Kitty Foyle

SYNOPSIS

Ginger Rogers won her best actress Oscar for her performance in this artificial melodrama, which at least proved that she had a career outside her partnership with the great Fred Astaire. What Rogers was particularly good at was portraying the common, not to say vulgar, shop girl, and that, in Christopher Morley's once-fashionable novel, is what Kitty Foyle is: a shop girl who can't make up her mind which man to choose. Unfortunately, when this film was made, all the decent Hollywood leading men had gone off to war, making her choice exceedingly dull: doctor James Craig or playboy Dennis Morgan? Who cares? Still, there's interesting support from veteran Eduardo Ciannelli as a speakeasy owner and from Gladys Cooper as the playboy's snobby mum, but this is hard going today, even for devout Ginger fans.