Little Women Movie

Sometimes the most important aspects about Little Women Movie, little women, margaret o brien and liza minnelli are not immediately obvious. Keep reading to get the complete stories. Katharine Hepburn‘s favorite movie role was in a part that in fact much resembled her, a role that had all her radiant spirit, energy, fire, her sparkling wit and even her patrician New England roots. Of course, it was her incandescent performance as brainy, hardy New Englander Jo March in George Cukor’s great film of the Louisa May Alcott classic — a film which ironically came out the same year (1933) that Hepburn won her  first “best actress” Oscar for another good but-not-quite-as-good movie, as stage-struck young actress Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory.

Little Women Movie,, They’re both of them superb performances, but Hepburn’s Jo is perfection: an impeccable, blazingly attractive, richly imagined  job  in a neglected classic, a book unfairly dismissed by some as a girl’s library favorite and by others as undemanding Americana.

In fact, Little Women is as much a classic film about an American family, as, in different ways, are Meet Me in St. Louis, The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird. Cukor’s film, an impeccably mounted and very faithful David O. Selznick production, brings this new England city in the Civil War years to warm, pulsing life, as it also does Jo a full-blooded human being in a glowing family portrait, and her three sisters (Joan Bennett, Frances Dee, Jean Parker), her big-hearted mother (Spring Byington), and feisty neighbor (Edna May Oliver) and their often smitten neighbors and beaux (Paul Lukas and Douglass Montgomery.) Little Women Movie

Cukor’s celebrated brilliance with actors (especially Hepburn) is on full display here, as are his flair for detail and his impeccable taste. It’s one of his best films, and also one of Selznick’s. If you love Kate Hepburn, and who doesn‘t, it should be a favorite of yours as well.

Chicago (Two Discs) (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Frank Urson (and, uncredited, Cecil B. DeMille), 1927 (Flicker Alley)

Maurine Watkins’ play Chicago, based on her brief experiences as a Chicago Tribune reporter, covering sensational murder cases, is one of the most cynical of all newspaper romantic comedy-dramas. It’s acid on wry, the dark, trenchant tale of a faithless wife who kills her lover, tricks her schmo husband and sees her unscrupulous lawyer parley the case into a deluge of Chicago newspaper headlines and hot-mama publicity. Little Women Movie

It’s a venomous, crackling tale from the Ben Hecht era. And it’s the source of the brash 1942 William Wellman-Ginger Rogers movie Roxie Hart, of the 1972 Bob Fosse-Kander-Ebb Tony-winning stage  musical Chicago, of the Oscar-winning 2002 movie adaptation of that show, directed by Rob Marshall and starring Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere — and of this 1927 silent movie version, starring Phyllis Haver as Roxie, based on the play and produced (and substantially directed) by Cecil B. DeMille.

The official director was Frank Urson, a ‘20s filmmaker and frequent DeMille assistant director. Any way, however much DeMille did on Chicago, which he had found and purchased and obviously liked, it was a lot — according to his salary, the work records, and the very look and feel of the film. It‘s suggested that he took his name off Chicago, because they were in too close proximity to another DeMille 1927 show, the story of Jesus in King of Kings — starring as Christ, an actor they called The Queen of Queens, H. B. Warner.

DeMille had his cynical side and he gives full vent to it here. Roxie (gorgeously played by Phyllis Haver, a doll of a blonde who married rich, left the movies in 1929, and committed suicide in 1960), exploits and cuckolds her smitten hubby Amos (Victor Varconi) with her pudgy little bully of a lover Casely (irascible fatso Eugene Pallette, for God’s sake). Then she shoots and kills Casely when he tries to leave, and an opportunistic prosecutor (Warner Richmond) seizes on the case, along with the local scandal-hungry press, who make Roxie their latest doxy. Little Women Movie

Disillusioned but still faithful to Mrs. Hart, Amos hires one of Chicago’s top defense lawyers, the endlessly resourceful but cash-flow-obsessed Billy Flynn (Robert Edeson), and the case is on. It was rough stuff in 1926, when Watkins’ play played Broadway. It was rough in 1927, when scripter Lenore Coffee adapted it for this movie. It was rough in 2002, when Marshall’s Billy, Richard Gere, made a mockery of the law on screen, and the Death Row dollies sang their ode to murder. (“He had it coming.“) And it’s rough now.

Maybe the play is a classic. It’s sure lasted, and it sure feels like one. So does the movie. But Watkins only did a few more stage shows, including So Help Me God, another tough  play about Warren Harding-style political corruption (which was just revived on Broadway and was strongly reviewed).  Then she worked for a while in the ’30s in Hollywood, where her strongest credit was co-writer on the 1937 Spencer Tracy-Jean Harlow-Powell-Loy newspaper comedy Libeled Lady, directed by Jack Conway. Urson died a few years later in a fishing accident. Cecil B. DeMille, of course, went on forever, or almost forever. This near-perfect print came out of his personal vault. C. B.‘s last movie was a childhood favorite of mine, the 1956 The Ten Commandments, where DeMille dubbed the Voice of God, then had the tablets handed to Charlton Heston‘s Moses.

We see a lot of commandments broken in the 1927 movie Chicago. Tell me it doesn‘t happen in Chicago, 2010.

Extras: 1950 documentary The Golden Twenties (producer: Richard de Rochemont) (Three Stars); 1985 short documentary The Flapper Era (Lauren Lazin) (Three Stars); 2010 documentary supplement The Real Roxie Hart (d: Jeffery Masino, Silas Lesnick); Booklet with essays by Thomas H. Pauly (source of a lot of the information above), Robert S. Birchard and Rodney Sauer.

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