Kitty Foyle (film)

Infobox Film
name = Kitty Foyle


image_size= 175px
caption= original movie poster
director = Sam Wood
producer = David Hempstead
Harry E. Edington
writer = Dalton Trumbo
Donald Ogden Stewart
starring = Ginger Rogers
Dennis Morgan
James Craig
music = Roy Webb
cinematography = Robert De Grasse
distributor = RKO Radio Pictures
released = December 27, 1940
runtime = 108 min.
country = flagicon|United States United States
language = English
amg_id = 1:27558
imdb_id = 0032671|

"Kitty Foyle", subtitled "The Natural History of a Woman", is a fy|1940 film starring Ginger Rogers, Dennis Morgan, James Craig, Ernest Cossart and Gladys Cooper.

Production

Katharine Hepburn was offered the title role but turned it down.

The film was adapted by Dalton Trumbo and Donald Ogden Stewart, from the eponymous 1939 novel by Christopher Morley. It was directed by Sam Wood.

Critical reception

It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. Ginger Rogers won for Best Actress.

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. [cite journal | last = Asheim | first = Lester | title = From Book to Film: Mass Appeals | journal = "Hollywood Quarterly" | volume = 5 | issue = 4 | date = Summer 1951 | issn = 1549-0076 | id = oclc|56138080 | pages = 341 ]

Rogers' dress became a popular style, taking the name of the film.

The film had a national re-release in 1955.

References