COVER GIRL

This 1944 musical, featuring music written by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, and directed by Charles Vidor, was a big hit although I struggled to see why. 

There's only one outstanding song, 'Long Ago (and Far Away)', and even that isn't well treated given that Rita Hayworth mimes to it. Since I don't find her dancing to be up to much it's a bit of a mystery what she is doing in a musical.  But she's extremely good-looking in a glamorous way, which is helpful for a story in which she is propelled to fame by being chosen for the cover of a magazine.

Kelly is her boyfriend and he's not best pleased about her success, fearing that he'll lose her.  And of course his sourness has precisely the effect of driving into the arms of a theatrical impresario, who wants to marry her.

There's a weird angle to the plot in that some forty years earlier the magazine's editor was in love with Hayworth's grandmother, who jilted him at the altar because at the last moment she realised she loved someone else.  Inevitably the film ends with history repeating itself as Hayworth jilts the impresario at the altar so that she can be with Kelly.

The highlight of the film by some distance is the extraordinary 'Alter-Ego Dance' in which Kelly dances with a ghostly double of himself, an amazing technical feat which is thrilling to watch to this day.

The title song features the actual cover girls of over a dozen magazines of the time.  It's a neat gimmick which means nothing now, but it is fun to compare each model in turn with the cover on which she appears.  And the number is performed on a spectacularly surreal set.

Phil Silvers (as Kelly's pal) and Eve Arden (as the editor's assistant) are there to inject some humour, but most of it fell flat as far as I was concerned.

Even if this film is nothing special the fact that it was such a commercial success was very important for Gene Kelly's career and therefore for the future direction of musicals generally.  It was the first film in which he had control over his choreography, and so it's no exaggeration to say that without this picture we wouldn't have enjoyed such later classics as 'Singin' In The Rain' and 'An American In Paris'.