Kitty Foyle

And not just because my name is kit. The chemistry between Ginger Rogers and Dennis Morgan is unlike any other screen romance I've ever seen. Total smolder city. Rogers mixes idealism and cynicism has stunningly as it can be done. Morgan nicely tightropes between strength and fecklessness. The supporting cast, in entirety, is magnificent. Just a tremendous movie. In fact, I just got inspiration -- following the recording of this review -- I will change my IMDB handle to kittyfoyle.

Enjoyed this film starring Ginger Rogers, (Katherine "Kitty" Foyle) playing the role of a young girl who works for a magazine in Philadelphia and was hired by a man during the great depression. This man was Wyn Strafford, (Dennis Morgan) who is very good looking and started to fall in love with her. Kitty loses her job and finds other work selling cosmetics and perfumes and this couple do not see each other for over a year until Kitty meets up with Wyn Strafford who comes from a very wealthy family and they get married. Things quickly change in their lives and because Kitty was a girl who came from a rather poor Irish family this created a problem for the stiff shirts of Philadelphia. There are many flashbacks in this story and there is a great deal to this film which will hold your interest right to the very end. Excellent film and a wonderful old film to enjoy with old songs from the past.

The movie opens with a young woman, Kitty Foyle, assisting her doctor-sweetheart in delivering a child in a ramshackle tenement. They are a very compassionate pair. Afterwards he proposes marriage, she accepts and agrees meet him at midnight to be immediately married by an all-night Justice of the Peace. But while packing back at her hotel room, in pops an old flame, a wealthy married man who Kitty still desperately loves. He announces he has left his family and is leaving that night at midnight for South America. He still loves her, and wants her to join him. Oh, Kitty, what to do?

The remainder of the film is a series of flashbacks prompted by Kitty's image of herself in the mirror (i.e., her conscience) as it attempts to direct Kitty to the proper decision. Starting with her teenage years growing up working-class Irish in 1920s Philadelphia we learn how poor Kitty met and fell in love with a rich Mainline aristocat, and got herself in such a predicament.

Ms. Rogers won best actress for her role as Kitty, but the rest of the cast is no less deserving. A real movie treat.

A vastly underrated actress outside the realm of song & dance, Ginger Rogers finally scored w/a best actress Oscar for her performance here. Rogers plays a working class perfume hawker torn between the blue blooded beau from back home in Philly & a struggling doctor she meets in New York. A good role in a flawed film, I chuck this one to the director since the script is on point from Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus/The Brave One) but the strength of Rogers turn is let down on an over reliance on flashbacks.

"Kitty Foyle" is a lush, expertly done example of the "women's films" that were popular in the 1940's and are so rare today. The rather simplistic plot focuses on Kitty's choice of sharing her life with either a married scion of a mainline family or an impoverished doctor, both of whom love her. Pure soap opera, but lovingly done, especially those luminous closeups. The device of having Kitty talk to her own conscience is rather hokey, but does provide for an interesting touch. The spark in the production is the admirably natural but spirited performance of Ginger Rogers in the title role. She perfectly fits the role of a working girl surviving on her wits and gumption, and really shines when telling off her rich, patronizing in-laws. See it for her, and for a somewhat dated but still intriguing view of the travails of independent women during the first half of the 20th century.