Sixteen years later, MGM decided the time was ripe for a full Technicolor treatment: Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 version ( again on Chili) is bathed in a sense of postwar luxury and abundance. The 19th-century setting may remain, but it’s palpably depression-era cinema, with the then 26-year-old Katharine Hepburn as charismatic and aptly tomboyish a Jo March as we’ve ever seen. Shot in silvery black and white, it downplays the romanticism of later versions for a more sober, bittersweet study of familial togetherness and resilience amid hardship. So we start with George Cukor’s rather lovely 1933 version – available most cheaply on Chili. Sadly, any Little Women streaming project begins with a dead end: two silent version were made nearly back-to-back, in 19, and both have been lost. While you wait for it, however, revisiting the timeline of past versions is both an interesting chronological exercise and a suitably seasonal comfort-viewing binge. Gerwig’s version, with its structural zigzagging and injection of Generation Z feminism, will be released in UK cinemas on Boxing Day. Not that long ago to some of us a literal lifetime to the little women (and men) who are its primary audience. I t’s a sign of advancing age when a film remake rolls along and your first reaction is: “Already? Didn’t we just have the last one?” So it was with me when the news landed that Greta Gerwig was making a new version of Little Women – the first major big-screen adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s pioneering young adult novel in 25 years.
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