Scotland in Film by Forsyth Hardy; Edinburgh University Press, 1990

In the thirties, plays of proved popularity very often became films. Ready-made plots and dialogue and the reputation of the authors were magnets which the studios, with hungry, demanding production schedules to fill, found it difficult to resist. J. M. Barrie's plays were well-known in the United States by the time the cinema acquired sound. Charles Frohman produced The Little Minister on Broadway as early as 1897 and What Every Woman Knows in 1908, both starring Maude Adams. Even before the coming of sound there were two versions of The Little Minister, both released in 1921-- the Vitagraph film starring Alice Calhoun and Jimmy Morrison and the one made, more elaborately, by Paramount starring Betty Compson and George Hackathorne. Neither was as successful in drawing audiences as the stage productions with Maude Adams.

Time has not dealt kindly with Barrie's reputation. Fairy-tale and whimsy have long been out of fashion and ears are not attuned to 'the horns of elf-land gently blowing. It requires a considerable effort therefore to find virtue in the versions of What Every Woman Knows and The Little Minister made in 1934 which even at the time of their production must have appeared to present a deplorably maudlin image of the Scot. In a letter to Henry James, Stevenson once wrote of Barrie that 'there was genius in him, but there was a journalist at his elbow'. Barrie based his characters on observation of his contemporaries and introduced to audiences outside Scotland unfamiliar aspects of the country. Sometimes they were just too unfamiliar. What did they make in downtown Chicago of the rivalry between the Auld Lichts and the U.P.s in The Little Minister?

The theme of What Every Woman Knows -- that behind every successful man is a woman more perceptive and with greater resources -- has a certain universality. Barrie's particular illustration of it took the form of a bargain made by the family of a supposedly unattractive young woman that she shall legally marry a young man with political ambitions who, when he is successful in Parliament, fails to realise the source of his success. In its essentials the film was faithful to the original, although the four-act structure of the stage version was broken up to provide the film with greater variety in its background. In the part created by Maude Adams, Helen Hayes gave an appealing performance and Brian Aheame was the ambitious politician, blind to his wife's qualities. David Torrence as the father and Donald Crisp and Dudley Digges helped, as they invariably did, to sustain the illusion of a Scottish setting.

The Little Minister was chosen by R.K.O. when the company was looking for a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn after her success in Little Women. The actress had doubts about the part and accepted it when she learned that Margaret Sullavan had been approached. 'I didn't really want to play it until I heard that another actress was desperate for the role. Then it became the most important thing in the world that I should get it'. She may also have been influenced by the fact that Lady Babbie had twice been played on the stage by Maude Adams, to whom she was flattered to be compared.

It was not a happy choice for her or the company. The play had been rewritten twice to provide a better part for Maude Adams, and Barrie himself realised that it had become rather painfully manufactured (although it earned Ł80,000 for him in the first ten years of its production in the United States). He omitted it from the collected edition of his plays, published in 1928.