Essential Event Info
COVER GIRL, February 13 & 14, 2014
Starring Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers, Eve Arden & Otto Kruger.
Music and Lyrics by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.
Film and companion live performance.
Optional pre-film dinner.
Showtimes, Location & Directions...
W H A T :
COVER GIRL
USA, 1944, run time 107 minutes, rated G.
W H E N :
Thursday, February 13 7:30
Friday, February 14, 7:30
Live music, socializing, bar and food at 6:00 pm each evening.
W H E R E :
The Carnegie
1028 Scott Blvd., Covington KY 41011
859-491-2030
Easy Access and, Free Parking:
Interactive Google Map
Printable Map & Written Directions
Printable Downtown Bridge & Street Grid
Printable Parking Map
Film & Performance Tickets
Pricing, How to Purchase
Details...
FILM & PERFORMANCE TICKETS
$20 for the general public.
$17 for CWC patrons of record, available by phone only.
$17 for students and Enjoy the Arts members with valid ID, available only at the door.
HOW TO GET FILM TICKETS
CWC - ON-LINE, 24 x 7
Phone, 859-957-2345, Mon - Sat, 9a - 7p
In person at these area locations
(click each location for a map):
Clifton-Ludlow Avenue,
Sitwell's Coffee House 513 281 7487
Mt. Lookout Square,
Lookout Joe Coffee Roasters 513 871 8626
Downtown Cincinnati,
Coffee Emporium 513 651 5483
Tickets also at the door, subject to availability.
Dinner Reservations
Enjoy a romantic candlelight dinner in the Carnegie Gallery before the film.
Details...
PRIX FIXE VALENTINE DINNER ~ Thursday & Friday
Join us for a romantic dinner prior to the screening of Cover Girl. Cozy tables will be nestled in the Carnegie Gallery, all dressed up for Valentine's Day.
For $40 per person, you will receive a glass of wine, buffet dinner catered by Jeff Thomas Catering including salad, Chicken Coq Au Vin, Aligote Potatoes, assorted grilled winter vegetables, and heart-shaped iced cookies. Gratuity is included.
Jeff Thomas Catering is famous for elegant, delicious meals. Think about what you would pay elsewhere for dinner + wine + gratuity and you'll agree this is a real value! And it's super-convenient — enjoy a leisurely dinner, then walk across the hall for Cover Girl.
Reservations required - space is limited...
The Thursday and Friday 6:00 PM seatings at the Carnegie Arts Center will accommodate a limited number each night. We suggest you reserve a place without delay.
You can make dinner reservations for either night by calling (859) 957 3456, or online via CWC WebTix.
Questions? Call CWC at (859) 957-FILM.
Live Music before the Film
Popular guitarist Richard Goering will perform romantic favorites during dinner.
Learn more about Richard and his music on Facebook and
YouTube.
Cast Filmographies & Bios
Career highlights plus filmography and bio links for Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers, Eve Arden, Otto Kruger and Lee Bowman.
RITA HAYWORTH 1918-1987 Bio & More...
Separate Tables, 1958
Pal Joey, 1957
Salome, 1953
Affair in Trinidad, 1952
Loves of Carmen, 1948
Lady from Shanghai, 1947
Gilda, 1946
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Cover Girl, 1944
You'll Never Get Rich, 1941
Blood and Sand, 1941
The Strawberry Blonde, 1941
The Lady in Question, 1940
Susan and God, 1940
Only Angels Have Wings 1939
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GENE KELLY 1912-1996 Bio & More...
Xanadu, 1980
Inherit the Wind, 1960
Marjorie Morningstar, 1958
Brigadoon, 1954
Singin' in the Rain, 1952
An American in Paris, 1951
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On the Town, 1949
Anchors Aweigh, 1945
Cover Girl, 1944
For Me and My Gal, 1942
The Time of Your Life, 1940
Pal Joey (stage), 1940
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PHIL SILVERS 1911-1985 Bio & More...
