Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
Something a little different for Friday Night @ The Flicks – we’re focusing on the work of one actress – Ginger Rogers, thanks to the request of Jennie Jones – do buy her debut novel The House on Burra Burra Lane, due out on June 1.
The brief from Jennie was that it was to be Ginger, sans Fred, to focus on her career without her light stepping partner.
Too easy – especially when you look at such a solid body of work.
Part of the request was to look at the award-winning musical comedy Stage Door, which like The Women from last week is choc full of Hollywood’s finest leading ladies, including Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Ann Miller.
Released two years prior to The Women, Stage Door was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, the story centres on a group of Broadway hopeful who share an apartment, not knowing that one of their number (Hepburn) is a wealthy socialite who wants to make it on her own instead of on family connections. Rogers plays the wise-mouth Jean Maitland who has to fend off some unwanted advances as well as fight for roles.
But two films with a romantic theme that are worth touching on in the context of this blog, really give full scope to Ginger’s acting chops – the first is Vivacious Lady (1939) co-starring Jimmy Stewart who plays an earnest young college profession who meets and marries a nightclub singer in a whirlwind romance.
Vivacious Lady is light hearted romp, played for laughs as the film explores the clash of cultures as the very posh professor’s family learns to deal with the eponymous Lady with the aforementioned attribute.
And, as you can expect with rom-coms, our hero and heroine live happily ever after.
Trivia Alert: Since Ginger’s legs were insured for $500,000 they were strapped with boards and padded for protection during the fight scene.
Just one year later, Ginge stars in Kitty Foyle, giving a performance that was rightly recognised with an Oscar for Best Actress.
The plotline on the surface, appears to be a carbon copy of Vivacious Lady. A man from the upper echelons of society falls for a girl who lives on the wrong side of the tracks.
However this isn’t played for laughs. In a part originally offered to Katharine Hepburn, Ginger makes it her own by giving Kitty Foyle a depth of humanity and a capacity to feel as well as a strength of character to overcome and eventually find love.
Giving no spoilers away here, some might see Kitty Foyle as a slightly hysterical melodrama, it is actually an insightful character study that any romance novelist would give her eye-teeth to write – from misbegotten beginning to a bittersweet happily ever after.
While Ginger may be cinematically married to Fred in our hearts (and sadly much more happily than any of her five marriages), it’s on her own in these solo roles that she truly shines.
Next week we will have a film and literature cross over with the Victorian drama The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins.