Little Women (2019)

And so we're back to the movie that started me on this journey. Greta Gerwig's adaptation was my favorite film of 2019 and sent me to finally reading the book and watching all the other versions I could get my eyes on. I was curious and eager to watch it again now that I know the story much, much better.

I gotta admit though, after re-watching and loving Gillian Armstrong's 1994 version, I was a little afraid that I wouldn't love Gerwig's adaptation as much in comparison. But that's not the case. This project did reveal that some of Gerwig's techniques aren't original to her, but even though they're important to my enjoyment of it, Gerwig lays a tone over the story that makes it distinctly hers and so heart-warming.

Armstrong was the first to infuse the story with overtly feminist commentary. The 2017 BBC miniseries added shots of Jo's school at the end, giving viewers a peek at the futures of the characters. And surprisingly, it was the 2018 modern-day retelling that innovated starting the story with Jo in New York and using flashbacks to bring the earlier story up to speed. Gerwig repeats all of these tricks and does them super well. 

The 2018 movie uses heavy visual cues to denote the transitions between the present-day narrative and the flashbacks, but Gerwig is more subtle. She lets memory and the present flow naturally together and then trusts the viewer to keep up with some help from color filters, hairstyles, and other context clues. She also doesn't just insert the flashbacks in the order they happened in the book, but puts them at relevant spots that are connected to whatever's going on in the present.

I especially love Gerwig's feminism, because it's so heart-felt and natural and never didactic. Jo's speech always tears me up when she talks about how women are so much more than just beauty and love, but that doesn't help the fact that she's profoundly lonely. And then there's Meg's insistence that feminism isn't about rejecting marriage, if marriage is truly what a woman wants. And Amy's defense of marriage as an economic proposition, because that's the deal that society has given her. And I'm in awe at how Gerwig eats her cake and still has it too with the romcom trope of Jo's chasing Friedrich Bhaer to the train station, commenting on and subverting it while still delivering it in a crazy satisfying way. 

As she builds on these approaches from other films, Gerwig also adds completely new touches. Her March sisters are gloriously lively and rambunctious. They wrestle and run and talk over each other. It's no wonder that Laurie, alone in his own home with only his quiet grandfather and the household staff for company, longs to be next door. 

Speaking of Laurie's grandfather, Chris Cooper is easily my favorite iteration of that character. In a lot of these adaptations, I've enjoyed identifying MVPs who bring various non-Jo characters to life in surprising ways. Claire Danes' Beth in 1994, for instance. Or Emily Watson's Marmee in 2017. Gerwig's movie has several stand-outs, but the older Mr Laurence deserves extra mention because that character often doesn't have a lot to do. 

Gerwig's script and Cooper's performance make me feel how much Mr Laurence misses his daughter and how much he relishes Beth's filling that spot in his heart... only to have her ripped out of it again. It's so tragic and Cooper lets me see just how horrifying it is, and yet the character doesn't give into despair, but allows the rest of the family to comfort him even as they're suffering under their own grief. The two households love and support each other and not just after Beth is gone. It's a lovely picture of what neighbors can and should be for each other.

(Speaking of which, I adore the scene when the March women take their Christmas breakfast to the Hummels and tramp past a church as people are gathering for worship. I can cynically read that as an indictment of a certain kind of religion that elevates ritual above actually putting one's faith into practice. Or I can more generously see it just as a statement that what the Marches are doing is worship. I prefer the latter, because we don't know any of those people gathering for church or what their motivations might be or how they are or aren't practicing their beliefs in the rest of their lives. But the symbolism works both ways and either reading is valid and powerful.)

Another thing Gerwig does remarkably well is Amy and Laurie's relationship. It helps that Florence Pugh and Timothée Chalamet are amazing actors, but the script fully embraces the novel's scenes of Amy and Laurie in Europe, helping each other to grow up and mature through some things that are holding both of them back. And then there's maybe my favorite scene in the movie where Laurie tells Amy that she shouldn't marry Fred Vaughn and hints that she knows why he objects and she stops him cold. 

"That's mean, it's just mean of you," she says. "I've been second to Jo my whole life in everything and I will not be the person you settle for just because you can't have her. I won't do it. Not when I've spent my entire life loving you." I fully believe her and it murders me.

So, yeah. I can say with certainty now - having seen all the other major adaptations - that this is still my favorite with 1994 being a close second and the 2017 BBC miniseries close behind that.

Five out of five letters from Father.   

Little Women (2018)

Adapting Little Women to a modern setting sounds complicated and possibly ill-advised, but I looked forward to the experiment for the same reason that I don't complain about remakes and reboots. I'm always curious to see what artists choose to keep and what they change. And that's especially true in a story where the Civil War, small pox, and Nineteenth Century women's roles play such huge parts. 

Director Clare Niederpruem and her co-writer Kristi Shimek do a great job of updating the historical elements. Pa March is now a military surgeon deployed in the Middle East. Amy falls from a horse instead of through thin ice. Instead of catching small pox from a neighbor family, Beth contracts leukemia that goes into remission before eventually coming back. Instead of balls, there are high school parties and proms. That all works really well and I was fascinated by the modernizations. The only thing I scratch my head about is Jo's relationship with Professor Bhaer who appears to be her actual college professor? If that's right, there are some ethical questions that the movie never addresses.

What really doesn't work though is the extreme focus on Jo to the point that the film is only interested in how the other characters affect her. Laurie's grandfather only spends time with Beth in a quick montage and the whole Amy/Laurie romance happens completely offscreen. I would have loved to see Lea Thompson do a lot more with Marmee (weird that the movie keeps that outdated nickname), but she never gets the chance. 

