 |
| Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Greta Gerwig's Little Women. |
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the first movie version in which almost none of the charm and poignancy of the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel, published in 1868 and 1869, comes through. Not counting the lost silents – there were two, in 1917 and 1918, one in England and one in America – Gerwig’s is the fourth major adaptation for the big screen. George Cukor’s 1933 film, with its picture-postcard visuals, came out from RKO, though it's in the mold of MGM’s vellum-bound, studio-set approach to the Victorian classics. It’s beautifully adapted (by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, though imdb.com lists nine other uncredited contributors, including Charles Brackett) and meticulously detailed, with an A-list cast that features Spring Byington as Marmee, Joan Bennett as Beth, the stunning beauty Frances Dee as Meg and Douglass Montgomery as Laurie. And in Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Jo it touches greatness. It was Hepburn’s second year in Hollywood and her fourth picture, and no one has ever been more ideally suited to the role of Alcott’s feisty, ambitious, iconoclastic – and autobiographical – heroine. In the early scenes she overplays Jo’s gawkiness and tomboyishness, but she seems to find her stride as her character does, her grandiose romantic flourishes taking on the shape of Jo’s discovery of the world and her place within it. Hepburn shows us how Jo grows up, and I can’t be the only viewer who has never forgotten the moment when her Jo, after rejecting Laurie’s marriage proposal, confesses to Marmee in an anguished moan, “I feel as if I’d stabbed my best friend in the heart!”
