the audience applauded

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Blistering performances.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood often took a rather cavalier attitude towards classic material. A great example is 1936's "Romeo & Juliet", which featured actors two to three times the age of the characters and credits 'additional dialog' to an MGM writer! Another is "Wuthering Heights"...where the studio tacked on a HAPPY ending!! Because of this, I assumed that they'd similarly ruin Mark Twain's classic story of Huck Finn...especially because the story has a strong abolitionist slant...and studios OFTEN would sanitize these sorts of things in order to not offend racist audience members! I was shocked, then, when the story turned out to be very close to the source material...and as a result, it is a fine movie. It also deeply humanizes Jim and makes for an amazingly heartfelt film. Well worth seeing.By the way, at one point in the film, Huck is bitten by a rattlesnake and Jim cuts open the wound and sucks out the poison. Despite this being a common belief, this is NOT a good idea!! Kids, don't try this at home.

The others were the 1993 Elijah Wood film which was quite good, the 1974 musical version which was heavily flawed but still above-average and the 1975 Ron Howard version which was soggy and actually very bad. The photography in this film may be at times less than lavish and the final third feels rushed, but of the four it was the version that came across on its own as the best. As an adaptation perhaps it's not great, then again this is adaptation we're talking about(when something is not faithful to its source it doesn't mean it's immediately bad) and it does deserve judgement on its own merits. And while it's not perfect, it has many merits. The authentic river locations are a major plus, while the dialogue flows well and manages to be entertaining and poignant and the story still has cohesion and a good sense of atmosphere. The film may have primarily have been a showcase for Mickey Rooney but even with that the story is thankfully not ignored. Jim's jail scene is deeply heart-breaking. The pacing does feel rushed in the final third of the film but for most of the film it is just right, while the direction is very competent if not entirely imaginative. But the best asset about this version of Huckleberry Finn is the acting, so effective to the extent that it's like the characters themselves stepping out of the pages, and we are talking also about physical resemblances. Mickey Rooney's Huck is charming, mischievous and towards the end affecting(he may be somewhat too old, though not by much, but he doesn't look like he is), while Rex Ingram(personal favourite actor in the film) is very dignified and nuanced as Jim and Victor Kilian's Pap dominates quite terrifyingly. Walter Connolly and William Frawley are wickedly funny and menacing, in almost all four versions the Duke and the King have been scene-stealing characters(apart from 1975, hardly any the actors acquitted themselves well apart from Jack Elam). Elizabeth Ridson is fine as well. Overall, very good and underrated, of the four versions so far seen it's the best by quite some way. 8/10 Bethany Cox

