Westinghouse Studio One: "Little Women: Jo's Story" (Westinghouse, CBS-TV,. aired live December 25, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Christmas night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of Christmast-themed movies, one obscure and one familiar. The obscure one was a CBS-TV Westinghouse Studio One episode originally aired on December 25, 1950 (so I had to do a manual search through all the Studio One episodes to come up with its imdb.com page, and that also meant Charles and I were watching it on the 72nd anniversary of the original telecast) called Little Women: Jo’s Story. It was actually a follow-up to the previous week’s episode, Little Women: Meg’s Story, which had been telecast December 18, 1950. If the two of them didn’t tell the entire story of Louisa May Alcott’s famous autobiographical novel, they probably came close. One of the remarkable aspects about this production was it was helmed by a female director, Lela Swift, who had a number of TV credits in the 1950’s but never got the feature-film assignments she clearly deserved. Instead she switched to producing and made a number of TV series, of which probably the most interesting was Dark Shadows, the late-1960’s Gothic-horror soap opera featuring a vampire as the lead character.

Luttie Women: Jo’s Story benefits from its focus on the character who’s by far the most fascinating of the four March sisters, Jo, the tomboy and proto-feminist who was played by Katharine Hepburn (almost inevitably) in the great 1933 film of the book directed by George Cukor. Though the most recent cinematic reference point for Little Women when this TV show was aired would have been MGM’s 1949 remake with June Allyson as Jo (directed by Mervyn LeRoy after Cukor turned it down because he thought Allyson was too far from Hepburn’s league), the Jo March of this telecast, Nancy Marchand, seemed to be aware that Hepburn had played this role 17 years earlier. Marchand copied quite a lot of Hepburn’s famous intonations and mannerisms, though not to such an extent that they became oppressive caricatures. Instead she used the older actress as a model while still creating her own reading of the part, and she managed to make Jo March the force of nature she has to be for the character to work. Indeed, the entire cast was quite good, though there’s a rather odd glitch on the imdb.com plot synopsis: it states that the story takes place during the U.S. Civil War and the March women’s father is off fighting in it, but by the time the story actually shown here takes place it’s 1868, the war has been over for three years, and the father, Jonathan March (Richard Purdy), is actually an on-screen character. And Marchand was just six years younger than Mary Sinclair, who plays her mother (also called Jo, though usually addressed as “Marmee”).

The story deals with Jo’s frustration at losing the chance to go to Europe as the traveling companion of a rich woman who’s a friend of her aunt, her sister Amy (Lois Hall) going in her place, Amy marrying Jo’s long-time boyfriend Lawrence (Berry Kroeger) after Jo turns down his proposal because she enjoys having him as a friend but nothing more, her trip to New York which is cut short when her frail sister Beth (June Dayton( is diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor, and her ultimate pairing off with a man twice her age, Professor Fritz Bhaer (Kent Smith, a surprising role for him; in the Hepburn film he was played by Paul Lukas, who was Hungarian-born but usually played Germans, both good guys as in Watch on the Rhine and bad guys as in Confessions of a Nazi Spy) after they meet in a New York boardinghouse where Jo is staying and bond over their shared love of books, music and high culture in general.

This was the third item on the public-domain DVD I dug out of the backlog that also contained an abbreviated (69 minutes instead of the original 78) of the 1935 British film Scrooge, an adaptation of Chalres Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Seymour Hicks in the title role, and a color cartoon, also from1935, called Somewhere in Dreamland produced by the Fleischer Brothers. I actually enjoyed this more than the other two: it was a heartwarming story but cut with enough fierceness and power to avoid being too sentimental, and whoever Lela Swift was, she got excellent performances from her cast even within the limitations and pressures of a live on-screen telecast, fortunately preserved on kinescope (a crude technology that involved sticking a film camera ini front of a TV monitor and filming the result, though the cameras needed to be synchronized to current for the difference in frame rates between the 24 frames per second standard for motion pictures and the 30 frames per second of TV). The shows were seen live on the East Coast and then the kinescope films were flown across the country so they could be shown on the West Coast three hours later, albeit in such poor video quality that when Desi Arnaz produced I Love Lucy he insisted it be shot on film so it would look as good no matter where in the U.S. it was shown.