The Peculiarity of Time
Wrestling with our sense of recentness
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
I recently introduced my kids to the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Well, I sort of did at least.
They have yet to watch the movie, but I instead played a radio adaptation of the movie for them on a recent long car ride. The radio version features Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed reprising their roles as George and Mary Bailey.
The radio show condenses down the 131 minute film script into an hour-long program (although with show introductions, commercials, and station identifications, the content is probably closer to 48 minutes or so). As such, there are some liberties taken with the story to shorten it. Some secondary characters like Violet and Annie are not present at all.
The radio version is familiar and comforting, yet it also feels like it’s from a completely different world. It was released on March 10, 1947, as part of the Lux Radio Theatre.
Lux Radio Theatre was a popular radio program that ran from 1934 until 1955, broadcasting more than 900 episodes. Originally began as a way to adapt Broadway shows for radio, it broadcast from New York. The show eventually moved to Hollywood and was known for adapting popular movies, retaining the original stars of the film as voice actors whenever possible. The radio plays were performed live for a studio audience and were broadcast around the country.
The whole idea of movies adapted for radio sounds a bit foreign these days, where practically any movie can be streamed on demand to a handheld phone, but this radio show comes from an era before there was even home television. There was no way to experience the story of movies at home, aside from these radio adaptations. Once a film had its limited run in a movie house, it might return in a few years or it might never be seen again. Radio was essentially HBO or Netflix for the pre-TV age.
Lux Radio Theatre derives its name from Lux soap, a soap flake product marketed by Lever Brothers company (the precursor to Unilever, which today is an international conglomerate selling brands like Dove, Vaseline, TRESemmé, Liquid I.V., and Hellman’s).
The recording of It’s a Wonderful Life that survives includes the original packaging, including commercials, although they really aren’t “advertisements” in the same way that we think of today. They are integrated with the story to an extent and they all revolve around Lux soap.
For instance, here’s a line from the first minute or so of the broadcast, just as the show is beginning:
“Our story starts before the War, when life was normal, shortages were generally unknown, and simple luxuries, like Lux soap, were abundant. I won’t say that’s the only reason people said ‘it’s a wonderful life,’ but I do know from the thousands of letters in our files, that most of them said ‘it’s a wonderful soap!’ And they keep right on saying it day after day. In fact the popularity of Lux soap is what makes it possible to present such entertainment as Frank Capra’s great production It’s A Wonderful Life.”
If this were on social media today, it would need to include #ad, or at least #luxpartner.
The commercial sections are probably the most dated part in fact, with another ad break including this strange section of voiceover:
“The popular theory about beautiful blondes is that they are content to be merely decorative. Our lovely guest tonight, Miss Susan Blanchard, completely disproves that idea. Besides being a hard working Fox starlet, Susan, I understand you’re a wonderful cook.”
There are probably sections of the film that don’t hold up quite as well in our modern era, but there’s something about the entire package of the radio show that make it feel especially dated.
I was chuckling at the idea that my kids’ knowledge of this classic story are primarily through this old fashioned radio hour when something occurred to me that should be obvious. The film, which has become a Christmas tradition and continues to be watched year after year, and the radio show, which is largely forgotten and relegated to obscure corners of the internet, were produced at the exact same time.
The film opened in select theaters in December, 1946, with a wide release beginning in January, 1947. The radio program ran just two months later on CBS Radio.
They are both fully representative of their times, yet somehow the film feels more immediate, more accessible, and it endures.
A few months ago, we were back in our old stomping grounds in Eastern Massachusetts and decided to tour Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House museum in Concord. This is the home where Alcott wrote and set Little Women and it is largely preserved today as it looked in the mid-1800s.
My daughter read Little Women this past summer and I thought she might enjoy seeing the home in person. She has yet to see any of the film adaptations of the story, so for her, this was a chance to really allow her imagination to become real.
I have not read the novel myself, but have seen two of the film adaptions (the 1994 version starring Winona Ryder and the 2019 version directed by Greta Gerwig). Without the frame of reference of the book, I was surprised with how moved I was by touring the home.
The Orchard House was alive in a sense that’s hard to describe. I could feel the life of the Alcott family in that space. There was the portrait of Beth hanging over the melodeon (small organ). In the novel, she dies in the home, but in reality, she died as the family was preparing the Orchard House for their move. Her presence and her absence were both palpable.
There was May Alcott’s room (Louisa’s sister who became the character Amy in the book), which was covered in pencil sketches on nearly every wall surface and piece of woodwork. May would go on to move to France and become a famous artist in her own right.
