You'll Never Get Rich (Columbia, 1941)

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

After Cover Girl on Turner Classic Movies’ August 29 tribute to Rita Hayworth, they showed another Hayworth musical that despite a much cheaper production (it was shot in basic black-and-white, which ironically turned Hayworth’s famously dyed red hair back to its darker shade; she was black-haired au naturel, predictably given her Latina origins) was a better movie in every respect. The film was You’ll Never Get Rich, and it was better in all respects. It was directed by Sidney Lanfield, who’d had a career at 20th Century-Fox (where he made the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first film to star Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson) and would eventually make something of a comeback directing episodes of the mid-1960’s TV series The Addams Family. The writers were Michael Fessier and Ernest Pagano, and they came up with a Lubitsch-esque sex farce which casts Astaire as Robert Curtis, choreographer and star of a Broadway musical being produced by Martin Cortland (Robert Benchley). Unfortunately Cortland is a big-time philanderer who’s got eyes for a particular dancer in his chorus line, Sheila Winthrop (Rita Hayworth). Cortland has gone so far as to buy Sheila a diamond bracelet, while also palming his wife Julia (Frieda Inescort) off with a $7 Chinese back-scratcher he bought at the same jewelry store. When Julia pays an unexpected visit to Cortland’s office, she grabs the bracelet in a case from Martin’s basement and at first thinks it’s her 15th anniversary present, until she notices the inscription Cortland had put on it and sees it’s for someone named “Sheila” instead of her. Cortland says it was actually a present to Sheila from Robert Curtis, and the phony story gets blown up into a newspaper report that Sheila and Curtis are engaged. Naturally this pisses off Sheila’s actual boyfriend, servicemember Tom Barton (John Hubbard), and Sheila, Tom, and Sheila’s Aunt Louise (Ann Shoemaker) plan a joking reception for Curtis in which Tom will pose as Sheila’s revenge-minded brother and threaten Curtis with a gun. Just then Curtis receives a draft notice and decides to accept it, thinking that being in the Army will get him out from being either a patsy in Cortland’s attempts at extra-relational activity or a victim of Tom’s revenge plot. It doesn’t work out quite that way, as Curtis is assigned to Camp Weston (not coincidentally also the army camp Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers entertained the troops at during a brief gag sequence in Cover Girl), where naturally enough Tom is one of the commanding officers. There’s also a top sergeant played by Donald MacBride with all the delicacy and sensitivity which he played the furious hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ film Room Service (that’s meant ironically), and a couple of fellow enlistees who become Curtis’s buddies, Kewpie Blain (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams) and a fast-talking nonsensical character called “Swivel Tongue” (Cliff Nazarro), whose lines start out as English and quickly become unintelligible in any language. There are some nice slapstick scenes which show that had he been born a decade earlier Fred Astaire, with his superb control over his body, could have become a quite formidable silent-era comedian.

You’ll Never Get Rich has a musical score by Cole Porter, whose numbers showed a rare (for him) flair for jazz. Astaire gets some quite hot numbers, including a great song called “Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye” which he performs in the guardhouse (where he spends a lot of his time on base) with the Black vocal group the Delta Rhythm Boys, as well as an instrumental alternately called “Marche Milastaire” and “A-Stairable Rag” in which he dances with a Black jazz band featuring trumpeter Red Mack (who would later record a song called “If You Leave Me Baby” for Atlas Records on which he became one of the first singers to double-track his own voice), reedman Buddy Collette, and drummer Chico Hamilton (12 years before he’d become a major jazz star, first with the Gerry Mulligan quartet and then on his own). Working with African-Americans always brought out the best in Astaire; one recalls the great scene to “Slap That Bass” from the 1937 film Shall We Dance in which the song’s verse is performed by Mantan Moreland and then Astaire takes over for the chorus. You’ll Never Get Rich ends with Martin Cortland bringing his whole show to Camp Weston to entertain the troops and also hopefully to seduce his later would-be star dancer, Sonia (Osa Massen), for whom he’s changed the inscription on the diamond bracelet (ya remember the diamond bracelet?) from “Sheila” to “Sonia.” Not knowing this, Robert Curtis (ya remember Robert Curtis?) offers Sheila the bracelet as an engagement present, since Sheila has decided she’s really in love with Robert, only the change from “Sheila” to “Sonia” as the name on the bracelet convinces Sheila to go ahead with her original plan to marry Tom (ya remember Tom?) and ship out to Panama with him. Ultimately Robert double-crosses Sheila by secretly hiring a real justice of the peace (Frank Ferguson) to play the officiant in the big wedding number at the close of the camp show, so Robert and Sheila are actually legally married. A furious Sheila insists she’ll have it annulled, but Martin does his first selfless act in the whole movie and explains everything, so Robert and Sheila end up a legally wed couple headed for at least a modicum of happiness. You’ll Never Get Rich is a sheer delight start to finish, though it’s beset with some of those weird acts of cruelty Fred Astaire often committed in his movies (particularly the 1942 Holiday Inn) to get what he wanted romantically and/or sexually. It’s curious watching these two films back-to-back and realizing how much more entertaining You’ll Never Get Rich is even though it’s in black-and-white and is hardly as prestigious in budget. Incidentally Fred Astaire was originally reluctant to work with Rita Hayworth; he remembered appearing in vaudeville on the same bills as Rita’s father, Eduardo Cansino (and according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Astaire had briefly taken dancing lessons from Hayworth’s paternal uncle). I was a bit surprised that Astaire let Hayworth wear high heels during their dance numbers together since Astaire was sensitive about his short stature and worried about doing dances with partners as tall as he was. But Astaire later said that of all his dance partners Hayworth was the quickest study; he could teach her a routine, then take a lunch break, and by the time lunch was over she knew the routine perfectly.