|
|
| LITTLE WOMEN (1933) |
An RKO Radio Picture
B&W, 115 minutes
|
|
|
|
CAST
Jo: Katharine Hepburn
Amy: Joan Bennett
Professor Bhaer: Paul Lukas
Aunt March: Edna May Oliver
Beth: Jean Parker
Meg: Frances Dee
Mr. Laurence: Henry Stephenson
Laurie: Douglass Montgomery
Brooke: John Davis Lodge
Marmee: Spring Byington
Mr. March: Samuel S. Hinds
Hannah: Mabel Colcord
Mrs. Kirke: Marion Ballou
Mamie: Nydia Westman
Doctor Bangs: Harry Beresford
Flo King: Marina Schubert
Girls at Boarding House: Dorothy Gray, June Filmer
Mr. Davis: Olin Howland
|
 |
CREDITS
Director: George Cukor
Executive Producer: Merian C. Cooper
Associate Producer: Kenneth MacGowan
Scenarists: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on the Novel by: Louisa May Alcott
Photographer: Henry Gerrard
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase
Set Decorator: Hobe Erwin
Editor: Jack Kitchin
Sound Recorder: Frank H. Harris
Musical Score: Max Steiner
Costumer: Walter Plunkett
Makeup Artist: Mel Burns
Special Effects: Harry Redmond
Assistant Director: Edward Killy
Production Associate: Del Andrews
|
|
|
|
|
SYNOPSIS
The four March sisters grow up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the difficult days of the Civil War. Their father is away fighting and their beloved mother, Marmee, holds the family together as best she can. Jo, the impulsive and headstrong daughter, wants desperately to write, but cannot break away from her sisters. When her sister Meg marries Mr. Brooke, despite her pleadings, Jo bitterly refuses a marriage proposal from her sweetheart, Laurie, and leaves for New York City, where she later meets Fritz Bhaer, a scholarly professor.
|
|
|
|
|
|
CRITIQUES
"That Little Women attains so perfectly, without seeming either affected or superior, the courtesy and rueful wisdom of its original is due to expert adaptation by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, to Cukor's direction and to superb acting by Katharine Hepburn. An actress of so much vitality that she can wear balloon skirts and address her mother as 'Marmee' without suggesting quaintness, she makes Jo March one of the most memorable heroines of the year, a girl at once eager and puzzled, troubled, changing and secure."
- Time, 1933
"There are small flaws - a few naïve and cloying scenes, some obvious dramatic contrivances - but it's a lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel. Katharine Hepburn gives an inspired performance as willful Jo; she has a joyous tomboy abandon when she first enters Laurie's mansionlike home, and cries out, "What richness!" She strikes absurdly romantic poses, and they're enchanting. Joan Bennett is very amusing as vain, selfish, pretentious Amy; Frances Dee is Meg (she's charmingly funny when she's being proposed to by John Lodge, as the tutor); Edna May Oliver is Aunt March; Douglass Montgomery is Laurie (at times, full face, he resembles John Updike; too bad his bright lipstick makes his teeth look an uncanny white); Paul Lukas is the gentle, older man who courts Jo. The cast also includes Henry Stephenson, Samuel Hinds, Mabel Colcord as Hannah, and Nydia Westman. Directed by George Cukor, for the most part imaginatively and with unusual delicacy (the sequence with the play that Jo stages is particularly fine), and produced by David O. Selznick, for RKO. The dismal score is by Max Steiner, and Spring Byington as Marmee is sugary and sacrificial (she's a pain), and Jean Parker, as frail Beth, is not the world's greatest actress - she simpers a lot, though she's very touching when she goes to thank her gruff benefactor (Stephenson) for the piano he has sent her."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"An open, fresh, surprisingly spontaneous version of the Alcott story, directed by George Cukor for David O. Selznick (1933). Katharine Hepburn's Jo is the best of her early performances, a lovely dance of dreaminess and flintiness. Joan Bennett, Frances Dee, and Jean Parker are the other sisters, and the supporting cast has Cukor's usual depth."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"Surely the definitive version of Louisa May Alcott's novel, sweet, funny, perfectly cast, and exquisitely evocative in its New England period reconstruction. Cukor rightly emphasizes the seasons, starting with a winter of discontent as, with father serving in the Civil War, the four March girls face the prospect of growing up in reduced circumstances. But as the seasons change, so do joys return, and the film offers an endlessly pleasurable series of vignettes: the breaching of the ogre's castle next door (to find it inhabited by a very kind old man and a very personable young one); the disastrous performance of Jo's play; the business of Beth's piano, and the fluttering alarms of her bout with scarlet fever; the first stirrings of romantic interests. The cement that holds all this together is Hepburn's miraculous performance as the tomboy Jo, angrily resisting the approach of womanhood ('Why can't we stay as we are?'). Cukor mines a rich vein of sentiment, never over-stepping the mark into slush, but it is Hepburn's Jo, making a subversive choice of what she wants her life to be, who ensures that the cosiness isn't everything."