Even more frustrating, as obsessed as the movie is with Jo, it doesn't think about her nearly as much as she thinks about herself. This Jo is completely self-absorbed, mean, destructively angry, and has a laughably juvenile concept of what it means to Write (capital W; back of hand to forehead) that she carries well into her college years where she should have learned better. 

The point of the film is to watch her grow out of that, but I still think it takes the character too far. The book's Jo matures from writing pulp to creating personal stories with artistic merit, but she's also always aware of the difference between the two. She just prefers pulp and has to grow into appreciating literature. In this movie, Jo believes that her 400-page YA mythopoetic epic (or whatever she calls it) is Literature and it's embarrassing to watch her finally realize the truth about that. Especially after she's been such a stubborn jerk about it for so long.

On the other hand, the cast is pretty great. Sarah Davenport brings out Jo's feistiness, but also her eventual regret and desire to change. Allie Jennings is super cute as homebody Beth who fights to keep her humor even when she's really sick. Elise Jones plays the younger version of Amy as an obnoxious preteen and I really like the hints early on that she has a crush on Laurie. It makes it a bit easier to believe their later relationship, even though there's less reason to understand why he's fallen in love with her. Lucas Grabeel is charmingly nerdly as Laurie, a kid who'd get picked on at school if he wasn't so stinking rich and self-confident. I liked him a lot and wish the film had a kinder Jo for him to fall in love with.

One final note as I head towards Greta Gerwig's adaptation: unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first version to start the story with Jo in New York and reveal the previous events in flashback. I think that's a smart way to remix the story and keep it interesting for modern viewers. Gerwig does it too and gets even better results.

Three out of five Skypes from Father.   

Little Women (2017)

I liked this second BBC adaptation much more than the first. I wasn't sure about it after the opening scene in which the four sisters cut off locks of hair to send to Father, but director Vanessa Caswill shoots them in extremely intimate close-ups, giving the activity an off-putting, seductive quality. Caswill and cinematographer Piers McGrail love focusing on warm, sensual details all through the mini-series and it reminded me of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. But The Age of Innocence is all about seduction and sensuality. Little Women is about compassion and wisdom. Especially in that opening scene (but also a later one when Meg's friends are getting her ready for a ball), the sumptuous focus on hands and hair and ribbons and undergarments are out of place.

Caswill also uses the technique on household items and nature photography and other places where it's not as jarring and I was able to just enjoy the beauty of the images. The look of the production is gorgeous.

Maya Hawke (daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke) is maybe my favorite Jo so far. She's certainly up there with Winona Ryder and Saoirse Ronan. She's natural in the role and never feels like she's merely acting boyish or hot-tempered. She struggles to control her tongue, but not because anyone wants her to be modest and quiet. She struggles the same way a character like Han Solo does: because when she speaks without thinking, she alienates or even hurts people without meaning to. Hawke is wonderfully convincing in her struggle to control that.

Willa Fitzgerald and Annes Elwy are good as Meg and Beth. And Kathryn Newton is perfectly beautiful as teenaged Amy. She also plays the younger version of Amy though and that doesn't work as well. After seeing how nice it was to let Amy be a child in the anime series and the 1994 version, I've sort of lost patience with watching older actors play the spoiled, self-absorbed child. I'm kind of scared about how that will effect my enjoyment of Florence Pugh in the role when I re-watch that.

This adaptation doesn't really belong to Amy though, so I learned not to care so much about how it handles her. Her eventual romance with Laurie (Jonah Hauer-King) just sort of goes through the motions without showing the couple's love and support for each other in Europe or even hinting at a deeper attraction until its time for them to get engaged.

In contrast, I deeply believed Laurie's feelings for Jo. The series has a few scenes that show him clearly in love with her and wanting to talk to her about it, but she keeps putting him off. She tries to be gentle about it, but he persists until it finally comes to a head and he ends up sitting in the grass, bawling, the only version of Laurie I've seen do that. It's heartbreaking and real and I loved it.

This version pays a little more attention to Beth than most (with the exception of the 1994 movie) and deals with her realization that she's dying and her reluctance to burden anyone else with that information. There's still no beating Claire Danes' version, but this one is especially tragic.

It's even more tragic thanks to the MVP of the series, Emily Watson as Marmee. More than any other version so far, Watson's Marmee struggles hard with raising these girls by herself. She's not equipped for it, neither with the support structure she needs nor even with the inner resources. As she tells Jo in the book, she herself struggles with anger every single day and that comes out in Watson's performance. But what also comes out is her deep, deep love for her daughters and her husband and her perseverance to keep her anger and despair under control for their sakes. She's inspiring. 

Dylan Baker is good as Mr March and the script even gives him some nice, extra conversations with Jo where he tries to mentor her on writing (he's been working on a book of his own for a couple of decades) and she ends up mentoring him instead. Baker also gets to show Dad's grief over Beth, which is lovely. Mr March is often very stoic through all of that in other versions. (I did have a little trouble accepting Baker in the part just because I love his hilariously evil character in The Good Wife and this was such a different role, but that's not his fault. He's great as both characters and I have new respect for him as an actor watching this and The Good Wife so close together.)

The two most famous actors in this don't get a lot to do. Michael Gambon is Laurie's grandfather and he's great as always, but the script doesn't go too deeply into his relationship with Beth. They have a nice scene or two together, but a more touching scene is with Laurie when the elder Mr Laurence offers to accompany his grandson to Europe as an escape from Jo.

Angela Lansbury is Aunt March, but she's underused, too. It's always nice to see Lansbury and she does a fine job with Aunt March's mood swings between snobbishly overbearing and surprisingly compassionate. I just wish there was more of her.

