YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 217, 20 August 1943, Page 21

YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER

(Columbia)

[F the title refers to Rita Hayworth I would have to disagree. She was lovelier in the technicolour hues of Blood and Sand than she is in this film.

But she is still lovely enough to cause a traffic jam if she ever walked down a Wellington street while the Marines were about. The title can’t refer to Fred Astaire either, because whatever you might call Mr. Astaire, you would never call him lovely. Nice-ugly would be more like it. They may, of course, be talking about his dancing, in which case I suppose it should be You Were Never Livelier. Even then, I think, he has been a good deal livelier in several of his other pictures, though he still uses his two feet to better advantage than any other dancer on the screen. On the whole, I think it’s just a film title: one of those labels they put on a movie when they can’t think of anything better-like the kind of plot they put in musical shows in general, and rather like the plot they have put in this musical show in particular. For some unknown reason five authors laboured over it, which seems to me to be something that Mr. Roosevelt’s Manpower Office might investigate. It shouldn’t take five authors to turn out a story about an Argentine hotel magnate (Adolphe Menjou), who insists that his three daughters must get married in order of seniority. Unfortunately for the two younger love-sick girls, their elder sister (Rita Hayworth), is reputed to be a trifle frigid because she fell in love with the poetic conception of Young Lochinvar at the age of 16, and nobody since has measured up to him, Fond father lays a trap for her affections; both he and Fred Astaire fall into it; and there is a good deal of romantic and not particularly amusing milling around before the curtain falls on the accustomed finale. Still, it is, after all, a musical. show, which means that the story is primarily something for Astaire and Miss Hayworth to dance and occasionally sing through, and this they do to the accompaniment of Xavier Cugat’s rhumba band and the evident satisfaction of most of their fans (among whom, with some critical reservations, I am pleased to be numbered).