It's a tribute to the star power of Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly (as well as Phil Silvers and Eve Arden) that this hackneyed musical works as well as it does. Despite a setting contemporary to its 1944 release, Cover Girl exists in a fanciful New York where the war is of far lesser concern than whether a Brooklyn nightclub singer (Hayworth, whose crooning is dubbed by Martha Mears) can become an overnight modeling sensation without losing the club owner she loves (Kelly). The vaudeville setting allows for a series of original songs by Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern that, while not the best work by either, include a couple of standouts: the lovely ballad “Long Ago and Far Away” and the title song, a lively and endearing fashion show production number. Director Charles Vidor makes the best use of vibrant Technicolor when accentuating his star's famous auburn mane, but he also leaves many of the musical numbers disappointingly stage-bound, and the film doesn't really break out until “Alter-Ego Dance,” which finds Kelly dancing in the street with a superimposed image of himself in a lively number that obviously prefigures his famous title dance in Singin' in the Rain. The DVD contains no extras, but the transfer is clean and the colors pop. Recommended. (D. Fienberg)
Cover Girl
Columbia TriStar, 107 min., not rated, DVD: $24.95 Volume 18, Issue 6
Cover Girl
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