Word: digester
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world to promote the cosmetics of Faberge Inc., of which he is a director. Now he is getting a new line of products to push. His knowledgeable advice has helped encourage Fabergé to join the growing list of big corpo rations (General Electric, Xerox, Mattel, Reader's Digest) that are sinking money into making movies...
...certainly not disappointed with one aspect of their work. The Digest had obviously spared no expense while recreating the Missouri of Tom Sawyer's day. The Digest and the film's director, Don Taylor, exercised every effort to capture for the viewer the flavor of life along the Mississippi. Painstaking care had been taken to assure that every minute detail was consistent with the word images of the original book. Taylor made excellent use of the Panavision wide screens by means of some dramatic aerial photography that emphasized the breathtaking width of the Mississippi. But dramatic, breathtaking, and expensive photography...
...often, important sequences of plot were--albeit in Digest tradion--condensed into a few lines. Screenplay and song writers Richard and Robert Sherman evidently assumed that their film audience would already know the Tom Sawyer story, and there was consequently no need to go into it at any great length. While this might have been a worthy thought, it had the unfortunate result of pacing the film so that the brief scenes of story material appeared at times as no more than quick fillers between often absurdly drawn-out musical numbers...
...neither Whittaker or East can be classified as the 'stars' of Tom Sawyer. That title must remain reserved for the Digest, whose influence is visibly present in almost every scene. The Digest's famous sense of patriotism shows up in a Fourth of July celebration, complete with fireworks. The Digest's equally famous conservative editing discreetly removed the section of the original novel in which Tom discovers an 'anatomy' book--with a color frontispiece--in his schoolteacher's top desk drawer. Even the meticulous detail referred to before is typical of the Digest, which is quite proud of its reputation...
...although some argue that the Digest's unique policies result in a conservatively biased, second-class magazine, it cannot be denied that when applied to family filmmaking they result in a suitable effort, perhaps the likes of which have not been seen since the death of Walt Disney. Tom Sawyer is far from perfect, to be sure. But compared with such recent Disney productions as The Love Bug, it will no doubt provide quite a refreshing change for those who enjoy "family" films...