(1944) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Academy Award song) in a modest burlesque night-club act in Brooklyn, Rusty Parker (Rita Hayworth) danced and sang until she won out over 10,000 other faces to become Vanity's Golden Wedding Girl on the cover of the magazine's 50th anniversary issue.

For seven months she's been pals with the club's owner Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) and his hyperactive comedian Genius (Phil Silvers), living across the hall in the same hotel and looking for a pearl at Joe's Oyster Bar on Friday nights. Hoping to leap from Brooklyn to Broadway - "If you can get there quicker, why shouldn't you?" - she enters the cover-girl contest along with her brash blonde rival Maurine (Leslie Brooks), who tries to misdirect Rusty before her interview with Cornelia "Stonewall" Jackson (Eve Arden), whose first impression of the redhead is of a "leaping thyroid."

"I want a new face," says publisher John Coudair (Otto Kruger) to his wiseacre assistant Jackson: "I want a girl with a story in her eyes." Forty years earlier he'd been engaged to Maribelle Hicks (also Hayworth), another dance-hall girl whom Rusty very much resembles, but his mother ("Poor John") had disapproved of her.

Accompanying Coudair and Jackson to see Rusty for themselves is Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman), the wealthy producer of the Wheaton Theatre, who immediately recognizes not only her beauty ("the most sensational redhead since Cleopatra") but her talent (a face doing a feat on her feet). Not only does he want Rusty for the star on his stage, Wheaton proposes marriage and everything his money can buy her.

Poor Danny (who'd been wounded in Libya, though you'd never know he'd suffered a debilitating injury from his dancing), unable to compete, closes up shop and heads off with Genius to entertain the troops in Europe. Singing (tunes from Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin) and dancing (Kelly performs with his phantom double), lovely legs and laughs fill a pastry of musical romance directed by Charles Vidor (screenplay by Virginia Van Upp from Erwin Gelsey's story, adapted by Marion Personnet and Paul Gangelin), including a parade of actual cover girls from national magazines. The conclusion is silly, but the whole escapist entertainment is just for fun since there was a war going on.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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