Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman

Every once in a while there is a classic, well-reviewed movie that I, in spite of being a film buff, have never seen. And in an even greater while, it turns out that I don’t like it. Wuthering Heights was such a film. This is another. I’m not sure if they used that complete title above, which was the title of the book, but it’s about an ordinary working girl, a “white collar” girl. She falls for a rich guy from the Philadelphia 400, the social elite, and he loves her, too, but he is talentless, clueless, and completely under the control of his family. She marries him just long enough to get knocked up, sees the folly of it, and the marriage is annulled. Oops! But the baby miscarries. (In the book she had an abortion, way beyond the bounds of anything a nice girl would do in that era.) Then she considers taking up with him again, more or less as his mistress, but in the end does the “right” thing by marrying the other guy who loves her, a doctor. Problem for me: I hated the damn doctor. On their first date he “tests” her, for some stupid reason I can’t recall, more or less forcing her to play cards for three hours in her apartment instead of taking her out to dinner like he promised. For some reason she tolerates this. At the same time her two long-suffering roommates huddle in the bathroom to give her space. What a friggin’ jerk! He finds all this amusing, and for reasons I will never know, Kitty does not kick him in the balls, and then in the ass on his way out the door. I found this story to be just awful. Ginger Rogers won the Oscar for this role, beating Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. Sorry Ginger, I love you, but Kate was better.