Less convincing, perhaps, was "I'm Old-Fashioned," Robbins's extended riff on a Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth dance from "You Were Never Lovelier".
A performance with the orchestra in the 1942 film "You Were Never Lovelier," starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, led to roles in about a dozen other films, including "Week-End at the Waldorf" in 1945 and "Love Laughs at Andy Hardy" in 1946.
And yet something does seep through, as if to show that fate is not unchangeably malign: a channel-flipping Charlie stumbles on "You Were Never Lovelier," with Rita Hayworth smiling at Fred Astaire, and nearly smiles himself.
Also, don't forget Vincente Minnelli's "Designing Woman," starring Lauren Bacall as the designer and Gregory Peck as the sportswriter she falls for, also from 1957 (and I think Bacall was never lovelier than she is there).
At the heart of her exploration are three inter-twined life stories: that of Margaret Mitchell, the genteel, one-book wonder from Atlanta, David O Selznick, the pushy immigrant producer who passed in Hollywood as an intellectual, and Vivien Leigh, at this point not mad and never lovelier.
The title ultimately refers not to the New Year's Eve party at which its two misfit characters (played by a never-lovelier Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant) fall inconveniently in love, but the personal escape they find in each other; it's the most romantic thing you can watch this Christmas.
In the case of Rose Poivrée (introduced in 2000), that would be rose absolute, never a lovely scent and certainly not by today's standards.
Not all the experiments work: the retro ballad I Never is lovely, but the Noël-Coward-meets-Johnny-Cash feel of Ripcord is less so.
And never more lovely than during our summers in Tarusa, some 140 kilometers, or not quite 90 miles, south of Moscow, a langorous old town favored by painters, writers and musicians.
But never a lovely so real".
