General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Cover Girl

Cover Girl is a 1944 American Technicolor musical film directed by Charles Vidor for Columbia Pictures, starring Rita Hayworth as a Brooklyn chorus girl whose win in a magazine cover contest strains her romance with the nightclub owner who loves her, played by Gene Kelly. The film is remembered above all as the first significant venture into film choreography by Kelly, who devised his own numbers, working with Stanley Donen, and for the "Alter Ego" number in which Kelly dances with a superimposed double of himself.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	6 April 1944, Columbia Pictures; copyright registered the same day (LP12592)¹
Director / producer	Charles Vidor; produced by Arthur Schwartz¹
Cast	Rita Hayworth (Rusty Parker / Maribelle Hicks), Gene Kelly (Danny McGuire), Lee Bowman, Phil Silvers, Eve Arden, Otto Kruger, Jinx Falkenburg³
Music	Jerome Kern (music), Ira Gershwin (lyrics); "Long Ago (And Far Away)" became a standard²
Technical	Technicolor three-strip, 35 mm, Western Electric Mirrophonic sound, 9,623 feet; shot 3 July to 13 November 1943⁴
Academy Awards	Won Best Musical Score; nominated for Best Color Cinematography and Best Art Direction; "Long Ago (And Far Away)" was nominated for Best Song⁵^•⁶
Box office	Second highest grossing musical of 1944⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Rusty Parker, a red-headed dancer at Danny McGuire's Brooklyn nightclub, enters a contest to become the cover girl of Vanity magazine as a stepping-stone toward a Broadway career.⁴^•⁸ The magazine's publisher, John Coudair (Otto Kruger), had been engaged forty years earlier to showgirl Maribelle Hicks, who left him at the altar for the piano player she truly loved; Rusty, Maribelle's granddaughter, reminds him of what he lost, and he puts her on his cover.⁸^•⁹ Hayworth plays a dual role, appearing in flashbacks as her own grandmother.³

Rusty's success attracts Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman), a wealthy theatrical producer who stages a lavish musical to star her, surrounded by real cover girls of the mid-1940s. Dazzled by success and security, she agrees to marry him, but her heart remains with Danny; she drinks and loses weight under the strain before returning to the man she loves.⁸

Production

The film originated in 1942, when Bob Taplinger, publicity chief at Columbia Pictures, proposed a film and magazine tie-up in which real-life models would appear in a musical titled Cover Girl.⁵ Rita Hayworth was Columbia's biggest star of the 1940s, and studio head Harry Cohn decided the added cost of Technicolor was justified for her three-strip debut for Columbia.³^•¹⁵ Production ran from 3 July to 13 November 1943.⁴

Casting Kelly. Producer Arthur Schwartz wanted Gene Kelly, then under contract to MGM, as Hayworth's co-star. Cohn objected, saying of Kelly's "tough Irish face" that he "can't be in the same frame as Rita, my Rita"; Schwartz nevertheless borrowed Kelly from MGM and promised him something MGM had not allowed: the chance to choreograph his own numbers.⁶ Kelly brought with him Stanley Donen, a young dancer who had appeared with him on Broadway in Pal Joey; it was the first collaboration between the two men.⁶ The assistant director on the picture was Budd Boetticher, who later became famous as a western filmmaker.³

Choreography and the "Alter Ego" number

Although Val Raset and Seymour Felix are credited with staging the film's dance numbers, Kelly devised the routines performed by his character Danny, assisted by Donen, according to the Variety review recorded in the AFI Catalog; it was his first significant venture into film choreography.¹

The most celebrated result is the "Alter Ego" number, in which Danny, distressed that his girlfriend will find success without him, argues and dances with a superimposed double image of himself, his own conscience. The number was shot twice with a fixed-head camera, with Donen standing beside it calling out timings for the cameraman. Kelly later called it "the most difficult thing I've ever done, a technical torture," and elsewhere described it as the hardest film sequence of his career.⁶^•¹⁰ MoMA's program note describes the sequence as a technical and artistic triumph that pointed the way toward Kelly's later experiments in dance for the camera.²

Most of the musical numbers advance the plot. In "Make Way for Tomorrow," Kelly, Hayworth, and Phil Silvers cavort through a late-night Brooklyn street, using the objects and space around them as props, a choreographic technique that recurs in Kelly's later dances such as "Singin' in the Rain."⁶^•¹¹

Music

The score pairs composer Jerome Kern with lyricist Ira Gershwin. "Long Ago (And Far Away)" became a wartime ballad for American soldiers overseas and their families at home, and the Gershwin estate describes it as Ira Gershwin's single biggest hit of any one year during his career.¹⁰ The song generated four singles that reached Billboard's top 10, recorded by Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, and a Dick Haymes-Helen Forrest duet; Guy Lombardo's version reached No. 11.¹² At the Academy Awards the song was nominated for Best Song but lost to "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way (1944).⁶ The film won the Oscar for Best Musical Score, with nominations for Best Color Cinematography and Best Art Direction.⁵

Reception and legacy

Contemporary response was warm. The New Yorker's 1944 review called it "a likable musical" despite a plot that "militates vigorously against it," noting that the cast included real-life magazine cover models used as "a sort of blackjack to club you into a mellow mood."¹³ The film was the second highest grossing musical of 1944.⁷ Its optimistic depiction of the war is one reason it was the first film screened for GIs in France following the D-Day victory.⁵

Place in the Hollywood musical. In The Films of Gene Kelly, Tony Thomas describes the film as "a major turning point": the moment when the familiar movie musical, little more than songs linked by a thin storyline, was replaced by a larger conception treating the musical numbers as part of the story itself.⁶ A 1952 Picturegoer retrospective called it "a shrewd combination of screen art and entertainment and a forerunner of On the Town and An American in Paris."⁵ After Cover Girl, MGM permitted Kelly to choreograph his own numbers beginning with Anchors Aweigh (1945), and he returned to the character of Danny McGuire forty years later in Xanadu (1980).⁵

The film's runtime is given as 105 minutes in the AFI Catalog and 107 minutes by IMDb and MoMA.¹^•¹⁴^•²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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