The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) Online

Recommended for family entertainment, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" showcases the talents of "Mickey Rooney" and shows why he has been such a beloved actor for so many years.

Mickey Rooney stars as the title character, according to the book about 13 years old. Rooney was already past 18, but with his short stature and boyish face he looks exactly the part of young mischievous boy whom we see smoking his pipe and walking barefoot through the dust.

Based on Mark Twain's book of the same name, it is as closely adapted as the time constraints and censorship would allow. The general substance of the novel is left intact with a few details changed for the sake of dramatic license; otherwise it is well adapted as I remember from my recent re-reading of the novel.

Mickey Rooney is perfect in his portrayal of Huck, with his mischievous ways and always with a twinkle in his eye. Rex Ingram makes a thoughtful "Jim" whose quiet dignity makes Huck learn to accept him as a man, not just a piece of property to be owned.

The movie is quite funny and will become a favorite of the whole family with its wholesome characters and situations. If you get a chance to see it, I think you will agree that this is real entertainment that everyone can enjoy.

I do not compare this movie to the book, because it is not faithful to the book. That was never the purpose of the movie. The purpose of this movie was to provide a vehicle for Mickey Rooney who was the biggest box office star in the world from 1939 to 1942. And justifiably so. He has loads of talent. I say has because he is NOT DEAD. I read with horror a post here by someone who assumed that Mickey Rooney was dead and more about that later.

For now the reasons why I think this movie is so good are simple. Beautiful presentation, cinematography, acting, direction and writing. The cast are without exception wonderful. Especially Mickey Rooney who just inhabits the role. The tears in his eyes when told by Rex Ingram that his "pap" is dead....pure gold. Speaking of Rex, his portrayal of Jim is sheer poetry. It isn't easy to bring such depth and layering and nuance to such a character and yet he just does wonders with the very unforgiving role.

Walter Connolly and William Frawley are hilarious and insanely funny and yet curiously terrifying at the same time as the King and the Duke.

The plot does differ a bit from the book but so did and do a lot of movies even today. Many people adore 1937's Captain's Courageous (including me) and are seemingly not bothered by the fact that it veers wildly from the Kipling novel. I am not sure why that is. It feels like some people are actively trying to denigrate Mickey Rooney and certainly he seems to be out of fashion, but someday I do believe people will revisit the man and his movies and realize just how good he was and is.

Which brings me back to Mickey Rooney.. I think its sad when one of the immortal legends of movie history can be so throughly maligned and ignored. At a time when movies mattered, Mickey Rooney stood at the top of the hill. He had it all. Superbe acting talent, as well as an amazing entertainer. To compare his acting with Freddie Bartholomew is unfair to both. Freddie probably was the most talented child actor EVER but he had zero in the entertainment category. He could neither sing, nor dance, and did not have a magnetic personality. In those three areas Mickey stands head and shoulders above him. Mickey can sing, dance, and play dozens of instruments. Only Judy Garland stands above him and that is because she was a better actor and singer by far and Mickey, to his eternal credit, knew this and loved her for it.

I find it heartbreakingly sad that this movie has garnered so few reviews; and more sad that this man who has given so much to the entertainment industry and to movies in particular, can be so ignored by our modern day, talentless, tasteless "entertainment" industry that one can actually be forgiven for assuming he is dead.

I would love to see the over payed, over indulged denizens of the entertainment industry actually pay homage to Mickey Rooney at the Oscars before it is too late and before we truly do lose this living legend forever.

Thank you Mickey Rooney for all that you have given us.

Like any literary adaptation, this film throws out many scenes and changes others around. As a film, though, it works perfectly. Comparing it to the 1960 version, the reputation of the 1930s as the golden age of Hollywood is exemplified in this picture. Although the film and editing techniques were primitive at this point, the humour is funny, the characters click, and the drama is captivating. I'm not sure why this and the 1960 leave out the scene where Huck convinces Jim he's dreamt them separating in the fog, since its one of the most important in the novel. In any case, Jim's plight is tragic, and makes one shudder to think of the many people that had to be subjected to the institution of slavery. Rex Ingram gives a great performance, and his best scene may be in the jail, right before the lynch mob bursts through the door. "Somebody help me!" he cries. Amazing.