Finally, Mark Stanley plays Professor Bhaer and he's fine, too. He's ten years older than Maya Hawke, so the relationship isn't creepy. But Gillian Armstrong spoiled me with the 1994 version by having Bhaer be such a positive influence on Jo's transformation from dreaming child to functioning adult. 2017 Bhaer is handsome and gentle and supportive (when he insults Jo's sensationalist stories, it's an accident, because he's only seen them in print and doesn't know she's the writer). Armstrong showed me that Bhaer can be even more than that, though, so it's hard to go back to even a merely adequate interpretation of the character.

But while I pick on some of the characters that this version has made minor, I also adore the characters it puts in the spotlight: Jo, Marmee, and to a slightly lesser extent, Laurie. Jo carried me on her journey every step of the way and I ached for Marmee like I never have before. And I ached pretty hard for Laura Dern's version.

Four out of five letters from Father.

Little Men (1998)

I've never read either of Louisa May Alcott's sequels to Little Women, so I hadn't intended to watch any of the adaptations for this project. But when I saw that there was a Little Men movie only a few years after Winona Ryder's Little Women, I decided to add it to my list. It made it even better that it stars Chris Sarandon, former husband of Susan Sarandon, who played Marmee in 1994.

Chris Sarandon plays Professor Bhaer who is now married to Jo March, played by Mariel Hemingway. They run a boys school out of Aunt March's old house, which is now located out on a farm in the middle of nowhere for some reason. Not at all where I usually imagine Aunt March living, though the end of Greta Gerwig's Little Women also shows the school and has it uncluttered by surrounding buildings. Still, this version is very rural.

Sarandon is good as Bhaer, though I had to overcome the initial distrust I automatically have for all Chris Sarandon characters (thank you, Fright Night and Princess Bride). Hemingway is a perfectly fine Jo, matured and mellowed out from her feisty youth, but still with a spirit that rebels against convention. She's fiercely compassionate, which puts her into conflict with her husband during the events of this film. Bhaer is also gentle and loving, but he reaches his limit with an especially troublesome student before Jo does.

The plot has to do with the arrival of a couple of orphans at the school. One is named Nat, sponsored by Meg's husband John Brooke (who seems a lot wealthier now than he was in Little Women, but maybe business has just been that good). John met the homeless boy on the streets of Boston and offered to pay his tuition at Jo's school. There's some initial conflict over Nat's lying, but the boy quickly fits in with the other kids until a friend of his from Boston shows up, too. 

The new kid's name is Dan and he's basically the Artful Dodger to Nat's Oliver Twist. Against Bhaer's better judgment, he and Jo allow Dan to attend the school for free, but Dan soon begins influencing the other boys with drinking, smoking, fighting, cursing, and gambling. It goes about how you'd expect and resolves almost as predictably.

Frankly, the plot and the setting reminded me of watching Little House on the Prairie. It's sweet and competently made enough that I grew to like the characters even though they weren't doing anything original. So while I don't recommend anyone rush out to see the movie, it got me curious to read Alcott's version and see if it's more powerful. 

And I like the students enough (not just Nat and Dan, but Meg's two kids and a couple of the other boys and a late-arriving girl named Nan who very much reminds Jo of herself at that age) that I want to follow them into the events of Alcott's final book in the series. The trilogy concludes with Jo's Boys, which was adapted into a TV series also in 1998. Instead of calling it Jo's Boys, though, I imagine it was a marketing decision to call it Little Men as well to make the Little Women connection more clear. But it starts with the death of Professor Bhaer and has a different actor playing Jo. 

I'm not going to hold up the rest of the Little Women movies to watch the TV show, but I'm very interested in it. Jo's Boys includes Amy and Laurie and their kids (a group that I sorely missed in Little Men), so that's cool. And thanks to the pleasant, if predictable way that 1998's Little Men handles itself, I'm invested enough in the students that I want to see what happens to them next. 

Three out of five violin recitals.   

Little Women (1994)

I watched Gillian Armstrong's version of Little Women in 1994 without knowing anything about the story. The '90s were a great time for lushly filmed period movies and I was there for as many as I could get to.

And I loved this one for many of the same reasons that I still love it now. It looks great with the highest production values of any adaptation so far. The locations and sets are marvelous and I want to live in them. And the acting is amazing, but I'll get deeper into that in a second.

Being familiar with the story now, I appreciate this one even more. It brings out feminist themes without dramatically changing Alcott's story or characters, mostly through the character of Marmee, played by Susan Sarandon. Pa March does show up at the end, but the movie makes great use of his absence by emphasizing Marmee's single-parenting and underlining that this is a household entirely made up of women without any of the traditional structure or protection that would be present with a patriarch there. I'm a little sad that the script gets rid of Christianity as the motivation for self-improvement (replacing it with Kant's transcendental idealism), but given the current state of popular Christianity, I understand the desire to go with something different.

Winona Ryder is an amazing Jo. She's clearly out of step with cultural expectations for her gender, but doesn't have to be cartoonishly masculine to show it. And she's the only Jo so far to actually get her hair styled into a super cute bob when she sells most of it for Marmee's trip money. 

It was a smart move to cast very young Kirsten Dunst as Amy in the first half of the film. It's a little jarring when she becomes Samantha Mathis in the second half after only four years have passed (and none of the other actors change), but it very much helps to have a young actor playing Amy when she's a selfish, spoiled child and an older actor playing her once she's both physically and spiritually matured.

Shockingly though, the MVP of this adaptation is Claire Danes as Beth. Beth can sometimes be more plot device than character, just there for everyone else to comment on or feed sad about. The best adaptations do lovely things with her relationship with Laurie's grandfather, but even then she's not much on her own. Danes makes me feel for Beth and relate to her like I never do in other versions. I'm pretty sure she was hired for her lip quiver, which she uses to rip my heart out in a couple of scenes. And the script also gives her a heartbreaking speech on her deathbed where she talks about always feeling left behind her sisters, but now she's going to be the one to go first. So poignant and painful.

