With this picture, the forties musical seemed to have found a forward-looking identity. In its freshness, Cover Girl also sowed the seeds for the sublime exuberance of the genre’s best works of the 1950s. It’s not a great musical, sometimes it’s not even a good one, but when it works, and it works often, it [...]

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It was also in 1942 that Broadway song-and-dance man Gene Kelly made his screen debut opposite Judy Garland in MGM’s For Me and My Gal, which shared Yankee Doodle’s black-and-white nostalgia for the previous war’s era (plus another trunkful of oldies with which audiences could sing along). It’s not a good movie, but it was [...]

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