"Kitty Foyle"

Standard Hollywood practice would have been to convert "Kitty Foyle," Christopher Morley's "natural history of a woman," into an innocuous boy-meets-girl romance. The verboten questions of social caste and childbirth out of wedlock might have been replaced by sticky sentimentality and irrelevant filler scenes. Ginger Rogers could have devoted her talents to singing and dancing rather than to acting. But, with unusual regard for Morley's novel, the producers of "Kitty Foyle" brought this cross section of a white collar girl's emotions to the screen with almost all its original insight and realism.

Ginger Rogers clinched her stardom (and won a well-deserved Oscar) by the finest female acting of the year in her role of a spirited Irish girl from the far side of the tracks in Philadelphia. Madly in love with a Quaker aristocrat, Kitty finds that they can be happy anywhere except in the City of Brotherly Love--but the ties of birth and position hold her husband home and create a barrier between them. So Kitty goes out on her own, has a divorce and a baby, meets young doctor James Craig who offers her marriage and security. Then Wynn Stratford VI, remarried but disillusioned, asks her to come back to him. Her heart says "yes" but her head says "no," and the stream of consciousness technique by which the story is told in the first person gives surprisingly strong dramatic punch to this dilemma. This nigh-to-perfect filming of a fine novel should not be missed, but don't go at all unless you can come in at the beginning. The picture is so well constructed that missing even a few of the opening scenes spoils the whole effect.