“FIFTH AVENUE GIRL”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24401, 12 September 1940, Page 3

“FIFTH AVENUE GIRL”

BRILLIANT ROMANTIC COMEDY One of the season’s most delightful pictures is “ Fifth Avenue Girl,” Ginger Rogers’s new starring vehicle for RKO Radio, which will commence its local screenings to-morrow at the State Theatre. Very different from Miss Rogers’s recent Bachelor Mother,” but even funnier at times, the new picture revolves around the hectic experiences of a working girl guest in a stately Fifth Avenue home. She is hired for the Job by the discouraged head of the family, who despairs of ever persuading his wife and children to regard him as other than a walking bankaccount. ' The girl’s advent, as expected, alters the situation considerably. The wife, thinking her husband intends to marry the girl as soon he she goes to Reno, changes her plans and decides to "stick around.” The son, who has been neglecting the family pump business for polo starts to work again, and the daughter gives up her dizzy goldfish-gulping friends for a serious romance with the chauffeur. How the various tangled threads of the principal characters’ careers are finally straightened out forms the hilarious climax to the offering, while the heroine adjusts her own problems as well. The part might have been made to order for Miss Rogers’s talents, and she gives a remarkable portrayal of the difficult role. Walter Connolly heads the featured cast as the harassed husband, and James Ellison plays the part of the chauffeur, with Verree Teasdale as the mother and Tim Holt and Kathryn Adams as the two children, and such well-known players as Franklin Pangborn, Ferlke Boros and Louis Calhern in important roles. Gregory La Cava’s brilliant direction of his own production, and the sparkling screen play by Allan Scott, contribute heavily to the film's excellence.