Kitty Foyle (film)
Encyclopedia
Kitty Foyle, subtitled The Natural History of a Woman, is a 1940 film starring Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....

, Dennis Morgan
Dennis Morgan
Dennis Morgan was an American actor-singer. Born as Earl Stanley Morner, he used the acting pseudonym Richard Stanley before adopting his professional name....

, James Craig
James Craig (actor)
James Craig was an American actor.After graduating from the Rice Institute, Craig began appearing in films in 1937, most often in B-movies and serials...

, Ernest Cossart
Ernest Cossart
Ernest Cossart was a British-born Hollywood actor. Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, his real name was Emil von Holst. He was the brother of composer Gustav Holst. His daughter was the actress Valeria Cossart....

 and Gladys Cooper
Gladys Cooper
Dame Gladys Constance Cooper, DBE was an English actress whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television....

.

Plot

Kitty Foyle (Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....

), a saleswoman for Delphine Detaille (Odette Myrtil
Odette Myrtil
Odette Myrtil was an American actress, singer, and violinist of French birth. She began her career as a violinist on the vaudeville stage in Paris at the age of 14. She expanded out into acting and singing, and had her first major success at the age of 18 on the London stage in the 1916 musical...

), faces a life-changing decision: marry doctor Mark Eisen (James Craig
James Craig (actor)
James Craig was an American actor.After graduating from the Rice Institute, Craig began appearing in films in 1937, most often in B-movies and serials...

), or run away to South America with the man she has been in love with for years, the already-married Wyn Strafford (Dennis Morgan
Dennis Morgan
Dennis Morgan was an American actor-singer. Born as Earl Stanley Morner, he used the acting pseudonym Richard Stanley before adopting his professional name....

). As she wrestles with her decision, the film flashes back
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...

 to her youth in Philadelphia.

As a teenager, Kitty gawks at the city's elite "Main Liners" as they attend their annual Assembly ball. Her father (Ernest Cossart
Ernest Cossart
Ernest Cossart was a British-born Hollywood actor. Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, his real name was Emil von Holst. He was the brother of composer Gustav Holst. His daughter was the actress Valeria Cossart....

) warns her against getting carried away with her fantasies. Ironically, Kitty meets the embodiment of her dreams in an acquaintance of his: Wynnewood Strafford VI. Wyn offers her a secretarial job at his fledgling magazine. The two fall deeply in love, but when the magazine folds, he does not have the will to defy his social class's strictures by proposing to a woman so far below him socially.

With the death of her father and no prospect of marriage with Wyn, Kitty goes to work in New York for Delphine. One day, she presses the fire alarm button by mistake at Delphine's fashion store. She pretends to faint to cover her blunder, and is attended to by Mark. Mark, aware she is faking it, playfully blackmails her into a first date.

Wyn finally breaks down and comes for Kitty. The two wed, but agree that the only way the marriage can work is if they do not live in Philadelphia. When he introduces her to his family, she gets a chilly reception. She also learns that Wyn would be disinherited and left penniless if he does not remain in Philadelphia and work in the family banking business. She realizes that, though Wyn is willing to try, he is not strong enough to deal with poverty. She walks out and they are divorced.

Kitty returns to New York, where she learns that she is pregnant. When Wyn arranges to meet her, her hopes for a reconciliation are raised, only to be dashed when she sees a newspaper announcement of Wyn's engagement to someone of his own class. She leaves without seeing him. She receives a further blow when the baby dies at birth.

Several years later, Kitty reluctantly agrees to open a Philadelphia branch store for her friend Delphine. By chance, she waits on Wyn's wife and meets their son. She takes the opportunity to entrust the secret return of a family heirloom ring to the boy.

The film returns to the beginning. She decides to marry Mark.

Cast

  • Ginger Rogers
    Ginger Rogers
    Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....

     as Kitty Foyle
  • Dennis Morgan
    Dennis Morgan
    Dennis Morgan was an American actor-singer. Born as Earl Stanley Morner, he used the acting pseudonym Richard Stanley before adopting his professional name....

     as Wynnewood 'Wyn' Strafford VI
  • James Craig
    James Craig (actor)
    James Craig was an American actor.After graduating from the Rice Institute, Craig began appearing in films in 1937, most often in B-movies and serials...

     as Dr. Mark Eisen
  • Eduardo Ciannelli
    Eduardo Ciannelli
    Eduardo Ciannelli, sometimes credited as Edward Ciannelli, , was an Italian baritone and character actor with a long career in American films, mostly playing gangsters and criminals.-Early life:...

     as Giono (as Edward Ciannelli)
  • Ernest Cossart
    Ernest Cossart
    Ernest Cossart was a British-born Hollywood actor. Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, his real name was Emil von Holst. He was the brother of composer Gustav Holst. His daughter was the actress Valeria Cossart....

     as Pop
  • Gladys Cooper
    Gladys Cooper
    Dame Gladys Constance Cooper, DBE was an English actress whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television....

