Huckleberry Finn
Studio: Kino Lorber
Oct 03, 2025
Net Unique
Images by Kino Lorber
Only a few characters in American historical past have captured the American zeitgeist like Tom Sawyer. First revealed in 1876, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer shortly turned a family novel that captured the hearts of households and provided a playfully nostalgic escape from a nation nonetheless reeling from the Civil Struggle’s devastation. By the Nineteen Twenties, aided by the rise of the highschool motion and the rising push for American nationalism, Tom Sawyer reached its peak in American tradition.
Naturally, Paramount Footage began churning out movie variations of this beloved story. They launched three silent variations between 1917 and 1920 (Tom Sawyer, Huck and Tom and Huckleberry Finn; all directed by William Desmond Taylor), and the arrival of sound ushered in a reboot of the franchise in 1930. With Jackie Coogan (“the child” in Charlie Chaplin’s The Child) as Tom, John Cromwell directing and Charles Lang behind the digital camera, they turned the 1930 Tom Sawyer into the largest field workplace hit that yr. With such success on their arms, Paramount determined to provide this adaptation of Huckleberry Finn for launch the next yr.
In Huckleberry Finn, the kid stars (Jackie Coogan, Junior Durkin, and Mitzi Inexperienced) every reprise their roles from Tom Sawyer; Grove Jones and William Slavens return to adapt the screenplay. In any other case, most of Tom Sawyer’s manufacturing group didn’t return. Whereas the appearing and technical components of Huckleberry Finn are completely enough, they aren’t sufficient to compensate for a screenplay that lacks depth and erases most of Twain’s story.
Whereas Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is childlike and enjoyable, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is just not. The novels could share characters and a mischievous, episodic construction, however Huckleberry Finn carries a seriousness and ethical weight that Tom Sawyer doesn’t contact. So as an alternative of truly adapting Twain’s masterpiece, the movie exploits the novel’s title in an ungainly reimagining that turns Tom Sawyer right into a lead character (he, too, is on the raft on this model) and abbreviates the complete Mississippi River odyssey into an 80-minute, two-episode ‘white picket fence’ boyhood journey.
On this telling, Huck’s central battle largely revolves round his worry of cooties and never wanting to take a seat in class studying methods to spell “Pennsylvania.” Including Tom Sawyer into the journey turns all of Huck’s escapades into video games of pirate play. And maybe most notably, the screenplay fully ignores Jim’s standing as a runaway slave, avoiding any acknowledgement of the novel’s central battle. Plainly Paramount wished the income from placing out a sequel, however they didn’t need to take care of the precise themes of Twain’s materials.
Paramount’s 1931 adaptation of Huckleberry Finn represents one of many earliest examples of the “cash-grab sequel.” They tried to duplicate the success of the unique by recycling Tom Sawyer’s whimsical adolescence and shoehorning it right into a hollowed-out adaptation of a much more sophisticated story. Had Huckleberry Finn not been reissued, I by no means would’ve identified that it was one of many grandfathers of disappointing sequels similar to Jaws 2, Nationwide Lampoon’s European Trip, and Son of the Masks.
