Kitty Foyle

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Audience Member Ginger Rogers in her Academy Award winning performance. Very good. Dating for it’s time. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/28/21 Full Review steve d Rodgers is great and finally gets her due as the fantastic actress she was. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Audience Member One could be forgiven for forgetting that Ginger Rogers triumphed over Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Bette Davis in The Letter (1940) at the 1941 Academy Awards. She is best known for her work with Fred Astaire in classics like Top Hat (1935) but for a brief period of time she attempted to get serious with films like Stage Door (1937) and this film was considered weighty enough to earn her awards attention. I can't say that she is my favorite actress of this era but I can see why she appeals to some and she does get some nice moments to showcase her skills in this film. It is typical woman's picture fare that fails to interact with the supposed commentary it makes on class but it will entertain most female audiences. Working class woman Kitty Foyle, Ginger Rogers, has been raised in the poorer area of Philadelphia but has a fascination with the wealthy ‘Main Liners' that concerns her cynical but caring father, Ernest Cossart. Her life changes when the main liner Wyn Strafford, Dennis Morgan, comes to her house and agrees to employ her at his new newspaper where they slowly fall in love working side by side. The newspaper fails and the two break up over class differences but while working as a perfume saleswoman in New York City she meets Doctor Mark Eisen, James Craig, after a mishap at work. When Strafford returns to her they impulsively marry but after first meeting his snooty family she realizes she will never fit in with them and abandons him with them later divorcing one another. She is left pregnant when she returns to New York City and while Strafford attempts to reconcile with her and offers to run away from his new wife and child with her she chooses to marry the more reliable Eisen. Where the film lost me is in the fact that it is supposedly about the struggle of being a lower class person attempting to move beyond your station of birth in life it is so clearly uninterested in presenting it's characters as anything other than glamorous. We get a lot of Foyle talking about how hard it is to be poor but we never really see her miserable circumstances as she is always dressed immaculately and the apartment that she shares with a large amount of other girls looks fun instead of being overcrowded and uncomfortable. As soon as she meets Strafford we only ever see her in glamorous night clubs or the fancy estate that his family lives at and all of her concerns are left behind. Furthermore her other option in the film is a relatively wealthy man and it is not as though she is choosing between living in squalor and the wealthiest man in the world. Were the film to give us something of Rogers looking bedraggled, as a working class woman of the 1940s would have looked, or dealing with the consequences of not having money her talk of being lower class would have hit with more impact. The two romances in the film are also lacking in passion as the dialogue the actors are provided with seems so overwritten and lifeless that it is hard to care for the characters. Foyle and Strafford have one of those movie romances when they are constantly mushy and even their arguments feature them happily glimmering at one another before eventually agreeing that they were both wronging and laughing it all away. It was sad to watch a plucky, strong heroine fall in love with such a spineless sap as the primary attraction of Strafford seemed to be that he was wealthy and could take her to exciting locations. Foyle herself becomes boring when she is around him as she is all dopey smiles and excited whisperings. Eisen would seem to offer slightly more in the way of interest as he is involved in a classic meet cute set up that sounds positively delightful on paper. In execution it is less than thrilling with him seeming more like a father figure than a boyfriend to our heroine and her eventual settling for him lacking the melancholy that it should have. This is not to say that Rogers is not good at certain points because she did hit me emotionally during one scene in which she interacts with Strafford's child and Rogers is able to convey all of the hurt and unresolved feelings in her character's eyes. Other times the film relies a little too much on her quick wit and rather creepy little smile that is presumably meant to make her look cute. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member It’s not just that the story is so badly dated. Or that I’ve never found Ginger an especially appealing screen presence. The story is just really interesting. It’s told in disjointed and cutesy segments. From the useless opening scenes about early 20th century women, its on the wrong and uninteresting track. We get a lot of pretty closeups of Ginger instead of anything really engaging. Trendy for the early 40’s. Oscar to Ginger? Seriously? When classics that stand up to time with relatable performances like Rebecca, The Philadelphia Story and The Letter were there? Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 07/28/19 Full Review Audience Member Quite a modern view, given when it was made, yet I'm fascinated by comparing the book and the movie. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member A wonderful story of a young woman caught between two worlds, what she wants and what she needs. Ginger Rogers gives an outstanding performance of a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks that stands up to society and makes her way on her own. It is incredibly forward thinking for the time period and yet it deals with struggles that seem to be timeless... Kitty's Toil--Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 'KITTY FOYLE' as the hard-working, stubborn Irish lass who learns more than a few lessons about life, love and the social strata in this affecting melodrama... 'Kitty Foyle': THE NATURAL HISTORY OF A WOMAN!! Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Kitty Foyle

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