Here is a suitably dull tableau. I wonder what Rogers thought of being cheek to jowl with this dude, played by Dennis Morgan.
I have to confess that I could not finish Kitty Foyle (1940), a Ginger Rogers vehicle which won her the only Academy Award of her career. It’s the story of impetuous Irish-American Kitty Foyle, young, beautiful, and charming. Told through an interesting extended flashback mechanism, it chronicles her lack of interest in the mores of the day, and her chronic poor decision-making when it comes to the man in her life, Wyn Stafford, the spawn of a high society family. He cannot break free from his family’s privileged hold, despite his belief that a man should run his own business, and when the Great Depression closes his magazine down, he folds as well – after charming Kitty, who is inevitably from a lower class, into accepting a marriage proposal.
At this point, disappointed in her poor decisions and the languid pace of the movie, I gave up, but my Arts Editor, with time on her hands from an injury, continued. She reports the poor decisions keep on coming: their marriage, the rejection of the marriage by his family, the consequences of his lack of spine, Kitty’s clinging to a rosey past. Only in the end does Kitty, after promising Wyn that she’ll sail to South America to start a new life with him, come to her senses. Does she stick around to tell Wyn she’s changed her mind? No. That’s disappointing, too. But maybe she’ll marry the right man in the end.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an awful movie. I’ll stick around for an awful movie, just out of morbid curiosity. Even long time readers may not realize that it’s a rare movie I won’t finish, but I didn’t finish this one. Rogers really is charming, and I can see how she had the potential to win the Academy Award. Although I must admit there’s something odd about her left eye, or perhaps eye socket.
Mr. Speakeasy Owner is the guy with the sassy bow-tie. Although I’ll admit Rogers is competitive, sporting that hat.
But I was bored, bored, bored! Sure, Wyn is handsome and charming, but was he smart and clever? There was little to go on, and I didn’t get a feeling for him. Kitty exhibits some amusing symptoms of … what? Mental illness? A coping mechanism? Unlike vampires, mirrors are, for her, too reflective, and I’ll let it go at that. You know who I’d like to know more about? The speakeasy owner! A speakeasy is jargon for an illicit bar, and all bars were illicit when this movie is at least partially set: the end of the Prohibition Era. This owner, oozing with character, is serving customers while listening to the election returns of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) first run for President, hoping against hope that FDR would lose, because FDR was a “wet” – someone in favor of ending Prohibition, and this would diminish, if not end, his speakeasy. His hysterics are quite the little drama as more and more returns come in on that fateful night.
But I couldn’t go on at some point. Maybe I lacked the insulin for it. Maybe there had to be more support for Foyle making the decisions she was making. Maybe her father’s shrieking of Judas Priest! in every other line of his dialog just irritated me.
But my Arts Editor suggests I missed nothing. And you, my reader, get this hybrid review for my troubles.
