I feel as though Ginger Rogers gets ignored in favour of Fred Astaire a lot. And it’s true that it’s probably what she’s going to be known for the most. They made ten movies together, and they were among her most successful. True enough. But it feels as though everything else she did kind of gets sidelined in favour of remembering that, yes, backwards and in high heels. But I think too little of those movies’ success is attributed to her sparkle and vigor as a performer and too much to the dancing. And while she could keep up with him dancing, I don’t think he could keep up with her acting.
She played a lot of happy-go-lucky types, mostly showgirls of one form or another. She was even the second film Roxie Hart, in a film of the same name. (I’ve seen it, but not in years; her version is actually innocent.) She danced a lot, and sang some, and in general just lit up the screen in one way or another. She was an underrated actress, I think, because people don’t talk enough about how hard comedic acting can be. When she was called on to portray emotion, she succeeded, and she made people laugh, and that’s enough for most of the movies she did.
To be honest, the Academy’s database is down as I’m writing, so I can’t do all my usual research and don’t have time to just put it off until later; I’m writing a few hours before my scheduled posting time. Fortunately, though, I have both seen and reviewed Kitty Foyle, her Oscar-winning film, and mentioned a few relevant things. Like that she beat Katharine Hepburn for The Philadelphia Story and Joan Fontaine for Rebecca and shouldn’t have. The Code apparently took most of the plot out of the book, leaving the character as something short of what she could have been because her motivations make a lot less sense. Though I haven’t read the book.
To be even more honest, I’m not completely sure that Rogers had the range to portray a Kitty Foyle who was committed to what I referred to in my review (I have all my old Rotten Tomatoes reviews saved on my own computer) as “a little light sinning” in the way that she seems to have been in the book. Ginger Rogers in the ’30s was perfectly adept at playing women who knew just how far they were willing to go, but the implication I get is that Kitty Foyle in the book had an abortion, and that seems a bit too heavy for a Ginger Rogers character. The girls she played in the ’30s wouldn’t quite go far enough to need one, though they’d get just close enough to get the benefits.
Seeing that Ginger Rogers is in a movie is enough to make me happy to watch it. That’s honestly quite an endorsement, if you think about it. Maybe I wouldn’t watch a movie because she was in it, though I assume that I watched Kitty Foyle because she won an Oscar for it. (I seem to have watched it while I was going through “M,” which probably means I got it from Netflix; I doubt there was that much of a hold list!) But she’s a highlight of a bunch of movies, and after all, she was quite a dancer.
