LYCOS RETRIEVER 
June Allyson: Women
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Allyson began to vary her image, switching from films that tapped her comic skills, such as The Bride Goes Wild (1948, again co-starring Johnson), to dramas requiring a pathos that she projected equally well. In The Three Musketeers (1948) she plays the doomed Constance. In The Stratton Story (1949), co-starring with James Stewart for the first time, she is the understanding wife of Monty Stratton, the pitcher who lost a leg in a hunting accident. And she found her favorite role as Jo in Little Women (1949), delivering a touching performance that some compared favorably to Katharine Hepburn's interpretation in the 1934 version of the story. By this time Allyson and costar Margaret O'Brien were considered MGM's "best criers."
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In 1944, Allyson had her career-making role in the musical movie Two Girls and a Sailor. Her subsequent film credits include Music for Millions, Her Highness and the Bellboy, The Sailor Takes a Wife, Two Sisters from Boston, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Secret Heart, The Bride Goes Wild, The Three Musketeers, Little Women, The Reformer and the Redhead, Right Cross, Too Young to Kiss (for which she received a Golden Globe Award), The Girl in White, Battle Circus, The Glenn Miller Story, Executive Suite, Woman's World, Strategic Air Command, The Shrike, The Opposite Sex, My Man Godfrey and A Stranger in My Arms. She ... had her own television program, The DuPont Show with June Allyson. In the late 1960s, with the peak of her career past her, she returned to Broadway in the play Forty Carats. That marked her last appearance on the Great White Way.
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Allyson returned to the New York stage. After her appearance in Best Foot Forward in 1941, she was selected for the 1943 film version, and followed it up with several other musicals, including Two Sisters from Boston (1946) and Good News (1947). She ... played straight roles such as Constance in The Three Musketeers (1948), the tomboy Jo March in Little Women (1949), and Glenn Miller's wife in The Glenn Miller Story (1953). June was very adept at opening the waterworks on cue, and many of her films incorporated a crying scene. Fellow MGM player Margaret O'Brien recalled that she and Allyson were known as "the town criers."
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Curiously, Allyson appeared in more remakes than any other star in cinema history, and inevitably suffered by comparison with those who previously took the roles. Exceptions could be made for Good News, in the Bessie Love part, and in The Opposite Sex (1955), the musical remake of The Women, in which she was less anaemic than Norma Shearer. She was a spunky Jo in Little Women (1949); the runaway heiress in You Can't Run Away from It (1956), a lame musical directed by Powell; the rich girl falling for her butler in My Man Godfrey (1957); and an American tourist involved in a doomed affair in Munich in the soppy Interlude (1957). But although she gave a good account of herself in all of them, she could not obliterate the memory of Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne.
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In 1944 Allyson caused consternation at MGM by marrying the twice-divorced Dick Powell. They had a son and adopted a daughter, but on the screen she could not grow up. In the remake of Little Women she was 31 and still playing a teenager. Even more popular was The Glenn Miller Story (1954)... starring Jimmy Stewart.
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Allyson subsequently played in several other musicals including “Two Sisters from Boston” in 1946 and “Good News” in 1947. She next played straight roles in “The Three Musketeers” in 1948, “Little Women” in 1949, and “The Glen Miller Story” in 1953. During the fifties Allyson became one of the top box office attractions in the country. During that time period she was voted the number one female box office attraction in the country for six years in a row. In 1955, Allyson was the number one box office attraction in the country for both the male and female categories.
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