|
The George Cukor period piece, a plush mansion with a banister for sliding. A brief view of Union soldiers marching through snow sets the stage, then swift introductions of the March sisters. Katharine Hepburn's Jo is a dervish barely caged inside Victorian crinolines, the camera pans across a tuneless schoolgirl chorus to find Joan Bennett with blonde ringlets and a dainty deadpan, a very droll Amy. Beth (Jean Parker) cultivates both the clavichord's broken keys and the "infirmity of shyness," Meg (Frances Dee) masters the blush of the budding homebody. "Funny angels, in hoods and mittens..." In this portrait of the artist as tomboy, the curly male ingénue (Douglass Montgomery) has to compete with the arts for the heroine's affections. Voraciously creative, Jo stages a play in the living room, dons the hero's lute and the villain's whiskers with gusto, and climbs the cardboard castle as it crumbles, a pivotal Cukorian scene. "I'd like to hop a little way and try my wings," writing is the métier, Professor Bhaer (Paul Lukas) is the tough critic and sensitive beau introduced on all fours under a bearskin. (His ursine benignity contrasts humorously with the splenetic pecking of Edna May Oliver's Aunt March, quite the drop of vinegar.) The search for identity is its own combat in Louisa May Alcott's wartime New England, Cukor honors her stout feminism by filling the storybook compositions with sparkling whirls of feminine vitality. The society ball is glimpsed through a trio of doors while Hepburn spins in the sidelines, Bennett and Parker in doll-like dresses perched on the staircase make for an early sketch for Meet Me in St. Louis. Armstrong transposes it to My Brilliant Career, then officially remakes it as a point of clarification. With Spring Byington, Henry Stephenson, John Lodge, Samuel S. Hinds, Harry Beresford, and Nydia Westman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |