Cover Girl
I wasn’t planning to review “Cover Girl” when I set out on my Gene Kelly marathon, but I saw that was running on TCM one, so I figured, why not? More Gene Kelly, and my first Rita Hayworth experience? It sounded good to me.
As it turns out, this was probably my least favorite film of the marathon so far. There were a couple really nice moments (more on one of them later), but this one really didn’t grab me. I needed more Gene Kelly and fewer 1890s flashbacks.
The film was so run-of-the-mill, and the plot so basic, that I wondered what I’d even write about. But then I did some reading up on the film. As it turns out, while the on screen end product wasn’t all that compelling, the behind-the-scenes information was very much so. This is exactly what I love about movies. Sometimes the movie is wonderful, sometimes it’s not. But there’s almost always an intriguing story happening in the background. Such is the case with “Cover Girl.”
The film was a Columbia production (while the film tries hard to be as slick as an MGM musical of the day, Columbia just didn’t have the experience or resources to pull it off), and producer Arthur Schwartz wanted to borrow Gene Kelly from MGM to play the lead male role of Danny McGuire. He had to persuade Columbia chief Harry Cohn on this idea, who, in reference to Kelly, reportedly told Schwartz, “That tough Irish face! He can’t be in the same frame as Rita!” Right, because Gene Kelly’s face is so hard to look at.
Anyway, if Schwartz was worried about Cohn, he didn’t let it faze him too much, as he did end up bringing Kelly aboard. Sweetening the deal for Kelly was a promise that he could choreograph the picture, something which he had not yet had the privilege of doing at MGM. Further reading showed that besides just the choreography, Kelly essentially had complete creative control over the film (though he was not credited as the director).
Turning this control over to Kelly marked a turning point in both his career and the evolution of movie musicals of the era, and these were the real points of interest for me in terms of the film’s legacy. Kelly wanted to bring his ideas to both the choreography and the way the dance sequences were actually filmed, and he leveraged his control to do just that. Instead of of just dancing in front of a stationary camera, Kelly wanted the camera to move as the action did. He had set walls removed so he and his co-stars could dance along a street set in one take. The result is one of the high points of the film.
His masterstroke, though, was a sequence where he sees his reflection in a storefront window, and that vision hops out of the window to engage in a wondrous dance-off on the empty street. This was obviously a technical marvel at the time, and Kelly referred to it as the most difficult thing he’d done in his career. It was also pure genius, and makes an otherwise ordinary film highly memorable, if only for this one sequence. The only thing better than watching Gene Kelly dance in the street is watching two of him do it.
The film’s nominal director Charles Vidor thought this sequence would be technically impossible, but with the help of his choreography partner, Stanley Donen (who was just 19 at the time), they were able to pull it off. Kelly’s moves had to be filmed twice, and his mirror image was superimposed to match his original character. Kelly and Donen’s vision, and Kelly’s technical precision, allowed for a landmark for musical film.
The other shift that happened with “Cover Girl” was how the songs contributed to the story. To this point, many musicals had rather thin plots (and “thin” may be generous) that were there just to barely hold together a number of songs. The plot of “Cover Girl” was no more robust, but the big difference with the film is that instead of dance numbers just being a distraction from the plot, they evolved from the plot and moved it along. The opening number is a good example of this. You see the showgirls come out on stage, and you might be expecting a lavish dance number. Instead the number shows the troupe’s flaws and lets you know that Danny’s joint is not exactly the big time.
This may seem like a small shift, but in reality it’s quite huge. Musicals as a genre could be seen as light and bit fluffy, but weaving the songs into the story no doubt elevated the genre. This idea allowed them to stop being just a form of entertainment and more towards works of art on film.
Kelly’s dream at the time was to reinvent the way musicals were made on screen. With the changes he implemented on this picture, he achieved it, on his first try no less. As we’ve seen in this marathon, he kept pushing for innovation in his future films on his way to becoming one of Hollywood’s legends. “Cover Girl,” if nothing else, is fascinating to see the real beginning of his ascent.
