Cover Girl (1944)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) Just as I thought I had seen all of Gene Kelly’s better musicals, here is Cover Girl to reassure me that I’d missed at least one. A good musical by most standards, Cover Girl was singled out by at least one film historian as the first in an illustrious series of musicals in which the plot was advanced during the songs, and the first collaboration between Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. It’s also one of Kelly’s first efforts at choreographing his own dance numbers, and a film that hones in the typical self-aware style of Classic Hollywood musicals with wit and humour. Rita Hayworth shares the screen with Kelly, a pairing that works surprisingly well. The dance numbers are varied and well-executed, with a decent amount of visual innovation throughout the film. Surprisingly enough, it’s not an MGM musical — Kelly was loaned to Columbia (for their first colour musical) on the promise that he’d be able to stage the film’s numbers, but MGM definitely took notes when the film was a box-office success. Latter MGM/Freed films would come much closer to the example set by Cover Girl, and the result was an extraordinary string of timeless musicals. As for Cover Girl itself, it’s good — not great, but interesting enough in its own right that it’ll charm musical fans. Oh, and there are plenty of cover girls to gawk at, so the title is not misleading advertising.