‘American Masters’ on PBS takes intimate look at Louisa May Alcott’s life
Published: December 24, 2009, 12:30 am
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“I scrambled up to childhood, fell with a crash into girlhood and continued falling out of trees, over fences, uphill and downstairs, tumbling until the topsy turvy girl became the topsy turvy woman.”
That’s our first introduction to Louisa May Alcott in “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women,’” a fascinating documentary by filmmakers Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen, that airs at 9 p. m. Monday on PBS as part of its “American Masters” series.
There’s Louisa as a wee girl waving her legs in the air to form letters, during an alphabet lesson with her philosopher-father Bronson. There’s 3-year-old Louisa learning an early lesson in self-denial when she must give up the last plum cake to a schoolmate at her own birthday party. There are Bronson and Abba Alcott referring to their rambunctious second daughter respectively as “a devil” and “a merry little puss.” There’s 10-year-old Louisa, wearing a scratchy linen dress to avoid cotton, silk and wool and the evils of “slave labor, worm slaughter and sheep robbery.”
There’s Louisa running through the woods, Louisa writing furiously at her desk, Louisa touring Paris with the Polish soldier who served as the model for Laurie in “Little Women,” Louisa holding the hand of a dying soldier at a makeshift Civil War hospital in a hotel ballroom, Louisa hallucinating in the delirium of typhoid.
Alcott was a woman of strong opinions. She was also very funny. That comes through in this engaging documentary, which moves briskly along despite the challenging way screenwriter Reisen chose to tell her story—using only dialogue lifted from letters or journals. “We constructed scenes, and also had Louisa speak to the camera as if to an interviewer, or her niece, or a friend,” Reisen said in an e-mail interview. “It was a way to preserve the truth that gives power to documentary, and can so easily be undermined when you need to use actors in costumes because few photographs and no archival footage of the period exists.”
Four actresses, including the brilliant Elizabeth Marvel, play Louisa at various stages of her life. Jane Alexander plays Alcott friend and biographer Ednah Cheney, to frame part of the story. Along with several Alcott scholars, novelist Geraldine Brooks offers interesting commentary and her insights into why Alcott left her difficult father out of the largely autobiographical “Little Women” by sending him off to war. (Brooks’ novel, “March,” speculated on the relationship of Mr. March of “Little Women” with a slave woman.)
The costumes came from HBO Western series, “Deadwood.” Filming was done in original locations — Orchard House in Concord, Mass., where Alcott wrote “Little Women”; Fruitlands, the utopian community founded by Bronson Alcott where his family almost starved to death; and in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home in Concord, where teenage Louisa would borrow books from the great man’s library.
“It’s difficult to film in small spaces,” Reisen said, noting that the critically acclaimed John Adams HBO miniseries built sets, even though the original Adams House is in Quincy, Mass. “It cost a ridiculous amount to hide electric switches in historic rooms, and then we had to create electric fires and ‘candles’ so we could look authentically un-electric yet pose no threat of authentic fire,” Reisen said.
The biggest production challenge was the Civil War sequence, Reisen says. “We re-created a hospital in a ballroom of the same period, as the Union army did in the Georgetown Hotel — and had the most extended dramatic interplay with Louisa, a wounded soldier and the careless doctor who leaves it to her to tell the man that he will not survive.”
The documentary includes an interview with “the two ancient ‘literary sleuths,’ ” recalling their thrill at their chance discovery in 1942 of Alcott’s pen name and her secret production of the lurid thrillers she preferred writing over her bestselling, beloved juvenile books.
Another of Reisen’s favorite scenes, addressing Alcott’s interest in theater and acting, is Marvel “in glorious costumes playing Louisa’s blood-and-thunder characters — one a caped male villain with a French accent.” The documentary also breaks “the news of the real cause of Louisa’s death” from a pair of British doctors who believe a butterfly rash on her face in a portrait is evidence she suffered from lupus, Reisen notes.
This may also be some viewers’ first chance to see the impressive paintings by Louisa’s artistic youngest sister, May, who died of postpartum fever and left her baby daughter, Lulu, to Louisa’s care.
The documentary is an education about the period in American history and the Alcotts’ friendships with the leading reformers of their day. It is also an intimate look at the hardships of Alcott’s life — the poverty of her early life, the death of sister Elizabeth at 23, and the health problems that began to plague her in her late 30s.
The project — the Alcott screenplay and a companion biography published in October —was a labor of love for Reisen, who says she first came up with the idea for some kind of Alcott documentary 20 years ago when she saw Katharine Houghton perform her one-woman play “To Heaven in a Swing” at Bronson Alcott’s original Concord School of Philosophy on the premises of Orchard House.
But her admiration for Alcott reaches back to her childhood, when her mother gave her “Little Women” when she was around 10 years old and she was enchanted by Jo March, the rambunctious tomboy who was Alcott’s autobiographical alter-ego.
“Meeting Jo March was a significant event in my life and felt like it at the time,” Reisen says. “She represented an approach to life that was free and daring, and at the same time principled and unselfish.”
Reisen is certain that girls today still love “Little Women.”
“They tell us so all the time. Some of them read it once a year,” she said.
TV Preview
“American Masters: Louisa May Alcott”
★★★★
(Out of four)
WNED, Channel 17 9p.m. Monday
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