Christian Bale is a great Laurie and I love the attention the movie gives to setting the foundation of his relationship with Amy. There's a scene when he's taking Amy to live with Aunt March while Beth is sick and Amy is thinking about her own potential death. She says that she doesn't want to go without ever being kissed and Laurie kindly (and innocently) sets her at ease by promising to kiss her before she dies. It foreshadows their eventual romance, but it's also just a lovely example of Laurie taking her childish concerns seriously when not a lot of other people do.

A big challenge for Little Women adaptations is to make Amy and Laurie's romance convincing when it finally happens. If it's not carefully handled, it can seem like Laurie is settling for Amy since Jo is unavailable. Armstrong's version manages it with a couple of scenes.

The first addresses the elephant in the room by giving Amy and Laurie a conversation about whom they want to marry. Laurie says something about wanting to be part of the March family and Amy calls him on it. She asks if he thinks any of the sisters would want to be loved for their family instead of for themselves. And since she's been pursuing the wealthy Fred Vaughn, Laurie turns it back on her and asks if she thinks Fred wants to be loved for his money.

The question sits unanswered until a later scene when Jo writes to Laurie in England after Beth dies. She begs him to come home to the States and be with the family (but mostly with her). But instead of doing that, Laurie immediately goes to Amy in France to comfort her, proving that she's more important to him than her family, including Jo.

The other big challenge in adapting Little Women is the relationship between Jo and Professor Bhaer. Gabriel Byrne is twenty years older than Winona Ryder, so the age difference is intact. It's actually greater than the difference between Katharine Hepburn and Paul Lukas, who were only 12 years apart, but Hepburn played Jo a lot younger and Lukas was suave and worldly and kept calling her his "little friend." Consistent with the feminist tone of the film, Byrne's Bhaer treats Jo like an equal. He never directly criticizes her writing, but acknowledges her freedom to write whatever she wants (or feels the need to, because of commercial concerns). When she presses him, he asks if she truly likes what she's writing - and that question bothers her - but he's merely holding up a mirror so that she can evaluate the work herself.

In all things, this Professor Bhaer is there to gently usher Jo into maturity, both in how she thinks about her work and in how she thinks about romantic relationships. She was never able to take Laurie seriously, because their relationship was never serious. They were deeply fond of each other and connected in that way, but they were playmates, not true partners. Bhaer shows Jo a whole other way of relating to someone. It's healthy, it's mature, and his being older becomes an asset, not something creepy to have to work around.

Five out of five letters from Father.

Little Women (1987)

In the '80s, Japanese studio Nippon Animation adapted Little Women into a four-season TV series. Nippon made their name adapting classic English literature for Japanese audiences, also producing versions of Anne of Green Gables and Tom Sawyer, so Little Women was right up their alley.

I'm not naturally drawn to all anime, but I have a nostalgic spot for its vibe thanks to shows like Speed Racer and Kimba the White Lion that I watched as a kid, as well as US companies like Rankin Bass' occasionally outsourcing to Japanese studios. Whenever I'm watching anime, especially from this time period, those childhood memories kick in and help me through any speed bumps in the translation for English audiences. But with Little Women, those speed bumps are pretty minor anyway.

The English dub was created by Japanese actors who are all extremely talented with American English. That helps a lot. But even with that level of skill, there are some inherent things about transitioning from Japanese to English that are impossible to get around. The Japanese language has a different cadence from English and calls for different body language to help communicate it. So dubbing it well is harder than just having someone read a translation. The words audiences hear have to match the movements of the characters' mouths, which means that characters sometimes interrupt each other at odd times, or their cadence can sound a little unnatural, or they can be smiling sweetly while saying something very sad, or the dialogue can sound overly formal. That seems like a petty criticism though for an adaptation as thoughtful and well made as this one.

One of my favorite things about the series is that it has so much room to fill in details that Alcott wasn't concerned with. In fact, the entire first season takes place before the novel even begins, setting up the March family's life in another town before the Confederate Army invades. Alcott tells us that the Marches were well off before the Civil War and other misfortunes took their wealth. In this series, we get to see them in their big home before Father goes to war. Meg and Jo are both looking forward to new dresses for fancy balls. Well, maybe Meg more so than Jo. But then Father has to march south and isn't there when the town is occupied. Things are peaceful enough at first until a battle breaks out, setting fire to much of the town, including the Marches' home and Father's business. The now-homeless family goes to another town to live with Father's aunt until they can get back on their feet. Meg gets a job as governess to a couple of rich kids, Jo becomes Aunt March's paid companion, and Marmee helps distribute aid to the families of Union soldiers. By the end of the season, the family has saved enough to buy their own house and move in.

Seasons two through four adapt the first half of Alcott's novel, so there's a lot of room for embellishment there, too. Alcott's novel was originally published in two volumes with the first volume concluding with Meg's agreeing to marry Mr Brooke, Laurie's going off to college, and Father's returning home from the war. That's all that this TV series covers, so there's none of the second-volume stuff about Meg's married life, Jo's in New York, Beth's second illness, or Amy and Laurie's engagement. 

Instead, Season Two opens with the girls meeting Laurie and ends with Beth's being invited to play Mr Laurence's piano at his house. Season Three covers Beth's making slippers for Mr Laurence to Jo's getting her first story published. Season Four begins with Marmee's leaving home to go be with Father, who's very sick in Washington DC; it wraps up of course with Father's coming home and Meg's agreeing to marry Brooke. Each episode is a half-hour, giving them plenty of time to flesh out vignettes from the novel, so there's a whole episode about Laurie and Brooke's inviting Jo and Meg to a play, but Amy can't go, so she burns Jo's novel in revenge. The next episode then deals with the fallout of that, with Jo's being angry with Amy for most of the episode until Amy falls through the ice at the end while skating.

