An interesting and entertaining if flawed film which gives a good indication of Hollywood attitudes towards women at the time. Adapted and to some extent sanitised by Dalton Trumbo from a racy, hit novel of the day, it purports to tell the story of a "white collar girl" and the life choices she makes over marrying for love or money. There's an amusing little scene-setting history lesson prologue where we see a young and pretty, turn-of-the-century woman use her feminine wiles to trap her beau into marriage and a montage showing that if women want equal rights, such as the vote, they should expect a change in male attitudes towards them. So far, so deferential and then we're introduced to Ginger Rogers present-day title character, an attractive, sassy working girl who right away has to make a decision whether to run away to South America with the filthy-rich love of her life or make the more pragmatic choice to stay on in her native Philadelphia with a more loving, less selfish but more mundane young doctor.
The film then flashes back in time to flesh out the characters of the three principals and so inform her final decision at the end as we learn that one of the main themes of the film is class snobbery. Rogers' Kitty can have a luxurious life of ease with her dream man if only she will kow-tow to a little social refining otherwise her fiancé Wynn, played by Dennis Morgan will actually lose his inheritance. Her backstop is an earnest but dull budding doctor, James Craig, who can't promise her riches and comfort but instead a more modest existence where both will have to continue working. Matters are complicated further after she impulsively marries and then divorces the dreamboat only to find she's pregnant with his baby but which sadly dies in childbirth. She then years later suffers a revelatory chance encounter with her ex's new wife who has given him the son to continue the family name but from whom he now wants to run away and abscond with Kitty.
Director Sam Wood deftly handles the flashback-infused narrative, mixes in a little comedy and gets a fine performance from the Oscar-winning Rogers as the conflicted Kitty, especially when she gets her big rebellious scene in front of her new husband's fusty, censorious family. Personally though I think Kitty could do better than both of her suitors here and shouldn't have to feel that she has to settle down with either of them.
If you can get past the patronising sexual-politics of the day, no doubt strictly administered in deference to the prevailing Production Code, this is an amiable, old-fashioned melodrama which nevertheless mistakenly thinks it's being all modern and controversial with its focus on a poor shopgirl who is lucky to be pursued by two men, marries and divorces the rich one, has and then loses her baby and still gets the chance to escape her shop assistant life of drudgery and hard graft in the final scenes. Of course the film would fall apart in ridicule if the gender of the leads were changed but that film was never going to be made in 1940's Hollywood.
A big hit on first release and with the added lustre of Academy recognition, it probably thinks it's a "woman's picture" with serious messages to put across on a woman's role in a man's world and how the poor interact with the rich, but unfortunately it's let down by its too blatant anachronistic, clunky and cliched paternalist viewpoint.
The film then flashes back in time to flesh out the characters of the three principals and so inform her final decision at the end as we learn that one of the main themes of the film is class snobbery. Rogers' Kitty can have a luxurious life of ease with her dream man if only she will kow-tow to a little social refining otherwise her fiancé Wynn, played by Dennis Morgan will actually lose his inheritance. Her backstop is an earnest but dull budding doctor, James Craig, who can't promise her riches and comfort but instead a more modest existence where both will have to continue working. Matters are complicated further after she impulsively marries and then divorces the dreamboat only to find she's pregnant with his baby but which sadly dies in childbirth. She then years later suffers a revelatory chance encounter with her ex's new wife who has given him the son to continue the family name but from whom he now wants to run away and abscond with Kitty.
Director Sam Wood deftly handles the flashback-infused narrative, mixes in a little comedy and gets a fine performance from the Oscar-winning Rogers as the conflicted Kitty, especially when she gets her big rebellious scene in front of her new husband's fusty, censorious family. Personally though I think Kitty could do better than both of her suitors here and shouldn't have to feel that she has to settle down with either of them.
If you can get past the patronising sexual-politics of the day, no doubt strictly administered in deference to the prevailing Production Code, this is an amiable, old-fashioned melodrama which nevertheless mistakenly thinks it's being all modern and controversial with its focus on a poor shopgirl who is lucky to be pursued by two men, marries and divorces the rich one, has and then loses her baby and still gets the chance to escape her shop assistant life of drudgery and hard graft in the final scenes. Of course the film would fall apart in ridicule if the gender of the leads were changed but that film was never going to be made in 1940's Hollywood.
A big hit on first release and with the added lustre of Academy recognition, it probably thinks it's a "woman's picture" with serious messages to put across on a woman's role in a man's world and how the poor interact with the rich, but unfortunately it's let down by its too blatant anachronistic, clunky and cliched paternalist viewpoint.