Produced by Joseph Mankiewicz and directed by Richard Thorpe, with a screenplay by Hugo Butler that was based on the classic novel by Mark Twain, this average adventure drama features Mickey Rooney in the title role.Huck lives with the widow Douglass (Elisabeth Risdon) and her sister Miss Watson (Clara Blandick); their Black slave Jim, who's a big part of the story, is played by Rex Ingram. Huck's fearsome and largely absent father 'Pap' is played by Victor Kilian. Walter Connolly and William Frawley play two con-men, dubbed the King and the Duke respectively; Lynne Carver and Jo Ann Sayers play these men's intended victims, Mary Jane and Susan Wilkes. Minor Watson plays Captain Brandy, who later helps these sisters and Huck as well. Harlan Briggs (uncredited) plays Mr. Rucker, a friend of the sisters' recently departed father.Huck would rather fish in the mighty Mississippi River than go to school, hence he's about to be passed over (e.g. not promoted) by his teacher. This will disappoint the widow Douglass, and especially her less tolerant (of his boyish ways) sister Miss Watson, greatly. But that's not Huck's only problem: his missing thought-to-be-dead (by some) father arrives to claim his son. Pap's actual intent is to extort money from the widow whom he knows would like to keep Huck. This prompts the boy to run away, but he's caught in the process by his laying-in-wait Pap, who then holds him captive in his ramshackle "cabin" by the river.When Pap leaves to get the money from the widow, Huck escapes and makes it look like he'd been shot and then drowned in the river. When Huck later runs into Jim, who'd been hoping to buy his freedom from the widow but had learned that he was being sold (e.g. so that she could pay Pap for Huck), he's surprised that the slave has run off. Huck goes into town to see "what's what" and learns that Jim is being wanted for the boy's own (phony) murder! While fleeing, Jim sees something that he chooses to keep secret from Huck, that the boy's father is dead.While escaping down the river in hopes of getting to Cairo and a free state (Illinois), Huck and Jim encounter a couple of men who've just been thrown off a river boat. The two are able to con neophytes Huck and Jim into believing they're royalty, when actually they'd been ejected for cheating while gambling. The 'King' and the 'Duke' are on their way to their next confidence game: pretending to be the relatives of a wealthy man who'd recently died in order to fleece his daughters out of their inheritance.In fact, once ashore, they're quickly able to fool the man's best friend Mr. Rucker, who then helps to legitimize the claimants to these daughters, Mary Jane and Susan Wilkes. Another family friend, river boat Captain Brandy doesn't believe the con men but, in part because they'd cleverly given the deceased's $2,000 in gold to his daughters, Mary Jane and Susan choose to trust in their legitimacy, giving the con men back the gold. Huck has witnessed the entire set- up, and his conscience doesn't like it, but he'd been afraid to speak up because he'd found out that the con men know about the $1,000 reward for Jim, who'd stayed a little up the river hidden with the raft.When the con men fall off to sleep, Huck takes the gold and ends up putting it in the open casket before escaping to Captain Brandy's home, where he tells what he knows about fraud being perpetrated. Before morning, however, the con men wake up to discover the missing gold. Meanwhile, Huck had gone to see Jim. The next thing you know, here comes the sheriff with his dogs to capture Jim who, along with Huck, is able to escape yet again until the boy gets bitten by a rattlesnake and the slave selflessly takes him into town to see a doctor. The con men are tarred and feathered.While recovering from his snakebite, Huck isn't told that Jim was sent back to be tried for murder until it's almost too late. However, Huck, with help from Captain Brandy, is able to return, piloting the river boat himself, in time to save Jim's life (from some vigilantes that want to lynch him). He then negotiates the slave's freedom with the widow, by promising not to play hooky from school, to wear shoes, not to smoke, etc..

Fun adaptation of Mark Twain's classic novel with ideal casting of Mickey Rooney as Huck Finn. It's the story of an adventurous boy who sails down the Mississippi with his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Your kids might enjoy it if you're lucky enough to have kids who can appreciate older films or smart enough to understand the period in which the story takes place. Even if you don't have kids who fit that description, I'd say it's still worth trying to get them to watch it with you there to answer any questions they may have. The film obviously has some subject matter that kids (and a lot of adults) today may be oversensitive to. I'm speaking primarily of the character Jim, played brilliantly here by Rex Ingram. This part of the story is watered down from the novel but still people will grouse about it anyway. It's not surprising considering some have been trying to get the book banned from schools for decades now and have sadly been successful in some of our more politically militant indoctrination centers. Some fans of the book won't like that some changes have been made. It's not a perfect adaptation, for sure, but it's the best of any that I've seen.

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.