A spirited orphan with a vivid imagination endears herself to the older couple who take her in…and everyone else around her.
In this film adaption of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel, aging siblings Matthew (O.P. Heggie) and Marilla Cuthbert (Helen Westley) await the arrival of an orphan boy they’ve secured to work on their family farm, Green Gables. Much to Marilla’s chagrin, the orphanage sends a girl named Anne Shirley (Anne Shirley) instead. When Anne falls for her new classmate Gilbert (Tom Brown), the son of a rival family, it may test the Cuthberts’ patience — and threaten the stability of her new life.
Freckle-faced Anne Shirley, whom Mark Twain once described as fiction’s dearest child since Lewis Carroll’s little girl, reaches the screen in an enormously fine and touching bit of homespinning called “Anne of Green Gables.” Here, in the authentically catholic sense, is a magical family entertainment, manufactured with such genuine humanity and feeling and humor that it is equally fascinating for old and young. A gentle and immensely pleasing Arcadian idyll of an orphan girl on Prince Edward’s Island, it is certainly the peer of last season’s “Little Women” and an irresistible Christmas carnival as well. – NYT
In black and white.
Starring Anne Shirley, Tom Brown, O.P. Heggie, Helen Westley, Sara Haden.
Note: If anyone here knows when this version is set, please drop a note. It appears to be later than the Edwardian era, in which Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel was written, though the story seems to begin in the Victorian era.