However, there is one prop that appears twice and I deem to be an act of woeful negligence at best. It’s such a prominent prop and this mistake made me blanch when I first noticed it during my second screening of the film.
Late in the movie, Jo writes a lovely letter to Laurie, puts it in an envelope with his name on and places it in the wooden post box that the sisters and Laurie have been using to communicate since childhood. All rosy and graphically sound so far. Then, in a subsequent scene, once Jo finds out Laurie has married her sister Amy, she removes the letter from the post box, tears it up, and throws it in a stream… Except, the envelope she takes out of the box, isn’t the same one she put in!!! The name “Laurie” is a full inch lower on the envelope she removes compared to the one she put in. The handwriting makes it worse too, as although it looks like it’s written from the same hand, the large and elegant capital letter “L” has completely different curves to it. The final stroke curves down on the first letter and curves up on the second. All this makes it glaringly obvious that these letters were carelessly designed.