Katharine Hepburn in Little Women: Still surprisingly sharp

Is it worth your time?

If you like movies that feel like a warm blanket on a rainy Sunday, yes. This is for the people who want to see 19th-century domestic struggles played with real, fiery personality. If you prefer your cinema gritty, modern, or fast-paced, you’re probably going to find this a bit too sugary for your taste.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Little Women (1933) through its definitive frames.

Katharine Hepburn is just… well, she’s Jo March through and through. You can tell she isn’t just acting; she’s living in those oversized clothes. There’s a specific scene where she’s writing in the attic, and the way she hunches over her paper feels so damn real. It’s not graceful. It’s messy.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Little Women (1933) through its definitive frames.

The pacing is a bit weird. One minute you’re laughing at the girls causing trouble in the parlor, and then boom, someone’s sick or someone’s leaving for war. It doesn’t hold your hand through the sad parts. It just drops them on you.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Little Women (1933) through its definitive frames.

Some odd notes I jotted down:

• The lighting in the house sometimes makes the corners look like they’re vanishing into thin air. It’s a bit spooky for a family drama.
• The sisters’ chemistry feels less like a rehearsed play and more like an actual argument you’d hear through a thin apartment wall.
• I spent way too much time staring at the wallpaper in the background of the living room. It’s hideous, right? Or maybe it’s just me.

There’s this moment where Beth is playing the piano, and the camera just sits there. It doesn’t pan away. It doesn’t cut to reaction shots. It just lets the music happen. In a modern movie, they’d have edited that to hell and back to keep the pace up. Here, it feels like the movie is just taking a breath.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Little Women (1933) through its definitive frames.

Sometimes the dialogue is so fast it sounds like they’re racing to finish the scene before the studio light bulbs burn out. It’s charming, though. It feels like they were actually having fun, which is more than I can say for some of the stuff I saw in The Code of the West recently.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Little Women (1933) through its definitive frames.

Is it perfect? No. The sets look like sets, and sometimes the costumes look a little too crisp, like they just came off the rack at the costume shop. But there’s a soul here. It doesn't have that polished, soulless sheen of modern prestige dramas. It’s just people, talking, crying, and trying to get by.

I left the movie feeling like I needed to write a letter to someone. Maybe that’s the point. It’s not trying to be a cinematic masterpiece. It’s just trying to be a good story, and it nails that.