I'm Old Fashioned, Robbins’ delightful tribute to Fred Astaire, is America at the height of its love affair with the silver screen.
Morton Gould composed scores for a wide variety of films, Broadway shows, and television. For his commissioned score, for Jerome Robbins’ I’m Old Fashioned, Gould based the music on a theme from Jerome Kern’s song of the same name. The song, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, was used in a dance segment of the film You Were Never Lovelier, and to enhance the cinematically glamorous waltzes of the choreography, Robbins used this scene as a backdrop for his ballet. In the film, Rita Hayworth portrays Maria Acuňa, a daughter of a rich Argentine man, and Fred Astaire plays an unemployed dancer who falls for her. When Robbins wrote to Astaire to tell him that the dance sequence from the film had inspired him to choreograph a ballet, Astaire wrote back, “I’m honored that you want to do what you suggest.”
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