Phil Silvers was 33 when he appeared in this film. He was simply magnificent. Incidentally Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth were perfect together, what talents
1. the producer did not want phil silvers to do the number because he could not dance. but gene kelly threw a tantrum and demanded that the audience would get a kick out of a comedian who was not a pro at dancing hang with kelly and hayworth. 2. the "glad to see ya" was phil's calling card by then and an ad-lib suggested by him to the director. 3, the drunk at the end did a lot of small parts for columbia and played a drunk in a famous WWII 3 stooges short.
bigred997 thanks for the info! So Phil Silvers can’t dance, huh? Just watch him starting right around where they encounter the milkman. Silvers was straight outta vaudeville and in those days that meant you could fake anything - and with a tutor like Kelly learn to tap like a genius! Yes children, it is possible to do it all - just stay limber, keep your eyes open and if someone asks you if you can high dive, say yes!
@@paprika1951 Bilko was no Ebsen or Bolger, but he could do a buck and wing all right. He more than holds his own here. Although 'eccentric dancing' is easier for the less accomplished, because mistakes can be passed off as intentional, I see no flubs. The camaraderie of this number looks forward to 'Good Morning' and the title song from 'Singin' in the Rain'. Kelly was much keener on gang's-all-here teamwork than Astaire, e.g. in 'On the Town'.
Gene "threw a tantrum"? How about 'Gene had great instincts about what the public would want to see, and this number and his future multiple Academy Awards proved he was right!'
This was a Columbia film, but it has the aura of the classic MGM musicals. Metro had yet to find a musical film that exploited Gene Kelly's great talents, so they lent him to Columbia. When Kelly arrived at Columbia, he looked at the script and envisioned a great show-stopping number, but Columbia didn't have a big enough sound stage, so he said to studio chief Harry Cohn, "You gotta knock out a wall and create a super stage." The result was this great number, which helped the film to get an Oscar for best Adapted Score.
Harry Cohn bought the idea for a musical about a magazine cover star from a publicity flack at Warners, where it had been turned down. Cohn had nurtured Rita for several years (including two years of electrolysis on her widow's peak) and was bent on making her as lucrative as Faye or Grable at Fox. Rita had broken through in her two pictures with Fred and was ready to headline. Cohn took a gamble on Kelly, who himself had just gotten noticed in 'Pal Joey' on Broadway. Like him or not, and few did, Mr C had a nose for a hit and the people to make it.
@@esmeephillips5888 You're right about Cohn. Early on, Cohn had this vision Columbia could be great studio. It never had the repuations of MGM, Fox or Warners, but it more than held its own with good quality. Cohn was responsible for that.
Some of Rita's acting is still rough, admittedly. That drunk scene, sheesh. She improved in a hurry by the time of 'Gilda' and 'Lady from Shanghai'... what being Orson Welles's SO can do to sharpen your power to convey treachery, I guess. She was hugging her engagement to herself while shooting 'Cover Girl', poor child.
With all due respect to the monumental talent of Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers I can't take my eyes of Rita Hayworth. Not only for her stunning beauty but for the charm of her dancing. What a great number.
yes. there's always a charming personality coming through her dancing. The dancing isn't a gymnastic event she's competing in, like the dreary numbers on So You think You Can Dance. The dance seems to be a happy outburst of some genuine joy inside her. And I don't think that's just acting, either. She loves to dance.
That's teetotaler Jack Norton as Harry, the drunk. He has close to 200 movie credits and probably played a drunk in all of them. Let's give Phil Silvers a pat on the back. He finished with a smile on his face and still breathing.
Mad respect to my kid, Phil Silvers. The dude was on the wrong side of forty when he did this film yet undertook the dancing like a flighty kitten. Bro is amazing. I wanna live in this scene.
Make Way for Yesterday! This marvelous number is a bit of a precursor to the "Good Morning" number from "Singin' in the Rain." Love the bit with the milkman - and I bet he didn't even get a credit!
+Thomas Leary Exactly what I was thinking. (The "Good Morning" scene in Singing in the Rain - only then it was Gene, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds. Both fantastic dancing skills.
"Singin' in the Rain" was in a class by itself. But this film was one of the biggest box office films of 1944 ($8M, which was HUGE box office for a war-time movie). As I mentioned elsewhere, it made Gene Kelly a super-star because his home studio, MGM, hadn't realized his potential as a musical star. Metro loaned him to Columbia, which paired him with that studio's top star, Rita Hayworth. When Kelly returned to Metro, Louis B. Mayer never loaned him to another studio again.
@@thomasleary6287 But the song 'Good Mornin' is older than the 1953 movie. It is even sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in a MGM low-budget movie released in 1930s.
Kelly stresses his "just a regular guy" image by working everyday objects and types into the choreography: no top hats and champagne glasses like Fred, just sacks, brooms, trash cans, lampposts, a milkman, a smoochy couple and an amiable drunk. He reused the suspicious cop pulling him up short in 'Singin' in the Rain'.
Interesting that you should mention ''far away'' since the Oscar-nominated song from the film is the haunting Jerome Kern-Ira Gershwin song, ''Long Ago and Far Away.''
Gene and Rita imo lacked the precision that Fred and Ginger had, but boy do they have energy. I wish the former had made more movies together. I think Rita looked beautiful in both of her movies with Fred, but dance-wise, I feel like this is her best.
@@steveweinstein3222 MGM had yet to realize Kelly's creativity and Metro didn't have anything ready for Gene when producer Arthur Schwartz called asking to borrow Kelly for ''Cover Girl.'' The result was electric. Not only was ''Make Way for Tomorrow'' highly entertaining, but Kelly's ''Alter Ego'' dance was a show-stopper as was Rita's trip down a winding clouded staircase in the film's title song with all the Cover Girls in brilliant Technicolor. The huge success for Kelly in a rival studio's hit film was an embarrassment for Louis B. Mayer. When Columbia's Harry Cohn beat Mayer for the rights to Kelly's Broadway hit, ''Pal Joey,'' Mayer nixed Cohn's request for Kelly to re-team with Rita again.
A fun number that I think gets pulled down because of the browns in the sets. Even Gene wears a brown suit. They don't separate from the environment as much as they should. Get that brown with three hots and a flop on the first thing smokin' outta town.
Seeing "Sgt. Bilko" dance is intriguing. Too bad they couldn't have worked Phil Silvers' musical talents into "You'll Never Get Rich" somehow. ("Betcha a million that Sarge can't dance or sing!")
2:40 So, cops back then were known for clubbing people for singing and dancing outside diners? Boy, they were strict in those days! 😉 I think this same flatfoot was stalking Gene Kelly years later, at the end of the 'Singing in the Rain" dance number.
He put on weight when he moved towards TV. I don't remember him hoofing as Bilko, but he had come into the biz as a musical-comedy performer, not as a comedic wisecracker like Bert Lahr. When Phil still had hair, he was a nifty mover who could follow in Gene's and Rita's time steps, but he did not take care of himself- unlike, say, Buddy Ebsen.
