Word: huck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...different frames takes us from St. Petersburg. Mo., down the Mississippi--"flowing" into the middle of the stage in Heidi Landesman's creative sets. Following the well-known plot, Jim and Huck join forces in running away; Jim hopes to escape slavery, while Huck is running away from folk who want to "civilize" him. Ironically, the production falters precisely because Huck is too civilized. Huck's dual role as both narrator and protagonist is, at times, problematic. While in the "active" mode, he is scrambling about to keep the action going. Then, stopping dead in his tracks, he turns...
...Sawyer's carrot-colored hair peeked out from under a floppy fishing hat, and his bare feet dragged in the muddy water as he and Huck Finn floated lazily down the river on a makeshift wooden raft. Nothing could have been more American-only the river was not the Mississippi; it was the Dnieper. And the actor playing Tom Sawyer was freckle-faced Fedya Stukov, 9, from Moscow...
Govorukhin, who is known for his television productions of literary classics, discovered that the lush banks of the Dnieper were a mirror of the Mississippi valley. Casting Tom and Huck, however, took months. In the book, Tom and Huck are adolescents, but Govorukhin decided to use younger boys because, he felt, "we live in an era of age acceleration. Today's twelve-and 14-year-olds are thinking about discos and sports rather than playing pirates and Indians...
Throughout the filming, Govorukhin was obsessed with being faithful to the text. When Huck wakes Tom for their midnight expedition to the graveyard, Tom opens his bedroom window by pulling the lower pane upward. There are no such windows in the Soviet Union, so Govorukhin studied 19th century American architecture and had his carpenters build an American-style window. Mississippi steamboats were also in short supply, so Govorukhin instructed his carpenters to construct a replica, atop a barge, replete with lacy white railings, two smoking black chimneys and an American flag flapping at the stern...
...film about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn is remarkably devoid of any anti-American sentiment. Ironically, its illusion of reality is broken only once, when the director chides a Soviet, not an American, weakness. Confronting the corpse of Dr. Robinson in the graveyard, the tramp is unable to remember having killed him and mumbles, "It must have been the vodka...