Little Women (RKO). A scene in which four adolescent girls dressed in too many petticoats cluster around their mother and tearfully promise to obey their absent father's admonition to behave like little women does not sound like one which would excite a contemporary U. S. cinema audience. Neither does one in which the same four are to be seen squeaking and yapping near their Christmas breakfast table, out of enthusiasm for the idea of presenting their sausages to the poor family down the road. The charm that surrounds such episodes in this picture springs from the delicate and understanding humor with which Director George Cukor translated Louisa May Alcott's 65-year-old semi-classic into the cinema, a humor that becomes richer and sadder as the four heroines grow up. Small Beth March (Jean Parker), still the nicest of the four sisters, goes into a lingering and wistful decline. Romantic Meg (Frances Dee) decides not to marry, changes her mind, has twins. Amy (Joan Bennett) learns to manipulate her "vocabilary" and consoles Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) for falling unsuccessfully in love with her sister Jo. Jo (Katharine Hepburn), from a wild tomboy, develops into a moody, temperamental, tender-hearted girl, saddened by a sense that life is escaping her. Then one rainy winter day the German professor (Paul Lukas) who fell in love with her in New York comes to the March house and proposes to her, under an umbrella at the front door, stammering about "a full heart and these empty hands." By this time the March girls and their mother (Spring Byington), their tyrannical aunt (Edna May Oliver), the boy next door and his gruff uncle (Henry Stephenson) have long since ceased to be figures in an animated period cartoon. They and the snug New England town in which they live, touched by the sentimental melancholy which surrounds things that happened long ago, have become as real as people and places in the cinema can ever be.
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.
This picture, which critics last week pronounced the best that RKO has yet produced, is likely to place Katharine Hepburn, who last week left Hollywood to appear on the Manhattan stage in Jed Harris's production of The Lake, near the top of the list of U. S. box-office favorites. Good shots: Jo March running, with long awkward steps, across the snow, after she has paid her first call on Laurie; explaining to Laurie that she cannot dance with him because there is a patch on the back of her dress which people would see if she stood up; teaching Amy how to faint for amateur theatricals, with a fine disregard for ensuing bumps; listening at the door when she hears her Professor Bhaer playing the piano.