- Tom Milne, Time Out
|
|
|
|
|
|
COMMENTARY TRACK
"Little Women had that extraordinary quality of lost innocence and also of character. It was a child's book, it was always considered a child's book, but it was like my childhood, you see. We were in New England, we had a big family, and everything was always rather exaggerated and I was a very dramatic sort, you know 'Christopher Columbus! What richness' type. And all that sort. It rather suited my exaggerated sense of things. And they [the Little Women family] were a good sort. All of them. They had character and they were funny."
- Katharine Hepburn, interview with John Kobal, 1979
"Oh, I remember there was a sound strike in the studios at the time we were shooting, it was during the scene where Beth was dying for the nth time, and although I admired the book enormously, I was getting a little bit unable to play it because I had wept day after day after day, and I had sixteen and twenty takes on these weeping scenes, and they wouldn't get them correctly. We had all of these amateur sound men. Finally, she did die, and I threw up. I cried so many times, I just threw up."
- Katharine Hepburn, interview with John Kobal, 1979
"I remembered Little Women as being rather better than it was. But I think that we did capture just what has made that book live - the real vigour of it, and that love of family. And of course Katharine Hepburn cast somthing over the film: a sort of innocence and strength that was quite remarkable and very touching. They did the book again years later and it came out as just a sentimental shambles."
- George Cukor, interview with John Gillett and David Robinson, 1964
"When Selznick wanted me to do Little Women I hadn't read the book. (Kate Hepburn once accused me of never having finished it, which is a lie.) Of course I'd heard of it all my life, but it was a story that little girls read, like Elsie Dinsmore. When I came to read it, I was startled. It's not sentimental or saccharine, but very strong-minded, full of character, and a wonderful picture of New England family life. It's full of that admirable New England sternness, about sacrifice and austerity. And then Kate Hepburn cast something over it. Like Garbo in Camille, she was born to play this part. She's tender and funny, fiercely loyal, and plays the fool when she feels like it. There's a purity about her....You could go with whatever she did. She really felt it all very deeply. She's a New England girl who understands all that and has her own family feeling."
- George Cukor, interview with Gavin Lambert, 1970
"I'll never forget Katharine. She used to sit between scenes in a window seat in her severe, austere dresses with a straight back, reading a slim volume. She could have been Jo herself. She had such a grave, sweet expression on her face, with her hands folded in her lap, and looking so austere and yet so beautiful. She was always the first on the set every day, lines perfect, glowing with health, and never the slightest sign of temperament. Sometimes while she was reading or just contemplating alone, we girls, Joan Bennett, Jean Parner, and myself, would creep up and peek at her, absolutely awestruck by her concentration. I'm sure she knew we were watching, but she never looked up or around."
- Frances Dee
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Poster
|
Katharine Hepburn
|
Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Frances Dee, Jean Parker
|
Katharine Hepburn
|
Douglass Montgomery, Katharine Hepburn
|
Joan Bennett, Spring Byington, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, Katharine Hepburn
|
Joan Bennett, Katharine Hepburn
|
Joan Bennett, Katharine Hepburn, Frances Dee
|
Paul Lukas, Katharine Hepburn
|
Katharine Hepburn
|
Lobby card
|
Lobby card
|
On the set: Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor
|
|
|
Watch the trailer
