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| Little Women | 1933 |
Little Women follows the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo (Katharine Hepburn), Beth and Amy. They live in Massachussets with their mother, and their father is away, fighting in the Civil War. In order to help their mother, Meg works as a governess and Jo as a companion to the dreadful Great Aunt March. Jo also fancies herself a writer, and she often puts together plays to be acted out by her and her sisters. Beth keeps house and has a fragile health and the youngest, Amy, who still goes to school, has a love for painting and sculpting. The first line of the book in which this movie was bases illustrates the struggle the family goes through to make ends meet, and sets the mood nicely for the beggining of the story:“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”
The story begins at Christmas when Laurie Lawrence, the orphaned grandwon of their neighbor comes to his granfather house, recovering from an illness. It is not long before he and Jo get acquainted, and they fit remarkably well with one another…. Jo is a fantastic character. She’s the perfect definition of a Tomboy – like I wouldn’t believe exhisted in a film of the 1930s if I hadn’t seen this one. The more I watch these old movies the more I realize the world hasn’t changes as much as we often think it did… People have remained largely the same, and aparently the first half of the twentieth century had girls who played with the boys and didn’t quite fit in much like we have today…
Be that as it mays, Jo enjoys sword fights, running and she plays the male characters in the plays she
rights for her and her sisters… And Laurie seems to think she’s the most wonderful thing in the world. It is he who challenges her to a duel, claiming to have studied fencing at the academy, and he who asks to be included in her plays. At a dance in his grandfather’s home, he doesn’t mind that Jo was careless enough to burn her frock and now has a patch on it, instead he finds it funny and finds a place for them to dance where they won’t be seen.
This is the second film I watched with Katharine Hepburn, and it’s so surprising… In the first film, Desk Set, she was also loud, strong and not a typical female by any means… When I first saw her name at the top of a list of the 25 greatest actresses of the Golden Age I had imagined her as a girly girl, but at least from some of her parts, I don’t get that vibe at all! I even read that when she was little, Hepburn cut her hair and went by the name Jimmy! And these characters are, of course, much more reloadable and much, much more interesting… It’s quite wonderful to watch…
Katharine Hepburn definitely steels the thunder… It seems at times like the movie is solely about Jo, instead of the four girls...As a matter of fact, of all her performances, this is the one Katharine identifies with the most
“I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in LITTLE WOMEN. They just couldn’t be, they really couldn’t be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I’m sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, ‘Christopher Columbus! What richness!’ and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been dramatic, this suited my exaggerated sense of things.”
The director (who would become good friends with her) also commented on that:
“I didn't have to direct her. She directed herself. She is Jo. Of all those characters she ever played, it is the one who is closest to Kate herself, Kate and Jo really are the same girl. There’s no doubt that this girl put a lot of herself into Jo. Everything. Lines are important, but how they are delivered tells a tale. Expressions on her face, the way she moves…”
This film, the first sound adaptation of the book, goes on as a series of vignetters focusing on the lives of the four sisters as they grow older, go through hardship, illness, marriage and joy… The snowy landscapes keep the Decemberish vibe throughout the movie, even though it’s only actually Christmas in the beginning of the film. The scene in which Marmee (the mum) talks to the girls about giving up their breakfast as a christmas gift to a family who’s starving is definitely filled with the spirit of generosity of the holidays, particularly because the Marchs themselves are not a rich family – in fact, giving someone else food means necessarily giving up on having breakfast themselves.
In addition to that there is certainly a chance to see the characters grow and change. It’s a wonderful coming of age story, particularly rare in the sense that it focus on female characters and it presents them in a positive and independent light. The paths the girls’ lives take, and Jo’s path more than any of the others, are defined by their choices and actions, rather than by their relations with men. In fact, the relations between the sisters, different from one another as they are, are much more important to the story than their relationships with the male characters, and much less important than the relationships between each of them and themselves.
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| Publicity for the film |
Little Women | 1933 | Directed by George Cukor | Written by Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason | Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, Paul Lukas
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