There's so much room for the characters to breathe that I couldn't help but get invested in them. They're well designed too and well acted. Even though Meg isn't the only sister who remembers being wealthy in this version, her job as a governess puts her in contact with a wealthy group of peers and she still has to struggle with her reduced finances. Jo is impulsive and has a temper, but she's also aware of these faults and tries to correct them. 

Beth is drawn to look small and pale and of course her personality is very quiet. Instead of a host of dolls and kittens for her to play with though, the series gives her one kitten named Milky Ann who's almost as fully developed a character as anyone else in the family.

A huge advantage of animation is that Amy can be drawn to look as young as she acts. She's as selfish and attention-seeking as she is in the book, but she's also kind of adorable and impossible to dislike. It's easy to see why people spoil her, but just as easy to see why they're constantly losing patience and correcting her. One really weird change in this version though is that it's all narrated by Amy, rather than Jo. I'm not sure why that is, except that maybe Amy's youth makes her more open about how she feels about the events we're seeing.

Another big change, but a welcome one, is that Hannah is Black in this version. When I read the novel last year, I noticed that Alcott gives Hannah a distinct dialect that sounds rural and possibly Southern. I wondered if Hannah could be a former slave, but Alcott eventually reveals enough about Hannah's Irish background to contradict that idea. I enjoy that the series not only goes there, but also includes storylines about slavery and what the Union army (including father Frederic March) are fighting for. In one particularly powerful episode in the first season, a slave deserts from the Confederate Army that's forced him to fight for them. He hides out in the Marches' shed until Beth accidentally discovers him. Terrified, he takes her hostage, but Marmee is able to not only talk him into releasing Beth, but immediately forgives him and offers him a place to hide in the house. It's a beautiful example of the kindness that Marmee not only teaches, but exemplifies in her own actions. That's a huge part of the book and it permeates the series as well.

Even Aunt March is kinder here than she is in the book. She's still old and cranky, but when she offers Jo a job as her companion, it's out of genuine affection for Jo. Aunt March is generous whenever the Marches need financial help, though of course they're careful never to exploit her. The kinder Aunt March makes it a bit weird when she initially dislikes Mr Brookes, as demanded by the book's plot. But she has enough of a stubborn streak all throughout the series that it also doesn't seem completely out of character.

The series adds a couple of new characters, one of whom is another nephew of Aunt March to rival Frederic March and his family. The new guy's name is David and he's a lazy sponge who's constantly borrowing money from Aunt March. She sees right through him, but has more or less given him what he wants since he's been her only relative in town. With Marmee and the girls' arrival though - and their genuine kindness toward Aunt March - David feels threatened and constantly looks for ways to undermine the newcomers' relationship with their great aunt.

Laurie and his grandfather are pretty much like Alcott wrote them. They butt heads over Laurie's future, but it's also clear that they love each other. One weird thing about Laurie though is that the series leaves open the possibility of Jo's eventually marrying him. His feelings for her begin to heat up toward the end of the series, especially as things are getting more serious between Meg and Brooke. But Jo also makes a comment to the effect that she could see herself one day being romantically involved with Laurie. That's a big change from the book.

Related to that is a final big change in the form of another new character. Since we'll never got to New York or meet Professor Bhaer, the series gives Jo someone else to criticize her work and encourage her creative growth. Sadly, the character is pretty annoying. 

His name is Anthony and he works as a reporter at the local newspaper in town. When Jo approaches the paper's editor about publishing some of her writing, Anthony has an immediate, negative reaction about her work, either because she's young or a woman or both. Whatever his reasons, he's super rude about it and he continues to be abrasive and blunt for the rest of the series. He occasionally helps Jo out, to be fair. He's the one who finds the house that the Marches buy and move into, for example. And he eventually seems to come around to really liking Jo and wanting good things for her. By the end of the series, he's moving to New York and encouraging Jo to do the same. But he's such a surly know-it-all about everything that I bristle whenever he's in a scene.

I don't want to leave this on a bad note though. It took me a long time to finish the series, but I enjoyed spending all that time with it. The attention paid to the history of the Civil War as a backdrop for the story is excellent. And the four sisters, especially Jo and Amy, are among the best versions of the characters that I've seen so far. 

Four out of five Milky Anns.

Little Women (1978)

The 1978 Little Women was a two-part mini-series aired over a couple on nights on NBC. Little Women isn't something I would have showed up for at the time, but I was super excited to watch it now. It has a Who's Who of '70s and '80s TV actors with Susan Dey (Laurie Partridge) as Jo, Meredith Baxter (Elyse Keaton) as Meg, and Eve Plumb (Jan Brady) as Beth. 

Ann Dusenberry, the actor playing Amy, isn't as recognizable, but she was in an especially memorable episode of magnum pi that we covered on the recent AfterLUNCH discussion (she plays an unhinged woman who falls for Magnum and tries to murder Mimi Rogers), so even she was fun. And then there's Robert Young (Marcus Welby) as Laurie's grandfather, William Shatner as Professor Bhaer, and John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation) as Amy's suitor Frank Vaughn.

As entertaining as the cast is, they're also quite good. Meredith Baxter is classically beautiful and refined as Meg, but she's also kind. She's perfect playing the oldest daughter who remembers better times and is trying to stoically endure her family's reduction in finances. 

Susan Dey... I've recently run into a couple of roles of hers from the '70s that I'd never seen before and they never fail to remind me that my crush on Laurie Partridge was real and strong. She's lovely as Jo and the script really emphasizes her struggle to control her temper.