It's been so long since I've read the novel that I have to think hard about how closely the film follows the print. Not that it's so important. A movie should be judged on its own merits, I know.Yet the book, despite a major screw-up towards the end, was a model of its kind. Huckleberry Finn, like Candide, belonged in C. Northrop Frye's category of "naive hero." Huck experienced all sorts of adventures, during which he exhibited two primary traits -- he was dumb and he had no sense of humor at all.The movie preserves the second more or less intact. Mickey Rooney -- pretty good as Huck -- enjoys himself often but only very rarely does he laugh. And he doesn't play tricks on anyone. He's mostly earnest.And the movie keeps Huck naive too. For instance, when he and (N word) Jim pick up the two tramps who have been thrown off a steamboat, he believes it when they both claim the choicest meals because they are European royalty. (That's Twain's jab at European pretensions.) But the studio -- MGM, the home of "family movies" -- gives Huck an affable outgoing quality that one doesn't read into the Huckleberry Finn of print. The novel's Huck was anosognosic. He didn't know he was naive. Mickey Rooney is lively. He dashes about, picks things up quickly, and he speaks rapidly. And some of the longueurs of the novel are omitted. The pace is more lively and the events spruced up.I'll give an example. Those two vagabonds, the con men. Huck and Jim haul them onto their raft and share their space and food with them. One of the bums, after some gentle prodding, provoked by some of his own hints, reveals that he is the Duke of Bridgeport. So Huck and Jim treat him with greater deference, while the other tramp watches and grows more sullen. Finally, after a lot of brooding and thinking, the second tramp hints that he too has royalty in his background. Attention turns to him. And after a lot of nudging he admits that he is the Dauphin, the lost son of the King of France, so he outranks the first bum. Part of the humor in this absurd situation comes from the growing envy of the second tramp. The movie drops this. It squishes the two fraudulent claims together so that the tramps lie in rapid sequence.The adapter and director do this all the way through. It's not bad. It adds zap to the story. One element the writers might not have played down so carefully is the fate of Jim, which after all is the most important thing hanging in the balance. Eliminated too is Twain's tragic sense of life, as when Finn senior picks up a jug of liquor at the beginning of the novel, shakes it, and reckons that there are about three more cases of DT left in it. (That's delirium tremens, a horrifying illness.) Still, throughout both the book and this adaptation, we can sense Twain's gentle skepticism regarding humans and their adventures. Twain edited the dying U. S. Grant's memoirs when the ex-president was broke and living in the Adirondacks. The memoirs contain this sentence about Grant's youth. "In school, I was taught so often that a noun was a thing that I began to believe it." I'll bet that's Twain, not Grant. The writer himself was a curious and Byronic figure. He spent a short while in the army of the Confederacy and wound up living in a Hartford mansion next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I've added a little to my review, which was originally posted on May 4th, 2006. Thank you to the 4 out of 6 people who said they found my original review helpful. You'll see my additions starting about a third of the way down: I re-read Mark Twain's novel this week, and borrowed this movie version yesterday from my public library. I have just watched it and have to say that it is one of the most thorough distortions of HUCKLEBERRY FINN ever filmed. The novel is unambiguously anti-slavery. When you read the book you are supposed to be horrified that Huck doesn't actually realize he's doing the morally right thing by helping Jim escape slavery. The movie constantly emphasizes that Huck is right to be ashamed that he's helping Jim. M-G-M was so afraid of offending the bigoted part of its audience that it turned Twain's irony upside-down. The studio dispensed with Twain's dialogue in all but the most fleeting moments and substituted tepid bits of business. Key revelations are placed way too early. There is a courtroom scene in the movie while in the book there is not even a trial. None of this was done to make it a better movie. All of it was done to make everything safe for M-G-M. Mickey Rooney as Huck and Walter Connolly as the Dauphin give stand-out performances, but the dialogue, which surely isn't Twain's for more than a millisecond, serves them poorly. Rex Ingram's performance as Jim would have been inspiring if Twain's words were left intact. Instead he's reduced to interpreting lines from a melodrama having absolutely nothing to do with the towering work of literature this movie pretends to have as its source. Finally, M-G-M is not entirely to blame for this awful distortion. The blame rests on America's profound history of racism; a history Mark Twain wanted us to confront; a history deliberately, decidedly ignored in this outrageous revision of his art. HERE'S the racism of this movie: While, near the end of the novel, Jim is put in chains because of the simple fact that he is a runaway slave, the movie justifies Jim's imprisonment by having the mob think Jim has murdered Huck. Any mob would be somewhat justified in capturing and jailing a man who is thought to have murdered a child. But in the book, the people who put Jim in chains think he is a different runaway slave. They put him in chains simply because he's been turned in for a reward. The people who have turned him in (the Duke and the Dauphin) have never known that Jim has been accused of murder. This is because the Duke and the Dauphin don't know where Huck and Jim come from. The Duke and the Dauphin want money, so they print up a false ad with a description of Jim and plaster it on billboards saying he's a runaway slave. The Duke and the Dauphin are not even certain he actually is a runaway slave. Jim is put in chains by people who have never heard that he's suspected of murder. Hollywood, afraid to remind people of what their ancestors actually did, makes the lynch mob rather sympathetic. HERE'S a distortion of Twain's book. Early in the book, Jim and Huck discover a shack which has been destroyed in a flood. There's a dead man in there. Both Jim and Huck know the body is someone who's been shot. But only Jim sees the face. He tells Huck not to look. This body is not mentioned again until the second-to-last paragraph of the entire novel, when Jim, who has just learned that he's been freed in his late owner Miss Watson's will, tells Huck that the dead man in the shack was his father. The movie, however, has Jim confess to Huck, about two scenes after the scene in which they find the body, that he didn't tell Huck at first because he didn't want Huck to stop helping him run away. Huck then gets angry at Jim and calls him a false friend for not telling him. In the novel, Jim does not say why he didn't tell Huck at first and he certainly offers no apology, as he does in the movie. Huck does not call Jim a false friend in the novel. What happens in the final paragraph (which comes just after Huck learns that the dead man was his father) is that Huck tells us that he's going to head West to avoid Aunt Sally's plan to adopt him. We are not told if he's mad at Jim for taking him down the river without telling him his father's dead. Because we know Huck had been running away from his abusive father and yet still loved him, we can assume his world was shattered when he learned his father was dead. So, what does Depression-era Hollywood do with a story which ends with its main character determined to get away from everybody he's ever known? It has him, in the last scene in the movie, promising Aunt Sally he'll be good. He's so good, in fact, that he's just persuaded her, one scene earlier, to believe him when he tells her that slavery is wrong (which he never says in the book)and that Jim should be freed. She agrees to free him, in this movie, if Huck promises to do his schoolwork and not smoke and always to wear his shoes. He promises to do all that. The scene ends cutely with Huck secretly slipping his shoes off. This is not merely a cute ending. This is an ending designed to counter Twain's other point, which is that society is deeply corrupt and forces creatures of nature, such as Huck, to live in a state of perpetual flight.