The New Pictures

Kitty Foyle (R. K. O. Radio). Nothing succeeds with the cinema's limitless female following like a good teary treatment of women's travails. So when Novelist Christopher Morley produced Kitty Foyle last year, he had a certain movie sale on his hands.

Thrilled was a large sector of the nation's womanhood with the news that Ginger Rogers would play Kitty. Ginger, with her shoulder-length tresses, her trig figure, her full lips, her prancing feet and honest-to-goodness manner, is the flesh-&-blood symbol of the U. S. working girl. When Ginger emotes, only a nonconforming female heart fails to respond.

R. K. O. continued to be smart by putting its leading social thinker, Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun), to work on the script, later hiring witty, pink-cheeked Donald Ogden Stewart to furnish additional dialogue. This battery developed a smooth, efficient screen play from Morley's novel, preserving every pound of his pathos and adding a few ounces more of their own. They open with Kitty accepting the proposal of solid, reliable Dr. Mark Eisen (James Craig). As Kitty is packing for the elopement, they bring in Wyn Strafford VI (Dennis Morgan), Kitty's socialite ex-husband from Philadelphia. Wyn wants Kitty to run off to South America with him that night. The catch is he can't remarry her because of an existing wife. After Wyn leaves with Kitty's promise to meet him later at the steamer, Kitty has a long argument with her conscience, which suddenly appears as an image of herself in the bedroom mirror. The problem: whether to stick to faithful Mark and live in conventional security or to follow her heart which has always be longed to Wyn.

Kitty's final decision is reached only after a careful rehash of the previous ten years of her life, beginning when she was 15. This series of flashbacks first finds her as the society-struck daughter of a poor Philadelphia family from the wrong side of the tracks. Later she meets Wyn, a bulwark of the Main Line upper crust takes a job as his secretary. Their romance, marriage and divorce are tainted by their irreconcilable social positions which Wyn's stuffy family never let her forget. That is the shadow over Kitty Foyle's youth.

Through it all, Ginger, guided by seasoned, sentimental Director Sam Wood gives the prime performance of her new departure into drama. Waltzing to Paradise or making love with handsome kinky-haired Dennis Morgan, she throws in a whopping supply of spirited romance. As a brokenhearted wife or the mother of a dead child, she plunges her scenes into deep tragedy. Kitty Foyle should fix an even more permanent place for Ginger in the hearts of her feminine fans.

Night Train (20th Century-Fox). Dumpy British Director Alfred Hitchcock set a standard for mystery films with The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes which the U. S. cinema industry has never been able to touch. Night Train and Blackout (TIME, Nov. 25) show that Hitchcock's departure for Hollywood before World War II failed to deprive the British cinema of its special bent for prolonging a nerve-racking state of suspense over an almost unbearable period of time.

Like Blackout, Night Train has a spy-story pattern pasted against a war background. It begins in Czecho-Slovakia, moves to England, hurries back to Germany, then to Switzerland during a hectic scramble for the possession of a Czech scientist (James Harcourt) with secret plans in his head for a new type of steel plate. His trim, saucy daughter (Margaret Lockwood) strings along, meets with handsome British and German intelligence officers (Rex Harrison and Paul von Hern-reid), scrambles matters by failing to recognize for some time Mr. Right.

Although Night Train, directed by Carol Reed, lacks the polish of its Hitchcock predecessors, its sustained excitement is agonizing. Those who saw The Lady Vanishes will be pleased to rediscover the two cricket-playing English gentlemen of that film (Basil Radford & Naunton Wayne), who interrupt the plot's progress at the tensest moments to discuss devastating trivialities. This time they are upset about the declaration of war because it may make it impossible for them to retrieve their golf clubs which they left in Berlin. Steel-shafted clubs, they complain, will be hard to get in England with the Government hogging all the decent metal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.