Eve Plumb doesn't get much to do as Beth, but she's fine. And I like that the mini-series has enough time to explore Beth's realization that she's dying and how she helps Jo to come to terms with it. Jo's reluctance for change is a big theme that this adaptation pays a lot of attention to.

Amy is always a challenging character to cast because she's so young at the beginning of the novel and so matured and improved by the end. There are actors who make both parts work - I think Elizabeth Taylor and Janina Faye are good examples - but Ann Dusenberry isn't one of them. She's fine as the older Amy, but never convincing as the younger version. 

I don't know Richard Gilliland, but he had a recurring character on Designing Women as well as a ton of guest roles on a gazillion other '70s and '80s TV shows, so his face was familiar to me. He's a good Laurie, even though the script goes pretty dark with him. It really plays up the conflict between him and his grandfather and goes to extremes with Laurie's fall into drinking and gaming. There's even a scene where Laurie and his grandfather strike each other, which I thought was excessive. 

But of course it works out okay in the end and Robert Young does well with both the stern and gentle aspects of Grandfather's personality. I do think those aspects could be better integrated, but that might be more of a script problem than the performance. It's easy to see what Laurie has done to make Grandfather angry, but Young's character seems to switch quickly between hot and cold.

One of the performances I most looked forward to didn't appear until the second of the two episodes and that's William Shatner as Professor Bhaer. The professor is a tough character to do well, because he usually comes across as too old for Jo and creepy in his interest in her. Shatner is 20 years older than Dey, but he's using all of his considerable Captain Kirk charm to make a super charismatic character that it's easy to believe Jo falls for. I could do without Shatner's version of a German accent, but he's the best Professor Bhaer so far. He has a horrible, out-of-character line of sexist dialogue at the very end - suddenly insisting on being the master in his and Jo's relationship - but that's on the script. 

I'm also not crazy about how the script has Jo narrate the whole story first person. Or then again, maybe I am. She's talking the whole way through about her family life and her journey to become a writer in this bygone era, so it reminded me a lot of John Boy's voice-overs on The Waltons. 

The Waltons was super popular at the time, so Jo's copying him sometimes feels like a ripoff. But other times, the cast and Jo's descriptions just made me super nostalgic for this age of television. And that was really pleasant. I think I enjoyed Little Women '78 more than it probably deserves, but I'm okay with that.

Little Women (1970)

In 1970, the BBC adapted Little Women as a 9-part mini-series, which means a couple of things. First, it means more room for the story so we're finally getting away from the specific cuts made by the 1933 film and then copied by the 1949 remake. There's not only more of Jo and Amy's rivalvry, but also Meg's marriage and the adjustments that she and John Brooke have to learn.

The other thing about this being a BBC production is that almost everyone has English accents, so it feels like it could be happening in Dorset as easily as Massachusetts. The big exception is Pat Nye as Hannah, the Marches' housekeeper. Nye is working hard on a Southern accent that I'm not sure is that appropriate either. In the novel, Hannah has her own dialect, but if memory serves, she's supposed to be Irish. None of this is really a problem or made the show less enjoyable for me, but it's amusing.

What I didn't enjoy as much was that the adaptation uses so much of its extra time to highlight the conflicts between the characters in darker, unpleasant ways. Alcott doesn't write any of these people as flawless, but they're all aware of their faults and eager to improve. And more importantly, they all genuinely like each other. In this mini-series though, they're bickering and quarrelsome.

Laurie and his grandfather are a good example. In the novel, they fundamentally disagree about the direction of Laurie's life, with Laurie wanting to follow in his parents' musical footsteps, but Mr Laurence urging for what he believes would be a more useful occupation. Alcott has the two characters clash, but it's always clear that Mr Laurence loves Laurie and wants good things for him, while Laurie in turn respects his grandfather. In the mini-series, they get downright nasty with each other and there's a lot more sulking.

Hannah is another case. I don't know where this version's cantankerous, complaining, old grouch came from, but she's not from the book. She's meant to be lovably irritable, but I hated being around her.

Patrick Troughton's Mr March isn't grumpy or mean, but this version really emphasizes his absence and makes it not so much about duty to his country as just a general negligence of his family. 

You get the idea. If there are two possible motivations for a character to act badly in Little Women, this version chooses the more selfish. Everyone's just a little more despairing. There's less hope. Which is pretty understandable for a 1970s production. The world was a dark, uncertain place. It's just not going to be one of my favorite adaptations.

Outside of that, it's a good cast. It's certainly fun seeing Doctor Who as the father. Angela Down plays Jo with a perfect mix of well-meaning and shooting-her-mouth-off. Janina Faye is lovely as Amy even if this version never quite matures the way the literary one did. (When Faye was ten years old she had a part in Hammer's Horror of Dracula, which makes me want to go back and watch that again now.) Stephanie Bidmead is a great, matronly Marmie. And I really enjoyed Jean Anderson as the thin, prissy Aunt March, maybe because that character is already pretty disagreeable in the book and translates easily into this version.

Two out of five languishing Lauries.

Little Women (1949)

Who's in it?: June Allyson (The Three Musketeers), Janet Leigh (Holiday Affair, Psycho), Elizabeth Taylor (Jane Eyre, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Margaret O'Brien (Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden), Peter Lawford (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Mary Astor (Don Q Son of Zorro, The Maltese Falcon), and C Aubrey Smith (Tarzan the Ape Man, Rebecca).

What's it about?: A lavish, Technicolor remake of the 1933 version.

How is it?: Because it's based on the same script as the '33 version, the '49 Little Women makes the same cuts to Alcott's novel (no Amy burning Jo's book, for example) and finishes on the exact same note. June Allyson even seems to be borrowing some of her line delivery from Katharine Hepburn as Jo (including a bona fide "reaaallly I do"). 