It should also be noted that Clara Blandickgives an outstanding performance as Miss Watson. Mickey Rooney is okay as Huck, but his acting style hasn't aged as well as the others in the film. Overall, I highly recommend this as great entertainment and a great film.

8/10

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

I am surprised that there is no other review for this movie and I am the first to post my opinion on this box office hit of 1939, a top 20 hit of its year. When I sat down to watch this adaptation of the famous Mark Twain novel, I knew the running time was under 90 minutes so I did not expect to get the full book which I have read but the cliff notes version which I have also read. But no, Louis B. Mayer just had to give it the MGM cornball effect with scenes which are not in the novel and which change the meaning and transformation of Huck's character. Mickey Rooney, the biggest child actor the movies have ever heard, and in my opinion, also the best it has had brings one of those flawless performances to the role. Rex Ingram makes for a good runaway slave Jim and the other performances are fine. Direction is pendant in the hands MGM journeyman - that is not a craftsman, not an auteur, imagination insignificant, camera angles; perfunctory, directing actors; left to your own devices - Richard Thorpe who had a long and healthy career in Hollywood. You wonder why? The first half does feel like a cliff notes version as the scenes skip through have a general lethargic pace but keeps your attention because the story is good anyway. The changes involve the capture of Jim and Huck's injury and the resolution of the aforementioned events. It is not what happens and tongue-in-cheek ending changes the message of Twain's classic. I won't say I didn't enjoy it. I just mean if you are going to alter a classic, you'd better come up with something better.

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.

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.

MGM tailored Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for box office champion Mickey Rooney, with predictable results. Mainly, this is a comedy, with some rather exasperating omissions, and some cute additions. As with many child stars, the studio was by now relying heavily on height to help put across Rooney as a precocious thirteen-year-old. The whole ranges from workmanlike to good, with Rex Ingram's "Jim" helping the latter. As the swindlers, blustery Walter Connolly and rascally William Frawley are a funny team. The amusing ending actually works; at least, the studio resisted having Illinois lawyer "Abe" Lincoln actually make an appearance.

***** The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2/10/39) Richard Thorpe ~ Mickey Rooney, Rex Ingram, Walter Connolly, William Frawley

Most novels are long enough to require considerable editing to make them fit into the usual 90 minute format that Hollywood preferred in the days of 1939. What to leave out is always a problem. Someone's favourite scene is sure to be lost, whatever the treatment writers do. Mark Twain' classic seems to have always been troublesome for Hollywood. Put in too much and someone is sure to scream "racist"; Leave out too much and someone else is going to scream "chicken"! This version strikes a rather nice balance, but of course it didn't please everyone. Personally, I feel that leaving out Tom Sawyer is all to the good. His antics always seemed farcical to me. The comedy that remains in this version is not exaggerated, but is rather subtle. The real defect is that the film proceeds smoothly for about the first two-thirds, up to the time Huck is bitten by the snake. After that, everything is rushed and choppily edited. It makes for a disappointing finish. I admit, though, that the lynch mob scene, with Jim cowering in the jail as the mob batters down the jail door is exciting. If you are unfamiliar with both novel and film, I'll let you find out how Huck saves Jim! This cast does an excellent job of presenting Mark Twain's characters. After all, MGM had probably the best stable of character actors in 1939 of all the studios. Rex Ingram stands out as "Jim", but Mickey Rooney truly was born to play "Huck". Charges that the subtle changes to Mark Twain's original, so far as the slave Jim and the attitudes toward him are portrayed, mark this film as "racist" strike me as absurd. Efforts to bar the film, sometimes even the novel, here and there, are just Political Correctness run amok. Slavery was part of American Life in the time frame of the story, and attitudes varied from region to region. This is accurately reflected in both film and novel. Jim, too, get s sympathetic treatment in both. Where's the "racism"?

