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.
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.