But Mervyn LeRoy's '49 version improves on the previous one in a lot of ways. It's beautiful, to start with. It's got extravagant and highly detailed sets as well as gorgeous matte paintings and backdrops. And it looks glorious in Technicolor. It's an epic production.

But Allyson is also much more natural in the role of Jo than Hepburn was and the rest of the cast is just as good. I grew up associating Janet Leigh with Psycho, but have been watching more of her early work lately (Holiday Affair with Robert Mitchum being a special favorite) and she's a beautiful, wonderful Meg. Margaret O'Brien is a sweet and sympathetic Beth, showing that she has some range from her brattier character in Meet Me in St Louis. 

Casting 12-year-old O'Brien as Beth though makes it tough to cast Amy, who's supposed to be the youngest sister. LeRoy went with 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, a strange choice in some ways, but also very good in others. She's clearly playing younger than 17, but there's no universe in which she's younger than O'Brien's Beth. It works just fine though if you throw out fidelity to the novel and just imagine that Beth is the youngest sister. 

In the novel, Amy is beautiful to the point of being spoiled about it and Taylor brings that out of the character perfectly. But while she ends up being a fine choice to play Amy, the script takes out so much of her relationships with Jo and Laurie (Peter Lawford) that I never warm up to her like I do in the book. 

Mary Astor is a wonderful Marmee. I wouldn't want to choose between her and Laura Dern from Greta Gerwig's adaptation, but Astor is almost exactly what I imagine when I read the novel: kind and wise and wanting nothing so much as to see her daughters grow into healthy, moral, and happy people.

Special points as well to C Aubrey Smith as Laurie's grandfather. If the script gave him more, he'd be up there with Chris Cooper in terms of heart-breaking likability. Though I oddly didn't enjoy his Mr Laurence as much as I did Henry Stephenson's in 1933. The difference is in the directors, I think. In '33, George Cukor paid attention to some subtle touches that really emphasized the deep relationship between Mr Laurence and Beth. Smith's version is super lovable, but LeRoy leans too heavily on that and doesn't give us much else.

Finally, Rossano Brazzi (The Italian Job) is a much less creepy professor than Paul Lukas was in '33, mostly because he's a lot closer in age to Jo. He still calls her "my little friend," but he gets away with it.

Rating: Four out of five letters from Father.

Little Women (1933)

Who's in it?: Frances Dee (I Walked with a Zombie), Katharine Hepburn (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), Jean Parker (The Gunfighter), Joan Bennett (Bulldog Drummond), Spring Byington (Werewolf of London), Samuel S Hinds (Rhythm on the Range), Douglass Montgomery (Mystery of Edwin Drood), Henry Stephenson (Tarzan Finds a Son), John Lodge (Bulldog Drummond at Bay), and Paul Lukas (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

What's it about?: The first major adaptation of the novel, but also a vehicle for rising star Katherine Hepburn.

How is it?: George Cukor's version leaves out some story points that I miss, particularly in the rivalry between Jo (Katharine Hepburn) and Amy (Joan Bennett) and Amy's burning Jo's writing. As a writer who's sometimes had to start manuscripts over due to computer crashes or whatnot, I understand Jo's horror and frustration over that in the book. And it's especially heinous to think that Amy did it on purpose. But Amy is still a self-absorbed brat at that point, and it sets a bottom level that she's able to rise from as she grows up. Without that - or really any special conflict between Amy and Jo - the story loses impact when the sisters are not only able to get past their differences, but Jo can sincerely be happy when Laurie marries Amy.

Cukor's version also fails the Amy/Laurie story by having it develop mostly off camera. Their story is one of my favorite things about the novel, so this is disappointing. But the '33 Little Women is all about Katherine Hepburn and Jo.

That would be okay, I guess, if there weren't other, later versions that manage to balance Jo's story with the other characters'. If you have to pick one character to focus on though, Jo is it. And she's a great character, don't get me wrong. She's just not my favorite, so Cukor's movie is already going to have limited appeal to me. It's made worse though, by the way that Jo is portrayed.

Jo should be ungraceful, but Hepburn exaggerates her voice and movements to make a lumbering, boisterous oaf. She mellows out over the course of the film, but she's hard for me to watch in the early scenes. I also don't see any chemistry between her and Laurie (Douglass Montgomery).

Montgomery is heavily made up with eyeliner and lip rouge (the only male in the cast to get that treatment), so while Montgomery plays him just fine, he comes across like a dandy. He's also an angrier character than I want Laurie to be, though I respect the choice to make him that way. In the novel, Laurie has been through a lot and his relationship with his grandfather is strained at first (something they both have to grow out of), so there's reason for him to have some anger at his core. And I don't think Montgomery goes too far with it. My biggest problem is that I just never feel any heat between his Laurie and Hepburn's Jo. Both of them are good-looking, but neither is the least bit attractive, if that makes sense.

I have the same problem with Jo and Professor Bhaer (Paul Lukas), but that's always going to be the hardest relationship to sell in the story. In the novel, Bhaer comes in late and he's kind of pitiable and there's an age difference, so it's hard work getting me to root for them, even if you're Louisa May Alcott. She pulls it off by making the professor charming, the age gap vague, and by surrounding the relationship with a lot of other, more compelling activity. If we're mostly focused on Jo, like this version is, that relationship becomes hyper important. I never get into it, though. Partly because I associate Paul Lukas most with kindly, old Professor Aronnax in 20,000 Leagues and he's not doing much different in Little Women. It's also unhelpful that he constantly refers to Jo as "my little friend," emphasizing the age difference even more.

