You Were Never Lovelier

Columbia's second teaming of Astaire and Hayworth is a vast improvement on You'll Never Get Rich, even though the script is merely adequate, and it keeps threatening to let Xavier Cugat and his Latin rhythms run riot (it doesn't). Astaire plays a Broadway hoofer stranded in Buenos Aires after a bad day at the races. His efforts to secure an engagement at the plushy Hotel Acuna (his insolently playful audition piece is a delight) founder on the temperamental preoccupation of the millionaire proprietor (Menjou), but he subsequently finds himself involved in the latter's devious plot to stoke fires in his supposedly cold-fish daughter (Hayworth). Naturally, both Astaire and Hayworth get caught up in more than mere masquerade; and with love blooming to dreamily romantic Jerome Kern standards (the title song, 'I'm Old-Fashioned', 'Dearly Beloved'), the musical sequences are marvellous, especially an ecstatic dance that whisks all over a moonlit garden.