COVER GIRL

COLUMBIA, 1944 | COLOR (TECHNICOLOR), 107 MINUTES

DIRECTOR: CHARLES VIDOR PRODUCER: ARTHUR SCHWARTZ SCREENPLAY: VIRGINIA VAN UPP, ADAPTED BY MARION PARSONNET AND PAUL GANGELIN FROM A STORY BY ERWIN S. GELSEY SONGS: JEROME KERN (MUSIC) AND IRA GERSHWIN (LYRICS) CHOREOGRAPHERS: VAL RASET, SEYMOUR FELIX, GENE KELLY (UNCREDITED), AND STANLEY DONEN (UNCREDITED) STARRING: RITA HAYWORTH (RUSTY PARKER/MARIBELLE HICKS), GENE KELLY (DANNY MCGUIRE), LEE BOWMAN (NOEL WHEATON), PHIL SILVERS (GENIUS), LESLIE BROOKS (MAURINE MARTIN), EVE ARDEN (CORNELIA “STONEWALL” JACKSON), JINX FALKENBURG (HERSELF), OTTO KRUGER (JOHN COUDAIR), JESS BARKER (COUDAIR AS A YOUNG MAN), ANITA COLBY (MISS COLBY)

When a dancer wins a contest to become a cover girl, she jeopardizes her relationship with her club-owner boyfriend.

Technicolor musicals were surefire money-earners during World War II, expensive to make yet returning a major profit. If the music, dance, and lush production were important, the presence of beautiful women was seen by studios as irresistible incentive for keeping up morale and moving toward victory. In addition to being the ultimate wartime celebration of female beauty, Cover Girl is, in unexpected ways, quite an innovative piece of cinema.

Cover Girl was Columbia Pictures’ most ambitious project since the departure of director Frank Capra, whose Oscar-winning films were responsible for putting the studio into the major leagues. Under the legendarily dictatorial Harry Cohn, Columbia was smaller and more tightly organized than other studios, lacking the resources-at-the-ready production mechanism of Fox or MGM. It did, however, have a newly emergent star, and even in the era of Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth was spectacular. Her face, in close-up, was perfect, her dancer’s body moved with ineffable grace, and she possessed what may have been the world’s best hair. (Her trademark auburn was not its original color, as if that mattered.) There was also something soulful about Hayworth that set her apart, in and out of musicals. Where Betty Grable was cheerfully “this is me,” everything present and evident, Hayworth could seem a little remote, her scorch tempered by a private sensitivity. She seemed happiest on-screen while dancing, and after she fared well opposite Fred Astaire, her studio teamed her with Gene Kelly, whose movie career was just gaining momentum. In drama as well as dance, the pairing worked, and still works, extremely well. His smart-guy attitude balances her sweetness, and their respective kinds of physicality give them an erotic charge that earlier musicals rarely delivered.