The New Pictures, Mar. 14, 1949

Little Women (MGM) is Hollywood's second try at exploiting Louisa May Alcott's genteel, durable New England tearjerker. A shade less ambitious than its 1933 predecessor (which starred Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett), it still jerks tears with easy efficiency.

This time the four hoopskirted March girls are played by blonde June Allyson (Jo) in a red wig, brunette Elizabeth Taylor (Amy) in a blonde wig, Janet Leigh (Meg), and Margaret O'Brien (Beth). Though the faces have changed, the girlish flutter and flummery are still the same. Curled up in her cluttered Concord attic, tousle-headed Jo still writes, and weeps over her blood & thunder fiction. The romantic Meg still falls romantically in love, marries and has twins. Featherbrained Amy, as self-centered as ever and still suffering from the "degradations" of well-bred poverty, succeeds in catching wealthy Laurie (Peter Lawford). Little Beth once more wastes away, bravely and wistfully, to an early death.

After 80 years of circulation in one form or another, this gentle New England story in its latest version has few surprises. One of them is Producer-Director Mervyn LeRoy's success in bringing to life once more the faded sentiments and the tintyped situations. Another is June Allyson's playing of tomboy Jo. She has a refreshing breeziness and bounce which make the old tale believable and now & then lift it right out of its tatted frame. Other notable performances are Margaret O'Brien's delicate, peaked portrayal of ailing Beth, and the supporting work of veterans Mary Astor (Marmee), the late Sir C. Aubrey Smith and Lucille Watson. The whole package is so richly wrapped in romantic period sets and costumes that the final shot is unnecessary: a pastel, picture-postcard rainbow rises out of the subsiding suds and sentiments to arch the happy ending.

The Sun Comes Up (MGM) is an unsuccessful attempt, in Technicolor, to recapture the magic formula which made a hit of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling (TIME, Jan. 13, 1947). The story was written by Novelist Rawlings, the lead is again played by Claude Jarman Jr. and Lassie is in the cast to handle the heart tugs supplied by a fawn in the first picture. The second venture, obviously intended to be a natural, is as unnatural as a purple zebra.

There is some pathos in the stffry of a widowed concert singer (Jeanette MacDonald) who sees her only son hit and killed by a truck, but the sentiment sours when the scripters make Jeanette a self-centered, self-pitying woman. There is also some promise in the relationship between the singer and an orphan boy (Jarman) whom she meets in the Carolina Mountains. But the association never quite comes off. For one thing, young Jarman is uncomfortably overgrown and incurably quaint, and he is pictured as a ninny. Perhaps the only character to live up to expectations is the general storekeeper (Percy Kilbride). Lassie also makes the best of a dog's life.