Will success spoil Rusty Parker? Rusty, a chorus girl working at a nightclub run by her boyfriend Danny McGuire, gets a chance to go for the big time after being chosen as the cover girl for a prestigious magazine. Rusty becomes a Broadway star, but success threatens to spoil her romance with Danny when she is pursued by the magazine's editor John Coudair and by her Broadway producer Noel Wheaton. As, however, Coudair is old enough to be Rusty's grandfather- indeed, forty years earlier he was a suitor for her grandmother's hand- and Wheaton is the coldest of cold fish, we all know how the story will end. And that's about it as far as plot is concerned, although a couple of flashbacks tell us something of John's romance with Rusty's grandmother Maribelle. (Although these scenes are ostensibly set forty years previously in the Edwardian era, there is little attempt at period accuracy and some of the costumes are those of the 1940s).Despite the scanty plot, "Cover Girl" was one of the most popular musicals of the war years. Indeed, plot was often regarded as relatively unimportant in musicals from this period. Even a film as highly regarded as that other Gene Kelly vehicle "An American in Paris" is really about little more than a boy, a girl and a happy ending. What mattered were sentiment, spectacle, songs, dance numbers and an overall feel-good factor. This was particularly important during the war. Despite the film's happy-go-lucky atmosphere, we are not allowed to forget that it is 1944 and there is a war to be won. Phil Silvers as the nightclub's resident comedian Genius includes plenty of jokes about the war in his act, and we learn that Danny is a former soldier invalided out of the Army after being wounded. This is one of those wartime movies which try to help the war effort, not by pushing a heavy-handed propagandist message but by keeping up civilian morale. Most of the musical routines are relentlessly cheerful with a message of "better times are just around the corner".The film is said to be the film which made a star of Gene Kelly, although at the time it was primarily intended as a vehicle for the talents of Rita Hayworth, a rising young star at the time, showcasing not just her looks but also her skills as a dancer. She has a double role, playing both Rusty and Maribelle. Her talents did not, it would seem, extend to singing, as her voice was dubbed. This was not an uncommon phenomenon at this period; Hayworth's younger contemporary Cyd Charisse danced her way throughout numerous musicals without singing a note in any of them. During this phase of Hayworth's career she was normally offered "sweet girl next door" type parts like Rusty here. Later in the decade she would be given the opportunity to play sultry femmes fatales, as in "Gilda" and "The Girl from Shanghai", before moving on in the fifties to "sexy older woman" roles. "Gilda", incidentally, had the same director, Charles Vidor, as "Cover Girl", but the two films are very different from one another.Trying to evaluate a film like this one is a difficult task seventy years on. It belongs to a tradition of lavish Hollywood musicals which is no longer really part of our culture, having come to an end in the seventies soon after those two late, great examples "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Cabaret". Sporadic attempts to revive this tradition have not always met with success. Moreover, the musicals of the thirties and forties can often seem stylised and unrealistic, even by the standards of their successors from the fifties and sixties. Yet we have to bear in mind that this film was a great success in its day, and it is worth trying to understand why.The songs are tuneful, although none of them except perhaps "Long Ago and Far Away" has really become a classic. The dance numbers are well produced and the two leading stars are attractive and charismatic. Kelly's contribution, moreover, went well beyond just acting and dancing; he was also responsible for a lot of the choreography. The elaborate costumes also contributed a lot to the film's success. (This was, remember, an age of austerity).Seen through modern eyes, "Cover Girl" looks horribly dated, but if we make the effort to see it through the eyes of our grandparents, it still has a lot to recommend it. 7/10

Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) is a chorus girl dancing at Danny McGuire(Gene Kelly)'s Night Club in Brooklyn. Genius (Phil Silvers) is the m/c performer in the club. She wins the Cover Girl spot in Vanity magazine when she reminds publisher John Coudair (Otto Kruger) of his lost love Maribelle Hicks. Showgirl Maribelle had left John at the altar for her true love, the piano player. It turns out that Maribelle is Rusty's grandmother. Coudair's friend wealthy theatrical producer Noel Wheaton takes an interest in Rusty both personally and in his Broadway show.Rita is a better bombshell than a young ingénue. She doesn't really fit the innocent young thing quite as well. It's great that she's dancing up a storm in this with Kelly and Silvers. The comedy doesn't work well especially with Gene Kelly being possessive of Rita. Don't get me wrong. I get it. I wouldn't want her to go off to do the magazine and everything else after. I would want her to only be in my show too. For the romance to really work, he has to do the best for her no matter what. It's the self sacrifice that sells a true romance. The struggle in Kelly should not be as hard as it is and it takes him too long to get there. It doesn't give Rita's character enough time to change. The dancing is well done with a few good sequences. There are some really big sets for Rita to strut her stuff. Rita is dubbed but that's the standard operating procedure at that time.

Date: 11 October, 2012 -First Time Watch- Rusty (Rita Hayworth) is a showgirl at a small nightclub that is owned by her boyfriend Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly). She has an average life, spending her nights looking for pearls in oysters with Danny and mutual friend Genius (Phil Silvers) until another showgirl shows her a job position at a local magazine looking for their next cover girl. Naturally she applies and gets the position, which leads to fame but tearing her away from Danny and Genius. Rita Hayworth was just beginning her climb to ultimate super stardom when the movie was released and was basically centered around her. Yet, I found her performance average and unmoving. She basically acted like a woman with a lot of drama in her life. Phil Silvers' performance was also average. It was really Gene Kelly who gets the praise. He had only done a few movies before 'Cover Girl' and this movie ultimate shot him into fame. I see why and his performance is really the greatest thing about the movie, especially when he dances with his conscience, that's really neat to see. It's overall a good movie with a predictable ending however I still enjoyed it, but it's not a favorite.8/10

This is really worth it for Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, and different reasons for each. I enjoy these splashy films from old Hollywood in part because by now we can glean enough about the various circumstances surrounding that stage where everything was shown to be dreamy, enough to recognize tatters of private darkness planted or inadvertently mirrored in the actual films that challenge the polished image. We can supply extra depth that was kept from the public at the time. Extra beauty mixed with pain that is about the effort to stage beauty.So Rita is the radiant face center stage, performing for the dreams of two men, now and once in the past. Her story is another in a long line of Hollywood intrigue and covert allure with dark spots and well kept secrets. We know how she was groomed by the studio into the image that we came to know and love, how she was deeply troubled in a number of ways, most notably alcohol and men, how she was never allowed to sing and which embarrassed her in public. There is all of that funneled in this one here from a tumultuous life in the big stage of movies. She sparkles, but with a hint of precious fragility.The day the wedding scene for the film was shot, she eloped with Orson Welles. And she was the first female lead to dance with both Astaire and Kelly, accomplished here.And there is Gene, on and off that stage, fighting to stage a show around her that is about the feet and not just the beautiful face. He was on loan from MGM to Columbia for this and granted full creative control to stage the show that we see, the experience from this would go on to pay dividends for MGM at the time of Singin' in the Rain.His character's show inside the film is barely okay, a lot of tap crowded in a small venue. But it's what he choreographs outside that has magic; the cover-girl show where the giant lens of a camera descends on stage and colorful dreams of women unfold inside the eye, our eye, framed as magazine covers; the number with the three of them out on the street done in a sweeping take that we would see again in Singin'; Rita's grand Broadway show in that titanic stage receeding far in the back; the Alter-Ego number above all, a brilliant thing where he's called to out-dance his own reflection.It's marvellous stuff on the whole about a dance that can engage a dream to reveal the true beat of the heart. Turns out that the dream was not fame or money, not the image on the cover, but love for this girl.