Costume dramas that were centered around family situations were very much the call of the mid-1930's day. On the strength of her success with Little Women, Katharine Hepburn. was cast in two features of adaptations of J.M. Barrie's stories produced by Pandro S. Berman for RKO. Hepburn illuminated as the wild and willful Babbie in 1934's The Little Minister and in a disparate mood, gave a restrained and elegant account of the seasoned spinster in George Stevens' Quality Street (1937). Stevens would direct Hepburn in another of her finest characterizations - that of the funny but ineffectual small-town snob in Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams (1935)
It was Selznick again who produced one of the best Mark Twain adaptations The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), directed by Norman Taurog who made a prior version of Huckleberry Finn with Jackie Coogan in 1931. This version, the second in Hollywood during the decade, starred character players including Victor Jory as Injun Joe. The film owed much to the art direction of William Cameron Menzies and reflected once again Selznick's tireless quest for the perfect team in each production. Indeed it is a notable fact borne out by MGM's A Tale of Two Cities (1935) in which Ronald Colman gave the definitive performance of Sydney Carton - that wherever several versions exist of the same classic novel it is almost always the Selznick version that is best remembered.