Who Is That Dancing With Rita Hayworth?-Rita Hayworth and
Gene Kelly’s Cover Girl (1944)-A Film
Review
When The Whole World
Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor
Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth
By Si Lannon
You know the Internet is
a wonderful tool at times especially for sites like this one very interested in
history, of everything from governments to holy goofs. Most of the time you can
find out information or information comes your way when you are perusing for
something else. That was the case last year when I was looking something up at
the archives of American Film Gazette
and noticed they were doing a serious commemoration of the 100th birthday
of ruggedly handsome and versatile male hunk from the 1940s Robert Mitchum.
That information led to a full-scale retrospective of his work, or the best of
it anyway. The best being his noir stuff where he is hunk style and manly ready
to take a few punches, throw a few, take an errant slug or two, bang-bang a few
too for some dame, for some femme who had him all twisted up inside trying to
find the mystery of her. Fat chance of discovering that as a million guys since
Adam, maybe before have found out the hard way, although usually not at the end of some femme fatale gun.
Not so with the way I
got the information about 1940s sex siren and maker of guys, who knows maybe
gals too and not just lesbians or bi’s either although they can have their
stares just like anybody else but in their own right beautiful women who will concede
that she has bested them, steamy midnight dreams Rita Hayworth. I was in
Harvard Square on some unrelated business when I passed the famous and historic
Brattle Theater a place I knew well in my 1970s cheap date period and have
probably seen more films there than any other place. But video stores, studio
comps, and lately Netflix and Amazon have taken the place of going to the big
screen theater for me for many years now just because it is easier and more
efficient to see the films at my discretion. For old-time’s sake I decided to
take an “upcoming schedule” broadside which was provided in a little box in
front of the theater entrance. When I opened it up later there was one of the icons
of icons of Hollywood glamour when that burg was the only game in town and when
glamour meant something to eye candy hungry soldiers and sailors, airmen too, during
World War II and their waiting for the other shoe to drop anxious honeys
sitting in dark movie houses too. Yes, Rita in a 1940s provocative, although
what would now draw nothing but a snicker from even naïve eight grade girls,
sun suit with that patented come hither if you dare look that every guy, every
cinematic guy, begged to get next to. Was ready to take the big step off for
like her then husband Orson Welles almost did in the fatal Lady From Shanghai.
What the theater was
doing and was famous for in the old days when the classic no money classic college
date world was when I lived was a big retrospective of her work from early
B-film stuff as she made her way up the Hollywood stardom food chain to some astonishing
dance routines with Fred Astaire making you watch her moves not his something
hard to do believe me to the later femme fatale classics like Gilda and the previously mentioned Lady From Shanghai and then the drop back to B-films and cameos at
the end of her career. Since the theater had treated her to this royal treatment
I decided the least I could was to do a retro-review of those efforts for a now
glamour-hungry world. That type of “innocent” glamour will never come back, the
world is just a bit too weary and wary for that to happen but the younger sets should
at least know why their grandfathers and grand-grandfathers stirred to her
every move, pinned her photo up on a million lockers and in a million duffle
bags.
My own Rita experience is
like many things in the film business when Hollywood was top dog, rightly or
wrongly, second hand from those cheap date retrospectives and earlier, high
school earlier with Allan Jackson who used to rule the roost at this publication.
In those old Acre neighborhood days, usually Saturdays, we would hike a couple of
miles up the carless road to the old Strand Theater in Adamsville Center and
watch plenty of 1940s films since to save money Sal Cadger the gregarious owner
of the theater on first run features from the studios filled up the screen with
this older material. We loved it, have loved it ever since. Bang-the first time
I saw Rita sa-sashing into her hubby’s casino down in Buenos Aires, I think that
is right, and stumbles onto ex-flame down and out gambler on a losing streak Glenn
Ford, to find him working for her old man. Electricity beyond whatever words I
could use to describe that tension in the air which spelled some hard times for
somebody. I hope the reader will get an idea of that is this series as we commemorate
Rita’s 100th birthday year.
********
DVD Review
By Laura Perkins
Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth. Gene Kelly, Phil
Silvers, 1944
Turnabout is fair play or at least that is what we
learned when we were kids and maybe there is something to the matter. The
turnabout here is who is watching who in the film under review the 1944 musical
Cover Girl. That watching part was
predicated by a remark my longtime friend, companion and fellow writer here Sam
Lowell mentioned in a review he did of an earlier musical featuring the dancing
pair of Fred Astaire and the female dancer here the vivacious Rita Hayworth.
Yes that Rita Hayworth who half the guys, the G.I.s in the muds of World War II
Europe or on forsaken Pacific atolls has photos of, pin-ups in the lingo of the
times, hanging somewhere to remind them of well, let’s just say reminded them
of home. Sam had made a big deal of having previously gushed over Fred’s
exquisite and strong-legged dancing in previous efforts with former partner
Ginger Rogers where he was the focal point of whatever creation was being
performed. Not so when Rita came on board since Sam was at one with those guys
in the muds and on those damn forsaken atolls and according to my father who
was there they really had pin-up dreams, well let’s just leave it at that.
Needless to say, that there, as here, although I am bound
by my contract to say a few words about the plot of the film, what Sam always
called the skinny and that seems right in dealing with musicals the mere
presence of Rita as the much sought-after Cover Girl of every dream made the
dancing of the usually physically very present Gene Kelly from nowhere. That,
my friends, as much as a feminist as I like to think about myself as being in
these troubled times is my opinion as well. On this showing. Since Sam and I
watched this one together (he would have pouted for about three weeks if he
didn’t get his Rita fix) I remarked to him how much Rita’s mere presence in a
scene lighted the whole thing up. And this a film over seventy years old.
Here is that skinny I was mentioning above that I am
duty-bound to run through although I have already given anybody, male or
female, the reason to see the film if that is what is holding anybody back.
Rita and Gene, Rusty and Danny, are slowly working their way up the dancing
food chain via Danny’s Brooklyn nightclub (that location unlike today when everything
is coming up roses in that borough, a snub, a reference to the backwaters of
New York City, nowhere in other words) but mainly they are in love and can go
either way on the climb up the ladder business. As long as they have each other.
That is until a Mayfair swell, a Manhattan Mayfair swell was slumming one night
at Danny’s after seeing Rita apply for the cover girl cover of the title. Then
the chase is on. It seems that Mayfair swell was all set to marry Rusty’s
grandmother, also a dancer back in her day, who looked amazing like Rusty how
did they do that, and thus showing some DNA connection to granddaughter, but
she a free-spirit and the bane of Mayfair swell’s mother flew the coop, left
him at the alter. A sad but hardly unique tale.
Mayfair swell is not just any bourgeois playboy turning
gray but the publisher of Cover Girl
magazine which every good-looking young woman who had any ambitions that way would
die to be on. Naturally, despite six million false denials, Rusty wanted in.
Got in and got on the first rung of the ladder to high society, New York style.
Sans Danny, or so it seemed. Mayfair swell even set Rusty up with an up and
coming Broadway producer in the days when Broadway was the be all and end all of
real acting, of the legitimate theater as they used to tout the tag. Rusty
bought into the whole plan, including marriage to said producer. You know where
all this substitution is heading so you know that in the end she jilts the guy just
like granny did in her time and goes running back to blues struck Danny. I will
never ever not say when reviewing a musical that the plotline is nada, not a
thing and the thing is the dance and the lyrics to the music. Except here it is
really Rita going through her paces. Sorry Gene you will get your chance in An American In Paris so don’t fret.
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