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.
