Gene Kelly movies." "Anchors Aweigh" became one of the most successful films of 1945 and Kelly was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. In "Ziegfeld Follies" (1946)—which was produced in 1944 but not released until 1946—Kelly collaborated with Fred Astaire, for whom he had the greatest admiration, in the famous "The Babbitt and the Bromide" challenge dance routine. After Kelly returned to Hollywood in 1946, MGM had nothing planned and used him in a routine, black-and-white movie: "Living in a Big Way". The film was considered so weak that the studio asked Kelly to design and insert a series of
Fred Astaire opportunity to integrate Latin American dance idioms into his style (the first being with Ginger Rogers in "The Carioca" number from "Flying Down to Rio" (1933) and the second, again with Rogers, was the "Dengozo" dance from "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" (1939)), taking advantage of Hayworth's professional Latin dance pedigree. His second film with Hayworth, "You Were Never Lovelier" (1942), was equally successful and featured a duet to Kern's "I'm Old Fashioned," which became the centerpiece of Jerome Robbins's 1983 New York City Ballet tribute to Astaire. He next appeared opposite the seventeen-year-old Joan Leslie in the