Mickey Rooney has exited Boy's Town and Carvel and headed to the Mississippi for this faithful rendering of Mark Twain's classic story. Filmed many times before and since and also done as a Tony Award Winning Broadway musical, "Big River", this is the definitive version of the tale. Mickey is at his best here, and I think he was more worthy of an Oscar Nomination for this than he was the same year's "Babes in Arms". Everything from start to finish is perfect, from Victor Kilian as his evil father to Elisabeth Risdon and Clara Blandick as the two middle aged ladies who have taken him in. Special mention must go to Rex Ingram who may seem a little old to be Jim, but is outstanding. Walter Connelly and William Frawley add amusement as the con-men Huck and Jim encounter on the river after they are tossed off a riverboat. The photography is outstanding, the film moves at a fast pace, and everything is letter perfect. I really felt as if I was transported back to this time in a story that is not only entertaining but educational and enlightening about so many things as well. It's a true message film about what makes friendships so special, and Huck and Jim's is one of the best presented on film.

This movie is perfect for the nations #1 box office star of 1939. No wonder the public adored him! Mickey Rooney simply stated is the best actor that has ever lived. Mickey gives a down to earth and lovely performance.!!! The movie is very true to the book. If you loved the book, you will love this movie. It's wonderful!!!!!! Another great movie that was perfect for Mickey Rooney was Young Tom Edison. If you love him as Huck, then check out Young Tom Edison! Another Blockbuster performance by the MASTER performer. Mickey Rooney, may you live on in the hearts of all who love you! Also for your Rooney fans check out Boy's Town and The Human Comedy. The Andy Hardy series are also terrific God Bless you, and I love you Mickey!

Yeah it is hard not to notice Mickey Rooney and a bit of Andy Hardy leaks through. I don't know any movie that can capture Mark Twain total wit, The only ilk of that type are a few Shakespeare movies. This later complaint coming from stuff shirts 1939 critics.

What this movie makes you want to do is read the book, which is a good thing. This movie was about 100 pages of script, the book 400. If Twain could have written it in 100 pages he would have.

Why anyone thinks you can do a verbatim reproduction of a book is beyond me. Look at Gone with the Wind, or the modern book The Shining. The Shining totally fails as a movie, both releases, as the book is a more richer story. Slight spoiler for the Shining follows. The first Shining move especially because of the ending and ignoring the hotel's furnace problem which is an important thread in the book.

Rex Ingram as Jim should have at least been nominated for a best supporting actor. He was the glue in the film.

This is just a good classic golden age movie.

This is probably the least faithful version to Mark Twain's immortal novel that I've seen put on the big or small screen. Still this is one admirable production of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn and Mickey Rooney's starring performance is infectious and fun. The main points of the film are kept intact and that would be the whole sequence involving Huck Finn and Jim with those river con men the 'king' and the 'duke'. and the whole question of this white trash river kid helping a black slave whom he has been brought up to regard as inferior to freedom.

Through a combination of circumstances Huck Finn because he wants to get away from the widow Douglas's civilizing ways and his own father's brutal whipping Mickey Rooney as Huck fakes his own death and takes off on a raft with Jim, the widow's slave who wants to be reunited with his wife and child in a free state. But the law is hunting Jim not just for an escape, but for Huck's murder.

On the way these two pull Walter Connolly and William Frawley from the river where they've just been dumped after being caught cheating on a riverboat. The self styled king and duke get Huck to aid in a con being perpetrated on a young girl recently lost her father. They get Rooney to aid in the scheme lest they betray him and Rex Ingram to the authorities.

Here as in the novel the best scenes are with Rooney and Ingram as the slave Jim. For the first time in his life because the two are caught in the same predicament Rooney is seeing a black man as a human being. It makes him start reevaluating his thinking as Twain wanted many Americans to do. Twain came from the same background he's talking about the Missouri of his upbringing and how he came to escape that thinking with his character of Huck Finn.

Conmen for the most part in film are presented as lovable rogues on the big and small screen. Twain's king and duke are some of the most realistically created conmen in literature. These two are rogues, but there's nothing lovable about the way they want to trim some young girl of her fortune and leave her penniless and homeless. Connolly and Frawley are quite hateful and great in their roles.

