Rick Burin’s review published on Letterboxd:
There are three great versions of Louisa May Alcott's immortal 19th century novel, made in 1933 (with Katharine Hepburn as Jo), 1949 (June Allyson) and 1994 (Winona Ryder - that's the one where Christian Bale slobbers spit all over her face and they left it in the film); this is the least faithful and literate, but also perhaps my favourite, and certainly the one I've watched most often.
The cast is like one of those Tumblr posts where people imagine the casting of a modern film with classic actors, and just put all their favourite people in it: the sisters are Allyson, Janet Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret O'Brien (the ages of the younger two swapped so O'Brien could take the role), the parents - as in Meet Me in St Louis - are Mary Astor and Leon Ames, and there are supporting parts for Peter Lawford (as Laurie), Rossano Brazzi (the professor), Harry Davenport, Lucile Watson, Elizabeth Patterson and that twinkly-eyed old British rascal, C. Aubrey Smith. It's directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who made punchy Pre-Code movies at Warner Bros, before specialising in slushy melodramas over at MGM.
This film is a little episodic in places, and it takes a while to adjust to Allyson's slightly folksy, sometimes too broadly comedic characterisation, but that is ultimately the film's great attraction: a vibrant, intense and intelligent performance - Jo's emotions ever pressed to the surface - that leads to a succession of irresistible, extraordinarily moving sequences: especially her chat with Lawford under the tree, and the devastatingly restrained heart-to-heart with her mother, which has always stayed with me. She is, simply, exquisite.
Margaret O'Brien isn't far behind. Though she's maligned in some quarters today - particularly for the producers' propensity to get her to cry, an O'Brien party piece - she was one of the greatest child actors that cinema has seen; no less an authority than Lionel Barrymore once opined (possible prompted by the studio publicity machine) that "if she had been born in the Middle Ages, they'd have burned her as a witch". She made just one more film - The Secret Garden - before MGM put her out to pasture, but she shows here what a staggering and unteachable sincerity she possessed, and how painlessly she might have graduated to adolescent roles, had she been given the right ones. The scene on the stairs… the scene with the piano… the scene when Allyson returns: she is magnificent, and might another five years have made her the perfect candidate to play Mansfield Park's Fanny Price? Taylor, meanwhile, shows her comic smarts in a performance that has really grown on me over the years, and Astor is superb as the immortal Marmee, that idealised portrait of motherhood. In real life she was basically a nymphomaniac, so she really is doing good acting here.
Critics have derided this MGM version for looking like a chocolate box, but its gorgeous Technicolor cinematography and handsome sets never stunt the emotion of the piece: if anything they bring the periodic harshness of the material into sharp relief, whilst enrapturing the senses. Better still is Adolph Deutsch's stunning, sensitive score, which is never overused nor tips over into schmaltz, being used simply to augment the movie's towering peaks.
It doesn't all work: there are flat scenes (like Taylor arguing tediously with her schoolmates) and dud lines, Leigh is completely nondescript as Meg, and Watson turns a cleverly-written part into a parody of MGM period excess, but at its best it's a bewitching, exceptionally rewarding adaptation lit by Allyson's warm characterisation, O'Brien's lump-to-the-throat emoting, and cinematography and music that - at least to me - seems perfectly pitched.