her into a big show. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see where the story goes from there.
Cover Girl made stars of Kelly and Hayworth, and rightly so. It’s a far better movie than the synopsis above would lead you to believe, with beautiful songs and one of the most astonishing dance numbers ever filmed. The humor is hit or miss, but generally works, and the romance, while a bit pale, benefits from strong chemistry.
Kelly was a second stringer at MGM, so they had no problem loaning him to Columbia, who gave him what he’d never had before: control. He put it to good use, constructing innovative and amusing group numbers, and then stretched the boarders of cinema with Alter-Ego Dance, where his partner was a ghostly version of himself. The precision necessary to pull this off boggles the mind. It stands as one of Kelly’s best routines, and assured him the last word in his choreography from then on. If the movie had nothing else, Alter-Ego Dance is enough to earn it multiple viewings from any musical fan.
But it does have more. Hayworth is delightful, and holds her own in the footwork department with her heavy weight co-star. Her singing was dubbed, so I’ll have to say that Rusty’s voice was pleasant (instead of giving the complement to Hayworth). And, of course, with her blazing red hair, she was a beauty.
Silvers isn’t bad comic relief, though I was tired of his over-the-top antics by the halfway mark. Eve Arden on the other hand, shines throughout, and steals every scene she’s in. She plays the take-no-prisoners sarcastic sidekick (as she always did) to the magazine publisher. I could have used her onscreen twice as often. She is helped by excellent dialog. It is a strange script, that follows such a hackneyed plot, but does it with so many good lines.
The music is by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, and is never weak. Most of it isn’t outstanding, but catchy. The exception, in a good way, is the ballad Long Ago and Far Away, which is moving and stays with you long after the film is over. When you hear someone say, “They don’t make songs like that any more,” this is the song they are referring to.
The melodramatic shenanigans between Danny and Rusty is the blemish on the picture. It’s hard to come up with any reason for Danny to object to Rusty getting a break in an in-town show, or to be unhappy with her new found fame. Saying that, “It’s the 1940s, and things were different,” as so many critics do, is no excuse. It wasn’t like that in the 1940s, except for jerks with severe ego problems, and making Danny a jerk isn’t good for the story. Worse, the serious, angst-filled scenes are the wrong tone for a movie which is mainly light fluff.
The story is silly, and some of the character interaction is unpleasant, but there’s a lot to like in Cover Girl. Its flaws take it out of the running to be a great movie musical, but it is certainly a good one.
My other reviews of Gene Kelly films: Anchors Aweigh (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), Words and Music (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).