"Kitty" at the Rivoli
KITTY starring Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland, was a Paramount production that was a cross between “Pygmalion” and the recent best-selling masterwork of heavy-breathing prose, “Forever Amber,” which had recently started filming with the soon-to-be-replaced Peggy Cummins in the lead. In “Kitty,” Goddard played a guttersnipe in Georgian London who attracts the attention of society after Gainsborough paints her portrait. Milland, in a role that was a far cry from his recent Oscar-winning portrayal of an alcoholic in “Lost Weekend,” played a conniving fop who teaches the bawdy wench how to pass herself off as a lady in the hope that she can make a mutually profitable marriage. The film’s sets won praise and an Oscar nomination; Mitchell Leissen, the film’s director, was a former art director.
The ad copy promised “the most amorous adventures in love history.” Goddard with her period décolletage and Milland in his tight breeches were both deemed quite fetching by critics and the supporting cast was excellent, but Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found the script, based on a 1945 Rosamond Marshall romance novel, stiff and the leaden performances uninspired. James Agee noted in Time that the movie version considerably toned down the sex of the “lending library” novel. In the book Kitty is “as loose, if not as active, a hussy as the notorious Fanny Hill,” he wrote, while in the movie she is “almost as blameless as Cotton Mather's third wife.” Little seen since then, it is actually an under-appreciated, delightful, frothy, witty romp that does not take itself too seriously. The movie was the top US box office attraction in May according to Variety. In New York that April the movie was playing at the Rivoli, a 2000 plus seat venue, built in 1917 in Greek Revival style.