But my complaints about the Jo parts aren't to say that everyone else is completely sidelined. The other characters may not get as many great moments as they deserve, but they do all get moments. Joan Bennett is a particularly good Amy and there's a nice scene where the sisters each get a dollar for Christmas and choose to spend it on their mother. At first, Amy decides to split the dollar between some perfume for mom and some drawing pencils for herself, but later returns the pencils and buys a larger bottle of the perfume. That's the essence of Amy right there and Bennett is lovely with it.

Frances Dee's Meg is beautiful and subtly resentful about the March family's reduced finances. She doesn't outright complain, but she makes comments that are clues to how she's feeling, especially if you know her from the book. And her romance with Laurie's tutor, Mr Brooke (John Lodge) is sweet. They're a handsome couple and get a nice scene together, even though mostly the movie cares about how their romance affects Jo.

Jean Parker's Beth has a couple of great moments with Laurie's grandfather (Henry Stephenson), as it should be. Their relationship is one of the sweetest, especially in the Greta Gerwig movie, but also here, although this one's more subtle. I love the escalating gift-giving between the two of them. Mr Laurence invites Beth to come play the piano at his house (paying off a wonderful scene earlier where Beth is playing the March family's piano and frustrated because one of the keys doesn't work), then Beth thanks him with a gift of handmade slippers, which he responds to by giving her his piano, and she goes to thank him for that, can't really find the words, and just sits on his lap and hugs him. It's beautiful and heartbreaking, especially knowing what's going to happen to her later in the story.

A second moment just has Mr Laurence, but it's all about his relationship with Beth. It's when she's sick the first time and no one expects her to live. He's by himself in the Marches' sitting room and just sort of pacing. At one point, he walks over to his old piano and puts a hand on it before wandering away again. Understated and lovely.

Samuel S Hinds is barely present as the girls' father, but Spring Byington is a lovely, matronly Marmee. She's noble and convincing as a woman who's struggling in the absence of her husband, but also quite adept at supporting and raising her daughters and holding the household together.

I almost forgot to mention Mabel Colcord as Hannah, the Marches' domestic helper. She's fine as a stereotypical Irish housekeeper, but not really memorable. I only bring her up, because I'm curious to compare her with other versions and see how the character might be given more life. I feel the same way about Edna May Oliver's Aunt March. She's a grumpy old woman, but nothing more than that. Definitely room for other actors to do more with that role.

So to sum up, there are exquisite elements in Cukor's adaptation, but I wish that the film focused on providing more of those and less of Jo just being loud and awkward, especially in the early parts of the film.

Rating: Three out of five Amys.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

After seeing and loving Greta Gerwig's adaptation last year, I was excited to finally read Alcott's novel. It did not disappoint.

I've seen a bunch of other adaptations of it and like all of them to various degrees. The baseline of enjoyment for me on a Little Women adaptation is high and that's thanks to Alcott's characters and the tone created by their relationships. These are people who are by no means perfect, but are completely dedicated to loving and being kind to each other. They sometimes fail, but their response to that failure is always helpful. That applies to how they respond to their own failings as well as how they confront and ultimately forgive the failings of others.

It's deeply profound and inspirational. More so in the novel than in any adaptation I've seen (though Gerwig's gets super close), simply because we get to peek into heads and hear Alcott's commentary about things. There's parenting advice and marriage advice and simple getting-along-with-your-friends advice. But all of it is offered with humility and awareness that the advisor is just as flawed as the advisee. There's not a whiff of self-righteousness in the whole book. If you've seen the Gerwig film and remember the scene where Laura Dern talks to Saoirse Ronan about anger, you'll know what I'm talking about. And what's also amazing is that every bit of this is as applicable today as it was 150 years ago. Being kind and doing good are timeless exercises and Little Women is here to encourage us.

From a plot and character standpoint, I was surprised that I got so invested in Amy. Jo is always presented as the main character, because she's so clearly analogous to Alcott herself, but Amy is a very close second. Gerwig's version probably pointed me in Amy's direction with some new dialogue and by casting Florence Pugh, but I might have got there on my own just with Alcott's book. All four March sisters have character arcs, but Amy's is the one I most connect with for some reason.

Maybe it's because she's the youngest and has the most to learn. When the book opens, Meg and Jo are already aware of their biggest flaws and are working on them. For Meg, it's lack of contentment. As oldest, she's the only one who remembers when the March family was wealthy and she misses it. It doesn't help that she's still friends with people from that crowd, though no one ever suggests that there's anything wrong with that. It just makes it harder for her to appreciate what she does have when all of her friends have so many luxuries. She's trying though. Likewise, Jo's biggest flaw is her anger, but we see her work on controlling it almost from the beginning.

Beth is the quiet one, but even though she doesn't get into a lot of trouble, she struggles with laziness. When she famously goes to visit the family with the sick baby and contracts scarlet fever, she does it selflessly, but it's the result of some intentional discipline that she's been working to implement in her life. It's not super dramatic, though. She's always been a good, thoughtful person who cares about others; she just sometimes needs a nudge to get her away from her dolls and kittens. Curiously, Beth is the character I'm most like, so it's a little surprising that I don't connect with her more. But it's also kind of not.

Amy starts the novel wanting attention from her family and also her friends at school. And one of my own character flaws is that when someone demands my attention, my instinct is to not give it to them. So Amy irritates me in the early part of the book, but she gradually grows out of it to become self-aware and confident. It's a dramatic change and it's easy for me to get behind and cheer for her as she makes it. It's also helpful that her story is most like a Jane Austen novel in that she marries for love, but gets money as well. Only, unlike Austen's most famous heroes, we get to see Amy actually grow and develop the attitude that love is what she's really after.

I have more thoughts, but I'll save them. I'm going to write about some of the movie and TV adaptations, so other things (like Professor Bhaer) will come up as I do that.