"Charity Girl," the movie

Who would you cast as the two leads in a film adaptation of Michael Lowenthal's Charity Girl?

Here's how the author describes the characters:

Frieda is a bundle wrapper at the old Jordan Marsh department store (it's Boston, 1918) who gets caught up the U.S. government's World War I anti-vice campaign and incarcerated (as were 15,000 such women) for the “crime” of having venereal disease. When pressed to, I described her in the novel as being (in contrast to the refined girls in her magazine pinups) “the raw, unmilled grain: brown hair that ripened in the sun with red highlights, cheeks that went to freckles after June.” She's seventeen years old, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Felix, the soldier Frieda falls for, is “tall and fidget-thin, with forceful features and an agitated poise. His uniform, a quarter-inch short at every cuff, made her think of bursting seams, magic beanstalks.”

Read what Lowenthal wrote about a possible adaptation of the novel at My Book, The Movie.

Visit Lowenthal's website.

The Page 69 Test: Charity Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue