Cover Girl (Columbia, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 29) I caught two films in Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” one-day tribute to Rita Hayworth. The films were Cover Girl (1944) and You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), both out-and-out musicals with major dancing stars in the male leads: Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (and the immediate follow-up from 1942, You Were Never Lovelier: Astaire biographers Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt joked in their book about the similarity of the “you … never” titles of these films) and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl. Columbia Pictures borrowed Kelly from MGM for Cover Girl and after that planned to co-star Hayworth and Kelly in an adaptation of Kelly’s stage hit Pal Joey (1940), but MGM wouldn’t give Kelly two loan-outs in a row and so the only recordings we have of Kelly in his star-making stage role are fragments of silent film shot by someone sneaking a movie camera into a theatre in 1940 and a private recording from 1973 of Kelly singing one of Joey’s signature songs, “I Could Write a Book.” (Columbia finally filmed Pal Joey in 1957 with Hayworth demoted from the younger to the older of the two female leads, Kim Novak as the younger and Frank Sinatra as Joey; it’s a disappointing movie, partly because the script was softened and partly because both Hayworth and Novak were given voice doubles whose singing voices didn’t sound at all like their speaking voices. Even Sinatra’s singing was recorded in such a different acoustic from his speaking that if you didn’t already know his voice, you’d have thought he was being doubled, too.) Cover Girl is a stunning movie in one respect: after a number of indifferent roles at MGM (Kelly had been brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, who intended to use him in straight non-musical dramatic roles; when Kelly demanded to do musicals as well and Selznick realized he didn’t have the infrastructure to make them, he transferred his contract to MGM), he got complete control over his choreography for this film and his spectacular dance numbers made him a star. Other than that, Cover Girl is a clunky mess of a film that illustrates my General Field Theory of Cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The writing credits of Cover Girl list Erwin Gelsey (also the author of the story source for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers Swing Time) for the story, Marion Parsonnet and Paul Gangelin for “adaptation,” and Virginia Van Upp for the screenplay, while imdb.com lists one John H. Kafka (presumably no relation) as an uncredited contributor. The director was Charles Vidor, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who two years later would direct Hayworth again in the classic film noir Gilda, one of her most iconic roles.

The story casts Hayworth as Rusty Parker, one of eight chorus girls working at a seedy Brooklyn nightclub owned by Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) and co-managed by him and his sidekick “Genius” (Phil Silvers). Rusty and Danny are in love, but their relationship is strained when Maurine Martin (Leslie Brooks), a fellow member of Danny’s chorus line, hears of a major contest being sponsored by Vanity magazine to recruit a cover girl for a special wedding issue. Vanity is published by John Coudair (Otto Kruger), who sees a photo of Rusty and immediately flashes back to a woman he briefly dated 40 years previously, Maribelle Hicks (also Rita Hayworth), who was also performing in a show when they met. Coudair (whose younger self is played by Jess Barker, who’s actually believable as a younger version of Otto Kruger) went as far as to propose marriage to Maribelle, but during the wedding ceremony she bolted and ended up with the piano player who’d always been her true love, giving up wealth and security for a poverty-stricken but love-rich future. Rusty wins the cover girl contest, which is sponsored by Coudair but actually run by his editor, Cornelia Jackson (Eve Arden, saltily effective as usual; she practically steals the movie on her own!). She also attracts the attentions of Broadway producer Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman), who offers to star her in a Broadway show, also called Cover Girl, but makes it clear that marrying him is part of the deal. Rusty makes her Broadway debut in a big number that features various chorines playing cover girls: Jean Colleran (American), Francine Counihan (American Home), Helen Mueller (Collier’s), Ceceila Meagher (Coronet), Betty Jane Hess (Cosmopolitan), Dusty Anderson (Farm Journal), Eileen McClory (Glamour), Cornelia B. von Hessert (Harper’s Bazaar), Karen X. Gaylord (Liberty), Peggy Lloyd (Mademoiselle), Betty Jane Graham (McCall’s), Martha Outlaw (Redbook), Susann Shaw and Georgia Carroll (Vogue), Rose May Robson (Woman’s Home Companion), and the decidedly pre-pubescent (looking uncannily like Shirley Temple a decade earlier) Cheryl Archibald (Look). Rusty’s a success and agrees to marry Noel in the same house where her grandmother Maribelle bolted from her wedding to Coudair 40 years earlier, but after Coudair (who’s been assigned to give the bride away) tells her the story of Maribelle, Rusty likewise bolts her own wedding, flees to the piss-ant club in Brooklyn, and reunites with Danny at long last. (Frankly, I wish the writing committee could have come up with a way to have Rusty and Danny become Broadway stars together, since Danny obviously deserves success on the Main Stem.)

Oddly, there are other movies in which the business of having an intergenerational plot twist involving a chorus girl seeking a career in the same business as her direct ancestor was done more adroitly in Jessie Matthews’s British film It’s Love Again (1936), in which a young dancer tries to pass herself off as her own mother to gain stardom in London; and another Columbia film from four years later than Cover Girl: Ladies of the Chorus, the one fruit from Marilyn Monroe’s brief six-month stint at the studio, directed by Phil Karlson (who handled Monroe more adroitly than some of her later, bigger-name directors) from a story and script by Harry Sauber and Joseph Carole. Ladies of the Chorus is often lampooned because Adele Jergens, who played Monroe’s mother in the film, was only nine years older, but it’s an estimable film. It’s also noteworthy in that Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn allowed Monroe to do her own singing in the film, a privilege he never accorded Rita Hayworth. Rita recalled in interviews in the late 1960’s that Cohn spent a ton of Columbia’s money on voice teachers and coaches for her, but never let her sing for herself in this or any film; in Cover Girl she’s doubled by Martha Mears. Cohn spared no expense to make Cover Girl the equal of any major-studio production; he hired Jerome Kern to write the songs and Ira Gershwin to supply the lyrics. At least one song, “Put Me to the Test,” was originally a lyric Ira had written for one of his brother George’s songs, used in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, but the makers of that movie had used it exclusively as an instrumental (a dance between Fred Astaire, George Burns, and Gracie Allen with whiskbrooms) and Ira recycled his lyric and had Kern write a new melody for it. Cohn also budgeted the film to include three-strip Technicolor and got Rudolph Maté as the cinematographer, with Allen M. Davey as the ubiquitous “Technicolor consultant.” (Maté had shot Rita Hayworth in her film debut, under her true name Rita Cansino, doing a hot dance on a pleasure ship in the 1935 film Dante’s Inferno.) In the same late-1960’s interviews, Hayworth said that You’ll Never Get Rich, You Were Never Lovelier, and Cover Girl were her favorites of her own films, which suggests that she never really saw herself as an actress, but primarily a dancer. Cover Girl limps along to an all too predictable finish, and the scene in which Rusty returns to her Brooklyn redoubt and the man she really loves would have had far more impact if the voice doubling hadn’t been so obvious. The writing committee had worked out a plot in which Danny would recognize Rusty from hearing her sing their Big Song, “Long Ago and Far Away” (the one song from this movie that became a standard), which would have packed the emotional wallop the writers intended if either Rita had sung it herself or Columbia would have hired a voice double closer to Rita’s speaking voice than Martha Mears.