“Little Women”: this 1860s classic still provides a good lesson for new authors

I can remember a card game in the 50s called “Authors”, and I definitely remember Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (and later Men).

My records show that I had seen the 1994 film by Gillian Armstrong, and the 1933 film directed by George Cukor (from a Netflix rental).

The new film by Greta Gerwig and Columbia Pictures emphasize themes and the individualities of the four women. It played to a full house (I sat on the front row) at the Angelika Mosaic today, opening Christmas Day.

The film focuses most on the most obviously independent of the four sisters, Jo (Saiorse Ronan), the writer. In fact, the novel somewhat parallels Alcott’s own experience as a writer, which makes the work and film a poioumenon (like Thomas Carlyle’s obtuse 1830s masterpiece, “Sartor Resartus”).

In the opening Jo meets with her publisher (Tracy Letts) who x’s out a couple pages of her handwritten cursive manuscript, and ways the public now wants to be entertained, and doesn’t want moral lectures, having gone through a war. But he buys her work, and she needs the money to support the family as dad (Bob Odenkirk) has been impoverished by the Civil War (people have their privilege taken from them by conflict, you know). Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel) will fall in love with her, but so will the young aristocrat Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) who will court at least three of the sisters.

Meg (Emma Watson) is big sister and she tutors and teachers another family for income. The youngest, Amy (Florence Pugh) has to finish school, but the most tragic is the pianist Beth (Liza Scanlen), who, quite frail, will get scarlet fever, partially recover, but then pass away later. The piano is suitable for salon-like Chopin and the Beethoven Pathetique slow movement and some Schumann, but it is smaller than the usual 88 keys.

Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) is always lecturing Meg on the need to marry well, and that in their world marriage is mercantile, not just about romance, and that husbands control the purse strings, and that women have no rights, unless they are accidentally rich like the aunt.

At the end, Jo shows us how to negotiate with a publisher and keep your copyright. (I thought about the CASE Act.) But her editor insists that she get her own self-image heroine happily married. Jo likes the life of an individualist, alone, independent, not needing men (however sexy Laurie looks).

Reviews of earlier versions from older websites of mine:

Little Women (1933, RKO Radio, dir. George Cukor) remade (1994, Columbia, dir. Gillian Armstrong, novel by Louisa May Alcott, screenplay by Robin Swicord) is an adaptation of the famous American novelist (1832-1888), who could be compared with her English counterpart "George Elliot." Women become part of a household as the adapt to conditions in post Civil War America (but the North: New England). I saw the 1994 version when it came out and am renting the 1932 version, which TCM presented as a moral lesson: one of the women thinks her writing as too selfish in a time people sacrificed for others. But Alcott gave up writing herself for a time to serve as a nurse during the Civil War. (See "Cold Mountain", below). Here is the book text: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/ALCOTT/lwtext.html. The early part of the 1933 version deals with the writing and the stage plays, with mother resenting the girl's apparent inattention to more adaptive household matters. But the sisters always cohere, in ways that are natural to earlier generations but that seem gratuitous to the modern person. In the last scene, Prof. Bhaer tells Jo that she is published. Katherine Hepburn (Josephine), Joan Bennett, Paul Lukas, Edna May Oliver, Jean Parker, Frances Dee.

Name: “Little Women”

Director, writer: Greta Gerwig, Louisa May Alcott

Released: 2019/12

Format: 2.35:1

When and how viewed: Angela Mosaic, Fairfax VA, Christmas Day, sellout

Length: 135

Rating: PG

Companies: Columbia Pictures

Link: official

Stars: ****_

(Posted: Wednesday, December 25, 2019 at 11:30 PM EST)