The Cheap Detective, 1978
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1966
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1963
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The Phil Silvers Show (TV), 1955-59
Cover Girl, 1944
My Gal Sal, 1942
You're in the Army Now, 1941
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EVE ARDEN 1908-1990 Bio & More...
Grease, 1978
Anatomy of a Murder, 1959
Our Miss Brooks (TV), 1952-56
Night and Day, 1946
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Mildred Pierce, 1946
Cover Girl, 1944
Hit Parade of 1943
Ziegfield Girl, 1941
Stage Door, 1937
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OTTO KRUGER 1885-1974 Bio & More...
Magnificent Obession, 1954
High Noon, 1952
Cover Girl, 1944
Stage Door Canteen, 1943
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Saboteur, 1942
Dracula's Daughter, 1936
Treasure Island, 1934
Beauty for Sale, 1933
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LEE BOWMAN 1914-1979 Bio & More...
Cincinnati native, U.C. grad
Youngblood Hawke, 1964
The Adventures of Ellery Queen (TV), 1951-52
House by the River, 1950
Tonight & Every Night, 1945
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Cover Girl, 1944
The Impatient Years, 1944
Bataan, 1943
Fast and Furious, 1939
Last Train from Madrid, 1937
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 Wow, this woman can dance! Priceless up-tempo Hayworth!
About the Event
Cincinnati World Cinema and The Carnegie are proud to present a memorable occasion you'll want to share with friends and loved ones.
A classic movie musical romance and box-office smash that influenced movie-making ever after, starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, with music by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.
The film and a live performance — featuring a vocal ensemble performing in synch with key musical segments in the film, the brainchild of Josh Steele, Carnegie theatre director. How it works...
Film & Performance — How it Works
Imagine this: you're in the darkened theatre enjoying Cover Girl. On-screen, the scene changes, taking us to Gene Kelly's nightclub in Brooklyn where Phil Silvers sits at a piano.
The lead-in movie music swells, then fades as on the Carnegie stage soft pin spots illuminate a pianist seated at the grand piano. Two vocalists step forward and sing Gershwin's tender ballad, Long Ago and Far Away, totally in synch with the film.
You are magically transported to an intimate cabaret and live performance as Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly dance, and kiss, on-screen.
But, what happened to Rita Hayworth's renditions of Long Ago and other songs in the film? By design, they never made it onto the film's final sound track.
Dubbing vocals was a common Hollywood practice. Hayworth, an exquisite dancer, was not a strong singer. Her vocals were dubbed by Martha Mears, who also covered Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamar, Lucille Ball and Claudette Colbert over the years.
A candlelight dinner and musical serenade before the movie, setting the romantic mood for the evening.
Join us for this one-of-a-kind Valentine's celebration of romance, dance and music! It's so convenient – an easy-to-reach destination where you park once for your dinner and great entertainment.
For personal assistance from our Cinema Concierge with your film tickets and dinner reservations, call 859 957 3456.
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Romance, Glamor & Optimism
Beyond its appeal as sheer entertainment and romance, Cover Girl is a snapshot of America in wartime.
As heavy fighting in Europe and the Pacific continued in 1944, Cover Girl offered a "feminine ideal" — beautiful women that any soldier could adore —  showing our boys what they were fighting for. And it didn't hurt that Rita Hayworth was one of the most popular pin-ups with servicemen during WWII.
The glamorous hairstyles, wardrobes, hats and accessories were mesmerizing, inspiring dreams of fashion in war-weary women who had gone so long without. Cover Girl was a showcase for Rita Hayworth and also for Columbia's first use of the Technicolor process, evidenced by the lavish sets and use of brilliant colors.
Nominated for five Oscars, Cover Girl was a huge box-office success and more than just an escapist romance. There was overt optimism in the dialogue and in the sparkling songs by Kern and Gershwin — Make Way for Tomorrow, etc. — instilling the American psyche with belief that the war might soon be won.
Gershwin's poignant ballad Long Ago and Far Away remains one of the most beautiful songs ever written for a film (and was the biggest money-maker for Gershwin, more than any of the songs he wrote with his brother George).
