The New Pictures

Heavenly Body (M.G.M.) unexpectedly translates dapper William Powell into an absent-minded astronomer. He spends all night every night up at the observatory, mousing around with comets. His wife (Hedy Lamarr) sits home (as Astronomer Powell occasionally ascertains by a glance through his spare telescope), all undressed and no place to go. Then star-crossed Miss Lamarr falls into the hands of a female astrologer (Fay Bainter) who predicts the coming of an Ideal Lover so convincingly that Miss Lamarr mistakes the handiest air-raid warden (James Craig) for journey's end.

Shuddering with jealousy, Astronomer Powell lectures his learned colleagues, in sweating double entendre, about the collision of two heavenly bodies. At last, after getting blitzed on vodka, and giving the lonely air warden a dog which soon displaces Miss Lamarr in the warden's affections, Professor Powell gets his love life back into focus. Mr. Craig and the dog make a handsome couple. Miss Lamarr has seldom looked more mouth-watering or seemed more tired of it all. William Powell, busy as a beaver, cheats a few glimmers of fun out of all the suggestive mockery.

Cover Girl (Columbia) begins by undressing eight superb Technicolored chorines within an inch of the law, sets them to dancing as if they were trying to kick your chin and singing as if they were enjoying themselves too much to talk. The scene is a small Brooklyn nightclub full of whistling sailors. The 97-minute picture that unfolds from this frolicsome beginning is the best cinemusical the year has produced, and one of the best in years.

Not even Cover Girl's story--the one really conventional thing about it--gets in its way. It concerns the nightclub's proud proprietor (Gene Kelly), his one true love among the chorines (Rita Hayworth-- and their friend, a clown called Genius (Phil Silvers). A glossy Manhattan publisher (Otto Kruger) sees in Miss Hayworth the image of her grandmother, whom he loved in his youth (Miss Hayworth is glimpsed briefly, more fully clad, in Tony Pastor flashbacks). He puts her on the cover of his magazine, Vanity. After that it is only a question of time before she bolts her lover for a Broadway producer (Lee Bowman) and his big new show. In due time she bolts a socialite wedding march for her Brooklyn boss.

Miss Hayworth's and Mr. Kelly's amatory ups-&-downs have a warmth and poignancy which is unprecedented in a cinemusical. When they cue into a song--especially the sentimental bull's-eye Long Ago--they do not step out of character for the number. Their dance duets are the best since Astaire and Rogers split. Scene after scene, even the troublesome Manhattanites in their splendid lairs, have a remarkable authenticity of emotion, place, atmosphere and character. So do most of the sets, costumes, dance routines, Jerome Kern tunes and Ira Gershwin lyrics.

Besides dancing better than ever before, Rita Hayworth looks more than ever like a model in brisk flight from Titian, and shows marked symptoms of acting. Even better is Gene Kelly. Few cinemactors can match his reticence, exact evocativeness and sincerity, or carry such acting abilities into dancing and singing (notably in Cover Girl, Put Me To The Test).

Even the worst of Cover Girl is crisp Broadway style shrewdly transferred to the screen. That leaves a good 70% of superbly balanced, multifaceted, light pleasure.

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