Little Women.

In Gillian Armstrong's new version of it, Little Women has become Spunky Women. Of course, there was no shortage of spunk in the classic 1933 George Cukor production starring Katherine Hepburn, but the high spirits of the March family were also enacted with an unabashed emotionalism that was utterly true both to Louisa May Alcott and the Victorian era. During Cukor's version of the wedding of Meg March and John Brooke, the bride gently checks her groom's first postnuptial embrace; murmurs, "The first kiss is for Marmee"; and swoops into her mother's arms! Utterly authentic within the context and the period ambiance, but could a modern audience digest it? Gillian Armstrong and her scriptwriter, Robin Swicord, don't test our tolerance. There is plenty of emotion in this movie, but it has been carefully fashioned to avoid the least hint of gush.

The tone of any version of Little Women is set by the actress who plays Jo, the tomboy who grows up to be a successful writer, to be, indeed, Louisa May Alcott. (This new version stresses the autobiographical element.) In 1933, Jo was played by the glorious, the monstrous, the superhuman Hepburn, and though Cukor was too fine a director to let his film become a star vehicle, Hepburn infused every shot she was in with her specialty: New England briskness rendered radiant. No one who has seen it can forget the way Hepburn looks when she removes bonnet to reveal to her sisters her drastically cropped hair. (The tresses have been sold to provide for an emergency.) That mixture of flutter, defiance, and sneaky delight in the knowledge that her already odd appearance has now been made odder, was the essence of Hepburn's Jo and a permanent fact of Hepburn's screen personality. (Her later, equally great performance of the vacationing schoolteacher in Summertime was Jo autumnized.) She was the motor of Cukor's fluent and high-pitched movie just as, in Marvyn Le Roy's 1949 adaptation, June Allyson's Jo was the ingredient that made an already saccharine production truly sickening.

But here, Winona Ryder, a talented actress-in-the-making rather than a full-fledged star, brings romping energy and a certain gracious assertiveness to her role. She is engaging rather than magnetic and therefore both helpful and hurtful to the production. In the first two-thirds, with the action mainly in the March household, Ryder nicely interacts with the other actresses and rarely takes, or is given, center stage. But later, when Jo is on her own in New York City, Ryder fails to reward the focus now brought to bear on her character, and this permits a certain listlessness to creep into the film.

And there's another letdown in the New York episodes: Christian Bales, quite interesting as Laurie, the boy next door, is supplanted as romantic interest by the Professor Bhaer of Gabriel Byrne, who oozes so much quiet, self-effacing charm and nonthreatening masculinity that he comes perilously close to simpering. Bhaer is intended by Alcott to be to Jo exactly what Laurie wasn't: a soulmate who can elicit what is best in her without seeking to dominate. The character's name is a pun: Bhaer is a bear whose embrace supports rather than crushes. Byrne's twinkling can't convey this and certainly doesn't approach the achievement of Paul Lukas who, in his lumbering old-professor solidity, was the quintessence of the "good German."

So it is the Concord section of this movie--when the "little women" are still little--that really works. Susan Sarandon, as the mother, has unwisely neglected to rid herself of her redneck twang but is otherwise just right: firm without being bossy, idealistic but not priggish. Meg and Amy are adequately played, the latter by two actresses since Amy begins her screen life as a little girl and then grows into the nearest thing to a sexpot that a Concord maiden can be. For the role of Beth, the sickly sister wafted to heaven by seraphim, the director took a real chance that narrowly paid off by casting Claire Danes (star of TV's "My So-Called Life"). Danes doesn't look frail; her face is plain, its features rather flat, in some shots almost brutal. But the actress's knack for conveying a sort of frozen bewilderment at the carnage life makes of the infirm (and of us all, eventually) works well in portraying Beth's invalid fortitude and her doomed sweetness without a touch of schmaltz.

Gillian Armstrong was fated to direct this movie. Her wonderful feature debut, My Brilliant Career, was a sort of Little Women of the outback, and its concluding scene, Judy Davis's rejection of Sam Neil's offer of marriage, is a virtual twin of Jo's rejection of Laurie's proposal. Armstrong's feeling for locale blesses this movie. The cavernous, bare hallway of Aunt March's house is redolent of both the old lady's wealth and her loneliness. The March attic is both Jo's magical literary workshop where she scribbles while "longing for transformation," and a perfectly miserable little loft. The New York City where Jo tries to make her fortune is quite rightly no metropolis but the overgrown village of 1870 with muddy streets traversed by horse-drawn carriages.

Armstrong also uses weather and the passing seasons to advance the story. Much more than in any previous version, we can sense the March girls growing as the trees foliate, defoliate, and flourish again. The beauty of New England's autumn is here captured in all its bravado, and the juxtaposition of the intense blue of wintry skies (courtesy of Geofrey Simpson's excellent camerawork) with the fireside gold of the interiors exactly evokes what G.K. Chesterton called (in his Dickens book) "the happiness that stands at bay."

But best of all is the director's delicacy at portraying fairly subtle human interactions. (Yes, Alcott can be subtle.) For instance, Armstrong, Ryder, and Bales prepare the way for Jo's rejection of Laurie not by portraying the latter as a milksop but by showing that Jo's affection for him is so sisterly that she can't begin to regard him as a lover.

Cultural strata are also delineated: when Beth lies near death, you hear the Irish Catholic maid murmuring her Hail Marys while the transcendentalist-reared but basically Protestant sisters keep a lovingly silent vigil.

Yet, all said and done, there is a slight discrepancy between adaptor and source. Armstrong is just as firmly a creature of this century as Alcott was of hers, and Armstrong doesn't stretch herself toward the alien sensibility as much as Cukor did in his adaptation. She reins in Alcott's swooning emotionalism, trims her preachiness, underscores and even improves upon the book's infrequent comedy. This Little Women is a cooled-off Alcott, less treacly than the novel, less bound by convention and cliche. But it is also less energetic, less psychologically startling (in the scene of Amy's near-drowning, Alcott conveys Jo's darker side better than Armstrong does), less possessed by the lyrical high-mindedness that animates the book. This is a Little Women well-staged, carefully researched, and often (as in Beth's death scene) emotionally powerful. But, though it broaches the word "transcendentalism" as earlier versions never did, this adaptation is a little too earthbound, a little too untranscendent.