one of my absolute favorites!

i must have seen a different film!!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Blistering performances.

For his next photoplay, after "The Desperadoes", Charles Vidor requested Cover Girl (1944), primarily to show off his versatility, and having no idea at the time that it would eventually lead to his being typed (and principally thought of) as a director of musicals. Actually Charles Vidor much preferred his horror films, Gothic romances and westerns. But with the exception of his masterpiece, Gilda (1946), these were now all behind him. (Thunder in the East, The Joker Is Wild, and even A Song to Remember and The Loves of Carmen, have Gothic overtones, but I think they may be excluded here). Entrancingly designed and inventively choreographed, Cover Girl was a hit from its smash opening sequence to its rousing finale. The only conventional thing about the movie was its screenplay -- a story in which Gene Kelly, Otto Kruger and Lee Bowman vied for the affections of Rita Hayworth. (You have just one single guess as to which of these three contenders won through in the end?)

Never mind the studio with more stars than there are in heaven, this war-time musical has more colours than there are in a rainbow. "Cover Girl" really is a feast for the eyes and one can imagine it cheering up cinema-goers of the day and taking their minds off events overseas.The plot is a little silly as it tends to be in so many musicals I guess as lovely show-girl Rita Hayworth finds herself torn between true love for a jobbing choreographer (Gene Kelly obviously) and an ardent suitor who's a rich theatre-owner, in almost exactly the same dilemma as her identical grandmother forty years ago. Her present-day pursuer is coincidentally sponsored, if that's the right word, by an even richer publishing magnate on the search for the face of the year to emblazon on his magazine's cover, who wouldn't you know it was the spurned lover all those years ago. The latter scenario gives Hayworth the opportunity to dress up in turn-of-the-century costumes and sing (albeit her vocals are obviously dubbed) more old-fashioned Vaudevillian numbers. The outcome in both time-frames naturally is never in doubt.Employing the familiar device of a pair of love-birds (Kelly and Hayworth) and their tag-along pal, on this occasion a slightly camp Phil Silvers of all people, the film is undemanding entertainment, if not, in my opinion, of the very best of its type. The songs I'm not totally familiar with and sound to my ears pleasant if not outstanding. Charles Vidor directs solidly and occasionally stolidly, the camera staying fairly static throughout especially for the tiresome cavalcade of contemporary popular woman's magazine covers and Hayworth's ancestor's hackneyed routines of yesterday, including the worst attempt at a Cockney accent until Dick Van Dyck in "Mary Poppins".The best sequence is undoubtedly when Kelly dances with his own bad self in a routine reminiscent of similar trick-devices employed by the great Astaire. Hayworth however holds her own in her own numbers and photographs beautifully in glorious colour. Neither has to overstretch themselves in the straight-acting stakes and it's probably fair to say they don't try too hard anyway, but one can still easily imagine this light and bright movie cheering up war-time audiences back in the day.

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

I wanted to like this film...I really did. However, the plot was quite simple (and easily resolved) and the songs were an amazingly flat and uninteresting lot. I think all this is very apparent to me because I have recently spent a lot of time watching MGM musicals as well as films about classic Hollywood song and dance films--and "Cover Girl" just doesn't stack up all that well. Perhaps this is because the film is made by Columbia--a studio not known for its musicals.The film begins with a bunch of dancing girls all talking about some contest--where the winner is chosen as a cover girl for some magazine. Surprise....Rita Hayworth is the one picked. And, soon after this, her life changes--with great job offers and the wolfish Lee Bowman chasing after her. But what about her partner (Gene Kelly)? What about their act? What about the fact that the songs are so dull?So what does the film have going for it? Well, the color film is nice and Rita looks swell. And, at least one song and dance number is a standout--the one where Gene dances with himself. You have to see it to know what I mean--it must have been very difficult to choreograph and execute. But this alone is not enough to make up for the film's deficiencies--such as the notion of a granddaughter looking EXACTLY like her grandmother, the badly synchronized singing in many places and the rest. In addition, there is a romantic tension between Rita and Gene--when it all very EASILY could have been solved with her going on to a better job and Kelly keeping his old one AND they could have STILL kept dating. Overall, a time-passer and nothing more--even though it looks great.