     as Mrs. Strafford
  • Odette Myrtil
    Odette Myrtil
    Odette Myrtil was an American actress, singer, and violinist of French birth. She began her career as a violinist on the vaudeville stage in Paris at the age of 14. She expanded out into acting and singing, and had her first major success at the age of 18 on the London stage in the 1916 musical...

     as Delphine Detaille
  • Mary Treen
    Mary Treen
    -Selected filmography:-External links:...

     as Pat
  • K. T. Stevens
    K. T. Stevens
    K. T. Stevens , born Gloria Wood in Los Angeles, California, was an American film actress. The daughter of director Sam Wood, Stevens made her first film appearance when she was just two years old in her father's second 1921 silent film, Peck's Bad Boy. As an adult, she changed her name to...

     as Molly (as Katharine Stevens)
  • Walter Kingsford
    Walter Kingsford
    Walter Kingsford was a British stage, film and television actor born in Redhill, Surrey, England. He was born Walter Pearce and had several sisters...

     as Mr. Kennett
  • Cecil Cunningham
    Cecil Cunningham
    Cecil Cunningham was an American film and stage actress. She appeared in more than 80 movies between 1929 and 1946...

     as Grandmother
  • Nella Walker as Aunt Jessica
  • Edward Fielding as Uncle Edgar
  • Kay Linaker
    Kay Linaker
    Mary Katherine Linaker, known professionally as "Kay Linaker", "Kate Phillips", and "Kay Linaker-Phillips" was an American actress and screenwriter, who appeared in many B movies during the 1930s and 1940s, most notably Kitty Foyle...

     as Wyn's Wife
  • Richard Nichols as Wyn's Boy

Production

Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies...

 was offered the title role but turned it down.

The film was adapted by Dalton Trumbo
Dalton Trumbo
James Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter and novelist, and one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry...

 and Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart was an American author and screenwriter.-Life:His hometown was Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University, where he became a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity , in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I.After the war he started to write and found...

, from the eponymous 1939 novel
Kitty Foyle (novel)
Kitty Foyle, subtitled The Natural History of a Woman, is a 1939 novel by Christopher Morley. A bestseller in 1939 and 1940, it was adapted as a popular 1940 film....

 by Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures.-Biography:Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania...

. It was directed by Sam Wood
Sam Wood
Samuel Grosvenor "Sam" Wood was an American film director, and producer, who was best known for directing such Hollywood hits as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Pride of the Yankees...

.

Critical reception

It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Picture
The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...

 and the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
The Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay is one of the Academy Awards, the most prominent film awards in the United States. It is awarded each year to the writer of a screenplay adapted from another source...

. Ginger Rogers won for Best Actress
Academy Award for Best Actress
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

. It was also nominated for Best Director (Sam Wood) and Best Sound (John Aalberg).

In 1951, in a series of articles examining film adaptation, Lester Asheim, notes that some films "reproduce the costume, housing, and appearance of the novel's prototypes without softening or heightening," but that Kitty Foyle shows the more typical "glamorizing" process of film adaptation:

Kitty Foyle is typical, in every aspect of the adaptation, of the daydream character of film characterization. The glamorizing process carries through from the casting of Ginger Rogers and the Hollywood wardrobe provided her, to such added incidents as Wyn renting an entire nightclub for a night.... While the film retains a scene or two of Kitty's crowded apartment shared with two other girls, such scenes are played for comedy and no attempt is made to convey the day-to-day monotony and routine of the working girl.


Rogers' dress became a popular style
Kitty Foyle (dress)
A Kitty Foyle is a dress style of the 1940s characterized by a dark fabric and contrasting light collar and cuffs, typically of navy blue and white. The shape of the dress is a shirtwaist with short or elbow-length sleeves...

, taking the name of the film.

The film had a national re-release in 1955.

Adaptations to Other Media

Kitty Foyle was adapted as a radio play on the May 25, 1941 episode of Lux Radio Theater
Lux Radio Theater
Lux Radio Theater, a long-run classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network ; CBS and NBC . Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences...

 with Ginger Rogers reprising her role. Rogers also starred in the April 6, 1946 adaptation heard on Academy Award Theater
Academy Award Theater
Academy Award was a CBS radio anthology series which presented 30-minute adaptations of plays, novels or films.Rather than adaptations of Oscar-winning films, as the title implied, the series offered "Hollywood's finest, the great picture plays, the great actors and actresses, techniques and...

. On March 3, 1947 it was produced for The Screen Guild Theater
The Screen Guild Theater
The Screen Guild Theater was a popular radio anthology series during the Golden Age of Radio, broadcast from 1939 until 1952, with leading Hollywood actors performing in adaptations of popular motion pictures such as Going My Way and The Postman Always Rings Twice.The show had a long run, lasting...

, starring Olivia de Havilland
Olivia de Havilland
Olivia Mary de Havilland is a British American film and stage actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946 and 1949. She is the elder sister of actress Joan Fontaine. The sisters are among the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s.-Early life:Olivia de Havilland...

.

Kitty Foyle was also a TV soap opera starring Kathleen Murray as Kitty Foyle
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