“Kitty Foyle” A Triumph For Ginger Rogers

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21959, 10 May 1941, Page 5

“Kitty Foyle” A Triumph For Ginger Rogers

The film in which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for last year, “Kitty Foyle,” will soon be released in New Zealand. It is the fifth consecutive film which she has made with no dancing except that which the plot may require. The girl whose name was once always associated with dancing pictures has now travelled so far along the road as a dramatic actress that she can be judged to have done the best dramatic work in America for 12 months. Ginger Rogers lives the life of the heroine of Christopher Morley’s novel in flash-back style. The IrishAmerican girl is seen at 15, 18, 21 and 26 years of age. She is excellently cast as a Philadelphia “white collar” girl who falls in love with the heir of a rich and supercilious family, realises immediately after their marriage that though their affection is mutual she would never fit into the snobbish background that he cannot renounce, parts from him and prepares to bear his child alone, reads with dismay of his remarriage, accidentally . meets his wife, a womdn of exactly his own class, and their son, and then one night when she has just consented to marry a gauche but reliable young doctor, goes off to South America with her lover, who though still married has at last torn himself away from his environment and asked her to do what she has longed for five years to do, to live with him their own life. This is an unconventional career, but the plot is logical and the emotions of the characters are so lifelike, and their actions so like those of people everyone knows, that the story rings true. Ginger Rogers is well supported, the cast being headed by Dennis Morgan as her lover, and one can easily sympathise with Kitty Foyle in her affection for him, though she misjudges him favourably, and her unhesitating choice of him even after his marriage to another woman—if a girl's love is consistent nothing else about her character seems inconsistent. The Kitty Foyle of the book was remarkable for her epigramatic conversation. In the film, too, she has some of this wit, but the film is not over-charged with wisecracks. The colour of Miss Roger’s hair has become a subject of interest in recent months. In “Kitty Foyle” it is very dark, but not the jet black with which she replaced in the .previous two films the extreme blonde of earlier pictures. This, it is said, is her natural colour.