Kitty Foyle
Kitty Foyle is a 1940 American drama film directed by Sam Wood and starring Ginger Rogers as a working-class Philadelphia woman torn between a wealthy Main Line (wealthy railroad suburb area of Philadelphia) publisher and a young doctor, based on Christopher Morley's best-selling 1939 novel of the same name.1 • 2 Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, it earned Rogers the Academy Award for Best Actress and received nominations for Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Sound Recording.1
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | December 27, 1940 (United States), RKO Radio Pictures; drama, black and white1 |
| Source | Based on the novel Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley (New York, 1939)1 |
| Principal cast | Ginger Rogers (Kitty Foyle), Dennis Morgan (Wyn Strafford), James Craig (Dr. Mark Eisen)1 |
| Key crew | Sam Wood (director), Dalton Trumbo (screenplay), Robert de Grasse (cinematography), Roy Webb (music)1 |
| Academy Awards | Rogers won Best Actress; the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Direction (Wood), and Best Sound Recording1 |
| Runtime | 105 minutes per the AFI Catalog; 108 minutes per MoMA and streaming listings1 • 3 |
| Contemporary ratings | 73% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (11 reviews); 6.9/10 on IMDb from about 4,600 users2 • 4 |
Spoilers
Plot
The film opens with a subtitle, The Natural History of a Woman, and a brief silent prologue set in 1900 depicting the lives of women and the emergence of the 1940 "white-collar girl."1 On a snowy evening, Kitty Foyle, by then an executive at Delphine Detaille's fashion house, must choose between marrying Mark Eisen, a sincere young doctor, and sailing away with Wyn Strafford, the wealthy Philadelphia society man she has loved for years and who has just re-entered her life.1
The story unfolds through flashbacks. As a girl, Kitty watches Philadelphia's society "Main Liners" and dreams of a Prince Charming, against her father's warning not to try to leave her class. Five years later she meets Wyn Strafford, who hires her at his fledgling magazine; the two fall in love, but Wyn cannot break from Main Line society. After her father's death, Kitty moves to New York, where she dates Mark while still longing for Wyn. Wyn finally comes for her and they marry, but his family tries to "remake" her and she rebels; the marriage is annulled. Back in New York she learns she is pregnant just as Wyn becomes engaged to a Philadelphia socialite, and her plan to raise the child alone ends when the infant dies in childbirth.1 In the present, Wyn, remarried but disillusioned, asks her to run away with him; her heart says yes but her head says no, and she chooses Eisen.5
Production and writing
RKO originally wanted William Wyler to direct, and the writing credits changed several times during production. Onscreen credits attribute the screenplay to Dalton Trumbo with additional dialogue by Donald Ogden Stewart, while studio records also credit Robert Ardrey with a contribution to the treatment; modern sources note that Stewart's screenplay was considered "unshootable" by RKO and rewritten by Trumbo.1 For Trumbo, whose later career was defined by his blacklisting, Kitty Foyle was his major breakthrough and brought an Academy Award nomination.6
RKO moved the release date up to qualify the film for the 1940 Academy Awards, and it also tried unsuccessfully to hire Dennis Morgan away from Warner Bros. for the role of Wyn Strafford.1 Production ran from August 26 to October 26, 1940.1
Reception and awards
Ginger Rogers, best known for her musicals with Fred Astaire, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, defeating Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and Bette Davis in The Letter at the 1941 ceremony; Sam Wood was nominated for Best Direction and the film for Best Picture and Best Sound Recording.1 • 2 A contemporary Harvard Crimson review credited the film with preserving "almost all its original insight and realism" from Morley's novel, including its treatment of social caste and childbirth out of wedlock, and praised Rogers's "finest female acting of the year."5 The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was cooler, rating the film 2.5 of 5 and finding that the "sharpness and contemporary significance of Mr. Morley's commentary are missing."2 George Orwell, reviewing for Time and Tide, called it "quite a lively film, but Miss Rogers deserves something better."2
The "white-collar girl" and its context
The film arrived at a moment when working women were a live public subject. In 1940, 25 percent of American women over the age of 16 were employed, compared with nearly 60 percent in 2010, and LIFE magazine built a photographic essay on the "White Collar Girl" around the film's release, using a Rogers look-alike from Philadelphia whose life mirrored Kitty's.7 The film historian J. E. Smyth of the University of Warwick places Kitty Foyle among a set of successful Hollywood films of the late 1930s, including A Woman Rebels and Gone With the Wind, that promoted a positive image of working women, and calls the film "the story of a 1930s working-class woman which became a career-transforming hit for star Ginger Rogers."8
Scholarship has read the ending in different ways. One account of Hollywood "women's films" describes Kitty's choice of the doctor over an extramarital affair as the conventional "right" choice, while arguing that the choice is better understood as choosing the man who truly loves her rather than a renunciation of desire.9 The film scholar Karina Longworth reads the ending more critically, saying Kitty "learns through horrible tragedy that she should actually just want to be a dutiful wife to a boring guy who will provide for her."10 A study of the romance film treats Kitty Foyle as balancing commentary on women's rights, professional aspirations, and romance within a conventional romance structure.11 MoMA's screening notes observe that the screenplay, written by two future blacklistees, Trumbo and Stewart, "maintains a sharp sense of class tensions," apparently escaping the attention of Wood, who later became one of Hollywood's most vocal supporters of the House Un-American Activities Committee.3
Later adaptations and availability
In 1941, Lux Radio Theater performed a version featuring the film's stars; television versions aired on NBC in 1950, ABC in 1954, and CBS in 1955, and the story ran as a daytime NBC serial in 1958.1 The film was released on home video by Turner Home Entertainment on February 3, 1998,12 and as of recent listings it can be rented or purchased digitally on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home in the United States.4
References
- Kitty Foyle (1940), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
- Kitty Foyle, Rotten Tomatoes
- Kitty Foyle. 1940. Directed by Sam Wood, MoMA
- Kitty Foyle streaming: where to watch movie online?, JustWatch
- "Kitty Foyle," The Harvard Crimson, March 3, 1941
- Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, "From B Films to A Films," Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical
- Life Before 'Having It All': Portrait of a Working Girl in 1940, TIME
- J. E. Smyth, "Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood's Working Women in the 1930s," Hollywood and the Great Depression
- Melodrama, Tearjerkers, and "Women's Films"
- Karina Longworth Recommends 5 Classic Movies That Teach The History of Women In Hollywood, Bustle
- "Both Glad and Sorry": Romance Cycles and Women's Politics, American Postfeminist Cinema
- Kitty Foyle (1940), Box Office and Financial Information, The Numbers
Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1940s
Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
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