Considering that there have been at least six big screen and small crew screen versions of "Little Women", I'm surprised this lesser-known Louisa May Alcott story has not been remade. It's a late-career entry for soprano Gloria Jean, a child star in the late 1930's, appearing in films with Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields, who became a teen co-star of Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan's in Universal musicals in the mid 1940's. Here, she's been banished to the independence Screen Guild studios, one of several B studios that popped up and quickly disappear in the mid-to-late 1940's. Co-starring with her is former Henry Aldrich, Jimmy Lydon, as well as Francis Rafferty, Elinor Donahue and a future TV granny.
As Jo March was for her crotchety great aunt, Gloria Jean's Polly Milton is the poor relation to a wealthy Boston family who moves in, becomes a teacher, tells off some gossipy society women in a sewing circle and is there for support when the family undergoes their own financial crisis. Throughout the film, she breaks into song at the most inappropriate times and ends up getting her cousins to sing along with her.
I suppose her being a music teacher is the perfect excuse to sing, but the film overall is very slow and often pondering, with pacing that is very similar to a silent melodrama. Irene Ryan (as "Anastasia!") does have a few amusing moments as the mother (more elaborately dressed than her usual screen charwomen and maids), but she really doesn't have anything substantial to do. Young Elinor Donahue before her TV fame guys get the best lines although Jean does brighten the film up when she explodes at those Boston gossips. It is a little nostalgic and spots, and the Christmas sequence is sweet as well, but it seemed a bit behind the times coming out in the turbulent late 1940's.
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