Huckleberry Finn is considered by many to be America's great novel and this abbreviated version might give you some indication why. It succeeds as this film does in entertaining you, but also making you think.

Ever wonder why Hollywood can't just transfer a book to the screen without taking liberties with the plot? In this case, what was wrong with the way Twain wrote it? It resembles the book somewhat, but the movie works better if you didn't read it.

This was a cover-your-tracks movie so that MGM couldn't be nailed as racists, so some of Twain's book is whitewashed here. The result is a bland, pablum version devoid of tension and told in one tone of voice, without the highs or lows and lacking any suspense where required, for instance when Huck and Jim in hiding witness the tarring and feathering of the King and the Duke.

Having said all that, was there ever any better juvenile actor than Mickey Rooney? A reader mentioned Freddie Bartholemew - anyone ever see Bartholemew sing or dance, or display any charisma? Mickey Rooney is responsible for any success this picture has had. In a similar vein, I always think Walter Connolly is a detriment to any picture in which he appears. This movie would have been better off with nearly anyone else as the King, as he is a shrill, unconvincing actor.

As is, "The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" is a good movie which could have been so much better.

Even though 14-year-old Huckleberry Finn stole, smoked, lied, cursed and was lazier than an old possum, he was still a likable sort of rascal who was always full of bull and yarns and home-spun advice for all of his gullible friends, and the likes.

Released in 1939 - The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn would the first of 4 screen adaptations that energetically tackled Mark Twain's novel (written in 1884) of the same name.

Set in the year 1835 (where the action takes place in Missouri, along the Mississippi River), this decidedly average MGM production was still an entertaining and good-natured tale that I think was probably best suited for the enjoyment of a much younger audience than myself.

Though far from being faithful to the novel (where the racism was toned-down considerably), The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn starred the young, gung-ho actor, Mickey Rooney (who was 19 at the time) as the title character.

Full of pep and energy, Rooney (like the rest of the cast) put in a sincere and believable performance which certainly helped to keep the story fresh and relatively interesting.

This picture's story focuses in on Huck's raft trip down the Mississippi, accompanied by Jim, a negro slave running away from being sold. Together these 2 strike a bond of friendship as they inevitably find themselves led through some harrowing events and hair-raising adventures.

I believe that this film was well appropriate for the time zone in which it was created.

When viewing this movie, one needs to place themselves in a time capsule so to speak. It is a movie based on a child's story.

I enjoy Mickey Rooney, and was sorry to hear of his passing around December 2006. He shows determinant energy in his acting on this film. Rex Ingram, although, this movie placed him in a very stereotypic role, he put his all into it.

The movie had several great actors, and great areas, I think anyone who views it through the eyes of a child, will truly enjoy it.

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.

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.

Victor Kilian is a superbly terrifying Pap. The rest of the cast excellent. All the quibbling about not following the book is pointless. No movie follows any book verbatim its impossible. This is an excellent adaptation of the book with a no -holds barred examination of the shameful horror that was slavery in the U.S. Mickey Rooney is perfectly cast as Huck. He was also perfectly cast as Puck a few years earlier. The director Rickie Thorpe is a veteran of the Tarzan movies and handles the action sequences and mighty Mississippi parts very adeptly.Mickey Rooney is perfectly cast as Huck. He was also perfectly cast as Puck

fr muffinheuer: >...Mickey Rooney simply stated is the best actor that has ever lived...<

Um, no, he isn't. There are many others who far outshine him, but just because MGM kept partnering him in the "hey kids, let's put on a show!" movies, he just kept going. A far better kid actor was Freddie Bartholomew, who left movies when it was right to do so. Rooney just kept being in the same type of movie, and they got very dated very quickly.

He was good in "Captains Courageous" as Dan, and as Homer in "The Human Comedy" and somewhat fair in "It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world", but overall, just average.

Now that he spouts the studio line on Judy Garland and the way the studio got her addicted to drugs, he's just a former kid star who didn't age well.

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..