In a small village in New England, the March sisters are growing up in the shadow of the Civil War, for which their father has been mobilized. The girls’ lives are to follow very different paths. After this adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic, Cukor became, as he put it, “typed as a ‘literary’ director.” Of this film, a Depression-era hit, he said: “It was very honest as a picture of what America had been 60 years before.”