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 a huge hit, establishing Garland as an adult star and setting up Kelly as a threat to Astaire. MGM didn’t seize the moment, dumping Kelly into a supporting role in the inane DuBarry Was a Lady and a starring role in the lumpy Thousands Cheer, plus a few low-budget war dramas. While Kelly was trying to find his way at Metro, the studio machinery at Columbia was putting all its weight behind a dancing beauty named Rita Hayworth. She had become a star in 1941 on loan to Warners for The Strawberry Blonde and to Fox for Blood and Sand, then back home to Columbia for You’ll Never Get Rich opposite Astaire. In 1942, she starred in Fox’s My Gal Sal, a Technicolor period musical in the Betty Grable mold, and was then reteamed with Astaire for You Were Never Lovelier, a pleasing, modest musical with divine Jerome Kern-Johnny Mercer tunes. As with Kelly, it was time for Hayworth to get a vehicle that maximized her potential and raised her position to the superstar level. It came for Kelly and Hayworth in the same package: Columbia’s Cover Girl (Kelly was borrowed from MGM). 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 has a kind of dream-factory vitality that can still gets hearts racing. Its impact would be felt throughout Kelly’s career, and it’s easy to spot its influence on specific works of his. It must be said that much about Cover Girl is conventional, even for 1944: the turn-of-the-century flashbacks, the backstage showbiz tribulations (even “Pop” at the stage door), the love-conquers-all notions. Yet, it’s what’s new about it that dominates: Kelly’s virile dancing; Hayworth’s emergence as a screen goddess; a terrific Jerome Kern-Ira Gershwin score; the stylized use of color; and the razzle-dazzle camerawork and editing.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.