Perhaps most moving was Louisa’s room, which featured a built-in desk made by her father Bronson Alcott and a flower wall painting done by May. This was the room where Louisa did her writing. There was a black and white photo on the wall of Alcott in that space, much of it decorated in the old photos exactly as it still was in 2025 as though no time had passed.
The home was clearly a space where great ideas were allowed to flourish and Bronson Alcott’s daughters were allowed to express themselves in creative ways, which was not the experience for many women of that era. Bronson himself was an educational reformer and strong abolitionist. The school house that he built on the property for hosting lectures still stands and is a part of the tour. Neighbors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau were frequent guests in the home and collaborators with the Alcotts.
Only having the films for reference, I was amazed at how beautifully the filmmakers had brought to life the world of the Alcotts. I worked in Concord while Greta Gerwig and crew were filming the 2019 adaptation, which also filmed at locations in Harvard, Groton, and Ipswich, MA and remember feeling like Gerwig had really captured the feel of these small New England towns, both then and now.
For that film, the Orchard House facade was recreated in front of a large historic manor, serving as the home of the Laurence family. The replica house is maybe a mile or two from the original home. The interiors were recreated on a soundstage.
After visiting the actual Orchard House, I began to wonder if other film adaptations also captured the feel of the home as faithfully as Gerwig. While I didn’t watch any of the films in full, I went back and watched the trailers for the versions of Little Women dating from 1994, 1949 (featuring Elizabeth Taylor), and 1933 (with Katharine Hepburn).
Judging from the previews, each film felt like a product of its time. The 1933 one feels flat in its soft focus, black and white imagery. The acting (at least judging by the trailer) feels big, melodramatic, and almost shouty, perhaps a holdover from stage acting in the days before amplification. 1933 was a mere six years after talking pictures had debuted.
The 1949 trailer opens with a spread of classic novels on a table, surrounded by knick knacks of the era. It feels like browsing the aisles of an antique store nowadays. When moments from the film are seen, they are in bright Technicolor. They are filmed on a soundstage but somehow have a grandeur to them, akin to Gone with the Wind, Meet Me in Saint Louis, or The Wizard of Oz.
In all versions of the film though, the set designers and builders have recreated the floorpan of the house in Concord that I visited. There were liberties taken with color palette and props, but each film still managed to capture the essence of the home. Perhaps that’s why the house felt so alive when I stepped into it.
The Orchard House opened as a museum in 1912, so it’s likely that members of the film crew from all eras made the trek to Concord and used the actual home as a reference. It’s a strange thought, imaging some long dead art director standing in the same spaces I was in recently. Somehow that’s even a stranger thought to me than imagining Louisa May Alcott herself in those spaces before the invention of motion pictures at all.
The reality is that by 1912 when the museum opened, and certainly by 1933 when the first “talkie” version of the story was filmed, the way that the Alcotts lived was already historic and would have been a glimpse into the past for most visitors or filmgoers.
What I felt as accessible and immediate standing in that space feels distant and long ago seeing Katharine Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor in a similar aesthetic space on a Hollywood lot.
It’s kind of the opposite of what I described above with It’s a Wonderful Life, where the film endures but the radio play feels dated. In the case of Little Women, the house (and presumably the novel) feel current and alive, while the films feel like time capsules from different eras.
I could almost imagine myself living in the same time as the actual Alcott family in their home, but Katharine Hepburn, by contrast, feels incredibly far removed from my own life. Heck, even the 1994 film feels like it’s from a long ago past, but Kirsten Dunst and I are only about a year apart in age.
As an aside, I wonder if the 2019 film still feels as it did when I first viewed it upon release. I haven’t watched it in the last six years, and I wonder how changing circumstances in our world, namely COVID, may impact the viewing of that film today.
My larger point in all of this is that even though time is linear, our experience of it and perception of it isn’t. There are events that happened a year or two ago that feel like another lifetime, but there are moments from 30 years ago that I can recall like they just happened.
It’s also interesting to me how the perception of a story can change by the media it is released on, even if the source material is nearly identical. A radio show and a film from the same time and using the same overall story can feel completely different.
In the same way, a period piece can never be a true reflection of the time in which the story is set. A story about the 1860s will look different when told in 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019.
Perhaps at the end of the day though, a good story is a good story, no matter the media or the time frame.
Thanks for reading Willoughby Hills! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Related Reading
What Does It Mean to be “Old”?
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.