Cover Girl catapulted Hayworth and Kelly to super-stardom. After two successful dance films with Fred Astaire, this was Hayworth's first Technicolor musical — Rita's dancing was spectacular! And, the film established Kelly as a virtuoso choreographer as well as a major dancing talent.
WORTH KNOWING: Julie Kirgo writes about the significant elements of the film and offers behind-the-scenes insight into Cover Girl...
A Privileged Hollywood Moment, Preserved On Celluloid
By Julie Kirgo
Cover Girl (1944) is so much pure unadulterated fun that one can lose sight of the fact that it's also a landmark in movie musical history – in more ways than one. A lavish extravaganza designed to showcase both the sumptuous glamour and the terpsichorean talents of Columbia's supernova, Rita Hayworth, this was the burgeoning star's first musical in Technicolor – oh, those lips, those eyes, and that spectacular red hair!
Further, Cover Girl marked the first time that co-star Gene Kelly – soon to be acknowledged as a great innovator in Hollywood dance – was given free reign to choreograph his own numbers, assisted by another young dancer fresh from Broadway, future sterling director Stanley Donen.
And finally, in the words of film music historian Tony Thomas, Cover Girl was "a major turning point... at which the long familiar concept of the movie musical as a string of songs strung together by a skimpy plot gave way to a broader concept in which the musical sequences would form a part of the plot."
It's a lot of weighty "firsts" for one confection of a motion picture – and in fact, one of them almost didn't happen. Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn, notoriously obsessive about Hayworth, initially resisted producer Arthur Schwartz's suggestion of casting Kelly, then under contract at MGM, where no one quite knew what to do with him. "That tough Irish face!" Cohn reportedly told Schwartz. "He can't be in the same frame as Rita, my Rita!"
But Schwartz, a celebrated composer (The Band Wagon) producing his first film, had the temerity to stand up to Cohn, insisting that Columbia borrow Kelly from Metro and promising the dancer/star that he could choreograph, a privilege he had not yet been allowed at his home studio (this oversight would be corrected, in spades, after the success of Cover Girl; in the next decade, MGM would produce some of the greatest musicals ever made, with Kelly leading the way).
The result was one of the most sublime numbers in movie musical history: Kelly, as the nightclub owner trying to work out his feelings for his dancer/girlfriend (Hayworth) who has shot to sudden stardom, dancing with his "alter ego" to the potent strains of Jerome Kern's music. Utilizing double exposure "trick" photography to stupendous effect, Kelly works out two separate personalities for the two selves he incarnates, each with its own dancing idiosyncrasies.
The sequence was shot twice, with Kelly's partner, Donen, standing beside the camera, counting out the timings for the cameraman; Kelly would later call it "the most difficult thing I've ever done – a technical torture." On screen, it is a smooth and perfect introduction to Kelly's imaginative ideas about how to combine dance with cinema: surprising, athletic, breathtakingly beautiful, and psychologically combustive.
Hayworth, of course, also had to have her solo turns, of which the créme de la créme is the title number, "Cover Girl," representing her accession to the lofty status of Broadway star: literally lofty in that, clad in clinging gold lamé, she emerges from a pastel-tinted cloud of stage smoke at the top of a sinuously twisting ramp. Hayworth – a genuinely wonderful dancer – has little to do here except rapidly descend (with supreme grace, it must be admitted) and briefly engage with a cluster of chorus boys before ascending again in a rain of glitter and disappearing once more into the fog of dreams.
Rita, our Rita, is far better served – and far more radiantly natural, her greatest strength – in another Kelly/Donen number, "Make Way for Tomorrow," a buoyantly optimistic piece featuring the two stars teamed with effervescent second banana Phil Silvers. As the threesome makes its way through the humbler streets of New York, they interact, variously, with a cop, a necking couple, a milkman, and a drunk (played by who other than perennial movie inebriate Jack Norton, ironically a teetotaler in real life), making brilliant choreographic use of virtually everything that crosses their path: packing crates, brownstone stoops, mailboxes, curbs.
