The Astaire-Rogers partnership began to evaporate after Shall We Dance in 1937. They did make one other Sandrich-directed film, Carefree, before their subsequent films began to count as reunions, but you can feel that the studios no longer trust the magic. Both Astaire and Rogers had to some extent been yoked into the partnership by the RKO studio. Astaire simply didn’t want a steady partner, and Rogers wanted to be an independent star in non-musicals. After Shall We Dance, the narratives of Astaire’s films started to crowd out the song and dance moments. And most of the narratives were vacuous at best. Astaire also began to be paired with odd partners. Burns and Allen in Damsel in Distress may appear to be the oddest, but they work pretty well; Gracie was a good comic dancer and Astaire always liked the idea of being a comedian. (Joan Fontaine was so amateurish as a dancer in the film that she’s obscured by trees — and it isn’t even her anyway.) Astaire tried several different serious dance partners, with no intention of a long-term relationship. So his work with Paulette Goddard in Second Chorus and Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940 weren’t even experiments. They were what they were. Goddard didn’t know how to dance at all, and Powell was a solo artist with the accompanying ego; she wasn’t going to be led by anyone, especially not by her main competitor for hoofer stardom. Astaire’s partners in Holiday Inn — Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds — could hold their own, but they never appeared with Astaire again.
That changed for a short time with Rita Hayworth. It’s pretty much a consensus that Hayworth was the most accomplished ballroom partner Astaire had in his films. He said so himself, and he lobbied for her with his new studio, MGM. Her father had been a professional performer of Latin dance, and she was trained somewhat maniacally from an early age to be a star dancer in films. She could actually bring new steps to the table, since Astaire was not as versed in Latin dance as he was in European and African-American dance. In the two films they made together the dance moments are among the best in Astaire’s body of work, even if they are less well known and don’t have the romantic aura of the epic routines with Rogers.
You Were Never Lovelier, Astaire’s second and final film with Rita Hayworth, is both astoundingly stupid and visually gorgeous. It’s clear that Astaire paid little attention to the quality of his films’ stories compared to the music and dance — and from that perspective he was ill-served by the studios that kept bloating the narratives while delaying the musical numbers. The narrative of You Were Never Lovelier is vapid, William Seiter’s direction is borderline incompetent, the Jerome Kern-Johnny Mercer songs are insipid, and Rita Hayworth’s acting is no better than a ventriloquist dummy’s. It also has some of Astaire’s best dancing, a joyous chemistry with Hayworth that is as good as his best routines with Ginger Rogers.
The plot was disinterred from some ancient comic archeological site. A heavy father (Adolphe Menjou) — a wealthy hotelier in Buenos Aires — has decreed that his four beautiful daughters have to be married in order of age. An archaic absurd law? Check. But the one next in line (Maria, played by Hayworth) rejects the idea of marriage until she meets her ideal man, her “Lochinvar.” Idealistic and resistant young female? Check. Papa hires a gambler who is also a brilliant dancer (Robert Davis, played by Astaire) to woo the daughter and then to break her heart, so that on the rebound she’ll seek the solace of a worthy young gentleman of high social standing. Perky ironic outsider? Check. Papa does all the wooing himself, by proxy, sending Maria forests of orchids and writing moony love notes. Basic mistaken identity, father for lover? Check. Astaire needs the job, but he falls in love with Maria, while Maria, thinking he’s the wooer, falls in love with him. She ultimately doesn’t care about the deception because she feels their soul-mate chemistry in their dancing. So we have The Taming of the Shrew rotated through the dustiest mistaken identity farce imaginable — and both defanged. Robert is too nice and detached to be a Petrucchio, Maria is too sublimely romantic to be a shrew, and Papa turns into a luck-blessed sweetheart. Bergson writes that comedy requires at least a drop of realism. There’s not a drop to drip in You Were Never Lovelier.
A story like this could have been camp. It’s set in Buenos Aires for some reason (it is based on the script of an Argentinian film, and by 1942 the Germans were ensconced in Paris, Hollywood’s default fairyland of luxury), but you forget that completely after ten minutes. The Kern-Mercer songs evoke midwestern American sensibilities. The film is set nowhere — not a magical nowhere like a skyscraper penthouse or a Great White Nightclub, but in a studio space with no distinguishing characteristics. It’s just not knowing or committed enough to be camp. It’s basically the plot of an operetta, totally at odds with the spirit of Astaire’s best films. The script was put together by otherwise competent writers. William Seiter is not always a bad director. And yet, most of the film feels like it was cobbled together over a weekend. Amazing, really. How could a studio do that to stars like Astaire and Hayworth?
Well, it turns out that none of that matters because of the great dance numbers. Like Roberta, which was also directed by Seiter, the narrative and the stifling mise-en-scene take up a lot of time. The dances are delayed, and there aren’t that many of them. But when they come, they bring the joy.
The lumpiness of You Were Never Lovelier extends to technical aspects. On the plus side, Astaire’s acting is impressive — not something you can say about many of his earlier films. He has learned this part of his craft. And his voice — more precisely the recording and playback of his voice — is richer than usual, the dubbing much better aligned with other sonic values. (Astaire’s recordings have suffered a lot from poor microphone placement and relative volume problems.) Here he sings “Dearly Beloved” (accompanied by the Cugat orchestra) and you can sense why folks like Irving Berlin and Gershwin thought he was a really fine, expressive singer.
More surprising is that Astaire’s dancing was becoming more ambitious — or maybe the connection between the cameraman and the dancer was becoming more inspired. Astaire wasn’t imitating stage dancing any more, he was trusting the camera. His “audition” solo — which comes criminally late in the film — is wonderfully tight and relaxed at the same time.
Hayworth was no singer, so she was dubbed, as was standard studio practice. But in her case, there’s such an affective disconnect between the voice (that of Nan Wynn) and her miming of it that she seems like a ventriloquist’s dummy having Wynn’s voice piped through it. Compare Hayworth’s and Astaire’s verses in “I’m Old Fashioned.” Of course, that’s all trivial once they go into their dance.
Film historians note that Astaire’s style of ballroom dancing was falling out of fashion by the end of the 30s and the early 40s. Part of it had to do with the fact that the Astaire-Rogers steps could not be learned by mere mortals — even though the studio p.r. people kept printing material that pretended they could be. But more important was that most of the social dancing at that point was being done by young people, and they were powerfully influenced by Black dance styles introduced in the Harlem clubs and shows. Keeping up with the trends wasn’t just a matter of steps, but also a new feel. Astaire had the rhythmic chops and jazz sensibility, but he needed a partner who had them too, since most of the African-American social dance styles were partner dances. Hayworth was perfect for the task. (Rogers could have probably done it, too, maybe, but ironically Astaire needed a partner who was young enough to appear to be part of the new generation — beginning the unseemly (to me) trend in his career of always teaming with a woman far too young to be a credible romantic partner.) The tour de force of the project was the Astaire-Hayworth duet known as “The Shorty George.” That was the name of a real dance, named for a real person who was credited with inventing it in Harlem, and was among the popular dances in the social clubs and cafes.
The task for the dance routines in the film was to combine the high-class elegance that audiences still expected from the Astaire-Rogers days and the shimmies of the Lindy and swing generation. That part I believe they got right: the elegance comes from Latin ballroom, the youth from the jitterbug, synthesized as always with Astaire through tap. I like to think that movie audiences might have been a bit frustrated by the dance delays when they first watched the film, but when they went back for repeated viewings they just ignored the narrative. Especially in the second phase of his career, Astaire didn’t need the comic complications — they should have let him get straight to the happy endings.