He is what the Widow Douglas (Josephine Hutchinson) might classify as "cute," meaning everything a modern mother in a split-level house might vainly wish her darling boy to be.As a consequence, this pretty film version might likewise be classified as "cute" - cheerful, chummy, sentimental and, eventually, monotonous and dull.
He makes Huck a ruddy little tacker, with a lot of head-up forthrightness and spunk. The secondary characters are sufficient, beginning with Archie Moore, the boxing champion, making his screen debut as a beaming Jim, and continuing through the King of Tony Randall and the oafish Duke of Mickey Shaughnessy.But the film takes its basic characteristic from the quality of Eddie Hodges as Huck-and that, we must tell you quite frankly, is not on the order of old Mark's deathless boy.Little redheaded Eddie, who started his career in "The Music Man" and warmed a lot of heart cockles last year in the film, "A Hole in the Head," is pleasant enough in a beaming, broad-faced, Bobby Driscollish way. It is sumptuously photographed in sometimes a bit too vivid color, and much of it was shot out of doors, in the broad, flat Sacramento River Valley, which reasonably resembles the Mississippi's.The story is fairly well followed in a sequence of the familiar incidents, with a few disappointing omissions and a lot of building up here and sugaring there. has produced and which was put on appropriate exhibition yesterday in Loew's and other neighborhood theatres, the production is of a high order.
Assuming a good production, fidelity to Mark Twain's classic tale and fair enough representations of the other characters, the nearness with which the film approaches the level of the original will be measured by the stature and the saltiness of the boy.In the latest film version of the novel, which Samuel Goldwyn Jr. CLEARLY, the crux of any film version of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is in the quality of the performance of the youngster called upon to play Huck.
0 kommentar(er)
