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KITTY FOYLE
After spending the 1930's appearing in eight musicals with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers yearned to hang up her tap shoes and spread her dramatic wings and actually won an Oscar for Best Actress first time out of the gate for an underrated 1940 gem called Kitty Foyle.
This is Hollywood melodrama at its zenith...what appears to be a conventional love triangle on the surface is an actual valentine to the evolution of women as creatures of independence who didn't necessarily need a man to validate their existence but began to recognize the right guy if he came along.
The film opens with an amusing prologue briefly chronicling women's place in American society and how finding the right man was the number one priority for any women who had her head on straight. The film then switches to contemporary 1940 where we meet the title character, a working girl who is content with what appears to be her lot in life as a single independent woman until two different men from her past reappear.
Wyn (Dennis Morgan) is a an important magazine editor from an extremely wealthy family who hires Kitty to be his secretary but eventually falls for her. However, family pressure from his side force them apart and Kitty eventually meets cute with a handsome doctor (James Craig) who treats Kitty like a queen.
This lush and well-mounted film has all the classic elements of movie melodrama...the star-crossed couple being kept apart because of difference in social class and the woman feeling affection for one man that doesn't match her passion for the other and you know as the story progresses, that one of these poor souls is going to be left out in the cold and it's a shame because Dalton Trumbo's surprisingly adult screenplay presents us with three very likable characters, especially our heroine, a contemporary movie heroine unlike any we had seen up to this point.
Many were surprised when Rogers won the Best Actress Oscar and it is a terrific performance that allows her to run the gamut of emotions, but was it really better than Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story? Morgan and Craig are charming leading men and I also loved Gladys Cooper as Wyn's snobby mother. For fans of the genre, this one is hard to beat.
After spending the 1930's appearing in eight musicals with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers yearned to hang up her tap shoes and spread her dramatic wings and actually won an Oscar for Best Actress first time out of the gate for an underrated 1940 gem called Kitty Foyle.
This is Hollywood melodrama at its zenith...what appears to be a conventional love triangle on the surface is an actual valentine to the evolution of women as creatures of independence who didn't necessarily need a man to validate their existence but began to recognize the right guy if he came along.
The film opens with an amusing prologue briefly chronicling women's place in American society and how finding the right man was the number one priority for any women who had her head on straight. The film then switches to contemporary 1940 where we meet the title character, a working girl who is content with what appears to be her lot in life as a single independent woman until two different men from her past reappear.
Wyn (Dennis Morgan) is a an important magazine editor from an extremely wealthy family who hires Kitty to be his secretary but eventually falls for her. However, family pressure from his side force them apart and Kitty eventually meets cute with a handsome doctor (James Craig) who treats Kitty like a queen.
This lush and well-mounted film has all the classic elements of movie melodrama...the star-crossed couple being kept apart because of difference in social class and the woman feeling affection for one man that doesn't match her passion for the other and you know as the story progresses, that one of these poor souls is going to be left out in the cold and it's a shame because Dalton Trumbo's surprisingly adult screenplay presents us with three very likable characters, especially our heroine, a contemporary movie heroine unlike any we had seen up to this point.
Many were surprised when Rogers won the Best Actress Oscar and it is a terrific performance that allows her to run the gamut of emotions, but was it really better than Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story? Morgan and Craig are charming leading men and I also loved Gladys Cooper as Wyn's snobby mother. For fans of the genre, this one is hard to beat.