I have always found it strange,if not surprising,that Rita Hayworth is best-known for playing sultry bad girls.Her electric incandescence could,when concentrated,be sold as a solely sexual commodity,and it was.Her natural glow,when caught by a camera,was enough to illumine a football stadium.Yet,her impersonations of tramps,vamps and heartless schemers,however fiery, were a stretch for her, and it shows.Although she turned in a capable dramatic performance or two at the end of her career,Hayworth was at her best in quietly comedic roles that allowed her true strengths as a performer to shine through.The root of her appeal is based on a solid,enchanting sweetness,understated comic timing and dancing skills so fine that Fred Astaire considered her his most technically able partner.
The private woman was mind-numbingly shy. Even her most exuberant roles reflect the demureness that she wore off-screen like a second-skin.Like many great stars,she infused her characters with some of her personal qualities while never falling back on impersonating herself.There is a delicacy and calm at the heart of her best performances, and a lovely serenity that made her so believable as a girl-next-door when her stunning looks should have made such a feat impossible.
The young Rita came to fame through the ambitions of a succession of other people, including her mother and her much-older first husband.That someone so petrified of engaging with the world was in the red-hot spotlight for more than 20 years just to please those she loved is sad. To have all eyes on you, all the time when you just want to be left alone must be a personal,perpetual circle of hell.The world,though, is richer for her having endured a career and level of fame that she was never interested in.Yet she worked immensely hard at her craft,consistently giving her all in a game that did not suit her nature.
She considered herself a comedian who could dance and I think that her assessment is a correct and just one.When she was set free as a performer ,and allowed to harness her quiet yet jewel-like abilities to their proper medium,she was enthralling.Although she was sublime in her two films opposite Astaire, my favourite Hayworth flick is the one she made with Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers and a bevy of models:"Cover Girl" (1944).
There is something about the dynamics of this war-time musical that make it so readily and repeatably watchable.Separately,the components are engaging and worthy yet,when fitted together,they make up one of the breeziest,catchiest, and most believable comedies of the era.
"Cover Girl" was the first film to give Gene Kelly artistic control of the dance sequences.Kelly was much more than a dancing leading man who could act:he was the father-creator of brilliant,ahead-of-its-time cinematic choreography.Witness the scene where he dances with his shop-window reflection;it was but a small sign of what was to come for the innovatory hoofer.
Hayworth,Kelly and Phil Silvers are a trio of performing buddies who nightly fill out the bill at Kelly's off-Broadway establishment.Hayworth, as Rusty, is the star dancer while Silvers, as Genius, is, to no one's surprise, the goofy comedian.Silvers' usually overbearing shtick is kept in check here.He is entertaining, caustic and appealing without crossing over the hair-thin line to murderously annoying, as he was to do later many times.
Rusty's ambitions ultimately take her further than Danny's small stage.She leaves to become a Broadway headliner for an aging impresario who, coincidentally, knew her musical-theatre Grandmother way-back-when. This is as much a necessary plot-twist as it is an excuse to showcase the stunning Hayworth, as her character's Grandmother, in period costume, for which she seems made.
All turns out right in the end, as these things always do;the well-worn convolutions of boy meets/wins/loses/wins girl again is not the point. The originality is in the memorable musical numbers and the lively chemistry of the three leads."Cover Girl" caught, for posterity, three talents then in the ascendant.
Hayworth fell in love with and married a genius of her own during production.Orson Welles became her second husband while the film was shooting.Instead of retiring into the truly private life that she yearned for, she became so much modeling clay to another stronger-willed husband. Yet, Welles and her studio (Columbia),between them, never quite succeeded in transforming her into a believable,careless woman of mystery.As timid and pliant as she was,she ultimately knew herself better than all of the powers-that-be combined, and time has proven her correct.Rita Hayworth was a comedian who could dance, which is a legacy of much rarer composition than any bad girl could ever hope to achieve.
No comments:
Post a Comment