My favorite female movie actress of all time? That's easy---it's Ginger Rogers. I won't claim she's the greatest actress of all time, but simply my favorite.
Of course, it has much to do with her singing and dancing, especially in the ten films she made with Fred Astaire. But there is so much more. She was in fact the biggest box office draw of the 1930's, which has emerged over time as my favorite decade of American cinema.
Probably my favorite scene of hers is the opening sequence of Gold Diggers of 1933, in the Busby Berkeley choreographed version of "We're in the Money." Rogers' solo of the chorus in Pig Latin, droned in her special nasal tones that ooze Great Depression, still cracks me up every time I see it (youtube clip).
Last night here at the Massachusetts farmstead I found myself in sole possession of the large screen tv room on a night at which TCM was showing a series of Rogers' movies. Say no more!---I'm there. They started by airing Swing Time, one of the better-known Astaire movies, but then followed it up with one of my personal favorites, Rafter Romance from 1933, just after she signed with RKO. It was one of a batch of RKO movies that were given to producer Merian C. Cooper when he left RKO, but which then languished unseen for nearly 50 years until TCM bought the rights last year and broadcast restored prints.
It's a simple Depression-era romantic comedy about a man and a woman forced to share an attic apartment but never meeting each other, until they fall in love in the outside world. The scene I always wait for the one in which Rogers strips down for the shower, letting her underwear fall on the floor around her legs and walking around the room in her work heels. It's a very erotic scene, and exactly the kind that was only possible before the 1934 production code.
But the movie I was really waiting for was the one shown after it, one that had remained a big embarrassing blank spot in knowledge of Rogers, namely, Kitty Foyle, the 1940 RKO drama directed by Sam Wood and written by Dalton Trumbo (an odd pairing, considering the political direction the two men later took). It is the movie for which Rogers won the Oscar for Best Actress, and the one that solidified her claim as a serious dramatic actress independent of her dancing and singing (youtube trailer).
At first I wasn't sure I was going to like the movie. It starts with a corny introduction reviewing the evolution of the status of women since the turn of the century, somewhat nostalgically suggesting that women had it better before they could vote. But by the end of the film, I could see that this had been somewhat of a misdirection, mainly to inoculate conservative audiences against the more edgy and possibly scandalous aspects of the movie, including the bold love life of Rogers' character, and specifically her decision to have an out-of-wedlock child and give her own last name.
It was the kind of movie that verified all my opinions about Rogers', specifically her ability to convey, with a slight shift of her eyes, a wealth of emotion and insight about what the character is thinking, including many things that would have been transparent to women at time, but which may be less obvious to today's audiences. Times have changed. Things that had to remain unsaid now can be said, partly because of movies like Kitty Foyle.
One aspect of the movie that began to intrigue me involved the way the story was told in flashback. As a teenager, Rogers' character is given a snowglobe by her father. Inside of it is a girl on a sled. The girl, she is told, represents her in her innocence, but she cannot remain the girl. The snow inside the globe is used as a device to move between real time and flashbacks. The scene in which her father dies is especially poignant. She finds him at home, his hand sprawled on the floor with the snow globe beside it.
By this point I am thinking: I think I've seen this before!. It's almost impossible not to utter the word "Rosebud" when you see that scene. Of course, Citizen Kane was made a year after Kitty Foyle, and given the popularity of the film, it's impossible not to think that Welles' was somehow highly influenced by it. This is not to take away from the magnitude of his film, however, as one can argue that he takes the concept to a much higher level of art. Or not. Maybe he just cribbed Trumbo's screenplay and got away with it. I'll have to think about that one.
Among others, Rogers beat out Katherine Hepburn that year for the Oscar. Hepburn had been nominated her portrayal of socialite Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, a role that at the time was a big comeback for Hepburn. That both movies are explicitly about the difficulties of marrying into the upper crust of Philadelphia society seem to offer a clue about the strange year of 1940, which has long stuck out as me as a odd duckling of year in Hollywood, and in American history.
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