An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving

The warm family relationships that abound in this production makes the movie an appealing one.

Taking place after the civil war, it chronicles the life of a widow with 3 children who are poverty stricken. The eldest daughter, a writer with a great imagination, concocts a story that ultimately draws their wealthy grandmother to their New Hampshire home.

Jackie Bisset plays the stern grandmother. She is entirely too young for the part. Nevertheless, she gives a gem of a performance as a wealthy matron who married a much older widower than she and had a daughter with him to secure herself financially.

The daughter ran away years before with a stable boy who has now died. Both mother and daughter must confront past events in front of the children.

The story is filled with scarlet fever epidemics abounding.

The film also deals with a getting kind grandmother who will go to any length to get her children and grandchildren out of the poverty cycle.

It is a nicely done film with a triumph of the family spirit in this season of giving.

I think that the problem that most people have with this movie is that it is so far removed from Louisa May Alcott's story that the only thing they have in common is the title and the name of the family. And on a more personal level, my maternal grandmother being a Bassett from the old New England family, I didn't like that they turned Ellis Bassett into an Irishman, when Bassett is one of the oldest and well-known Norman-English names in England and Old Yankee names in New England. And so as not to make anyone mad, I do have some Irish in me and I don't have a problem with being Irish. It is just the turning of a name into something it isn't. It would be like calling the Kennedy family English.

So, now that I gave what I didn't like about the movie, this is what I loved. The movie was excellent. The costuming was out of this world. The homes in the movie were perfect. The plot line was good. The actors were great. And like with most Hallmark movies, I really felt good at the end of the movie.

So if you watch this movie just on its own, not comparing it to the original story by Louisa May Alcott, then you're going to love it.

I purchased the movie and it will be one of the movies that my family and I watch every year near Thanksgiving Day.

Very well written. I love the respect given to the audience who allowed to discover characters through the story. We are not told by narration who, what where or why.

Drama develops naturally to develop our understanding as does our love of characters.

I love this movie and have tried to see it each year around Thanksgiving if I can manage to catch it. Tatiana Maslany is great in a role she completed well before Orphan Black made her famous. I'm only sorry she didn't perform in the follow up "An Old Fashioned Christmas" as the young woman who took her place in that movie is nowhere near as good.

While I gather from other reviews that this story is far removed from the Louisa May Alcott story on which it is loosely based, I still felt it maintains an affinity with Alcott's writing and that Tillie is a believable Alcott heroine. The love story with Gad and the familial rapprochement that is the focus of the storyline are all quite charming and make one feel the hope of the holidays. Best of all, they actually filmed it somewhere with snow and cold weather, versus the horrible Hollywood tendency to blow some fake snow over green bushes and pretend it's winter. Definitely worth a watching.

It wasn't great but it was good. I'm not as harsh as the reviewer who gave it three stars, and I didn't give it 10 stars either. I gave it 7 stars, which is in between. What did I like about it? The story was believable. Scarlet fever, and other diseases that we have medicines for today, was a killer. It was set on a farm in New Hampshire just after the Civil War. Tilly, the oldest of three children, is a writer who concocts an incredible story to get her wealthy grandmother to come up. Then, as now, people were worried about losing their homes in foreclosure. Ellis Bassett was killed in the war and Mrs. Bassett has to pay rent to Mr. Hopkins, whose son. Gad, wants to marry Tilly, but her mother opposes it. Where does she go? What does she do? Watch the movie and find out,