More than any other, this number reflects the mood of 1944 America, when people were beginning to let themselves believe that World War II might eventually come to an end. In terms of era-definition, special note should also be made of Silvers's specialty turn, "Who's Complaining?"; beginning with an outright moan about having to drink chicory instead of coffee, it ends with the spectacular lines (courtesy of nonpareil lyricist Ira Gershwin), "I'll feed myself on artichokes/until that Nazi Party chokes/So long as they don't ration/my passion for you!"
Curiously, the Cover Girl song that became a standard is presented with an almost shocking austerity. "Long Ago and Far Away" – surely one of the gravest, most tender achievements in the American Songbook – features Kelly and Hayworth, not dancing, not making sweet love 'neath the mango tree, but mundanely putting chairs up on tables after hours in Kelly's strictly down-market Brooklyn nightclub. Somehow, the prosaic setting gives the song an extra layer of sincerity; theirs, it seems to say, is a love that can endure anything. For simple beauty, this is a number the equal of any the Hollywood musical ever produced.
Which, of course, is a hat-tip to director Charles Vidor, Budapest-born, and another gift to Hollywood, among so many, of the Jewish diaspora. Although he had made many films prior to Cover Girl – including one that is an eccentric if lovable favorite of this writer, 1942's Charles Laughton/Jon Hall-starrer, The Tuttles of Tahiti – his greatest claims to fame came subsequently, with another Rita Hayworth classic, Gilda (1946); the dark-toned musical bio-pic, Love Me or Leave Me (1955); the elegant Grace Kelly/Alec Guinness vehicle, The Swan (1956); and another musically inclined biographical film, this one starring Frank Sinatra, The Joker Is Wild (1957).
In Cover Girl, Vidor's superb craftsmanship has the superior aesthetic support of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, who shot the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr in Europe before moving to Hollywood and being nominated for the Academy Award four years in a row for shooting Foreign Correspondent (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and Sahara (1943); Cover Girl would extend his streak to five consecutive years of nominations. Maté would soon add another string to his bow as the director of such diverse films as that quintessential noir, D.O.A. (1950); the William Holden-led crime film, Union Station (1950); the science fiction classic, When Worlds Collide (1951); and the romantic melodrama, Miracle in the Rain (1956).
With two such masters behind the camera, it's hardly surprising that Cover Girl looks great – and further, is blessed with winning performances, not just from its stars (both Kelly and Hayworth would shoot into the stratosphere after this box-office smash), but also from its supporting players. The irrepressible Silvers is appropriately repressed here, his tendency to spit-takes and rim-shot reactions mellowed – and, he proves himself one helluva dancer. Eve Arden – as the most chicly-dressed magazine editor in existence, courtesy of costume designer Travis Banton (never mind Hayworth's; could I have Arden's wardrobe, please?) – is her customary wry, martini-dry, amusing self. And Otto Kruger, who could play a villain to a fare-thee-well, is here the very essence of the adorable old darling, playing a magazine editor once in love with Hayworth's Gilded Age showgirl/grandmother.
All in all, Cover Girl is an artifact of a privileged Hollywood moment, preserved on celluloid. The war to end all wars was coming to an end, the studio system was churning along on all cylinders – and even Rita Hayworth, a victim as well as a beneficiary of that system, was experiencing a rare moment of pure happiness. Married to golden boy Orson Welles during the making of the film, she would remember the production of Cover Girl as one of the happiest periods of her troubled life. "We had a sensational time with Gene and Phil," she would remember in later, less joyful years. "I knew we had a rapport – they were both so great to work with. It was a happy time. I didn't know we were doing anything special, but you knew it was going to be good because it felt good making it." Almost seven decades down the line, we are the beneficiaries of that happy time.
Used with permission. © 2012, Julie Kirgo, Twilight Time
 Julie Kirgo is a writer and film historian specializing in essays and liner notes for Twilight Time, a California firm dedicated to the restoration and distribution of classic films. Her career includes writing for American Movie Classics Magazine and contributing to DVD commentaries. Learn more about Julie in this KQEK interview.
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