Word: huck
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This slender and often charming autobiography, in short, is about growing up, and the author admits that Peter Pan had absolutely the right idea about the whole painful subject. There are moments when Bowen cannot seem to decide whether to remember the past as Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield. No matter. He spares us any anguished memories about teen-age sex. He is full of sentiment but no self-pity. His quotes and anecdotes are often sharp and funny. "If thee marries for money," his Quaker stepfather once admonished him, "thee surely will earn it." Most important, Bowen writes about...
...Finn. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," she said about his raffish novel, "he had better stop writing." Seeming to take the prim spirit of her outrage for their shaping force, the people involved with this movie have sanitized Huck's language and turned him into a nearly perfect little gent...
...dignity of the man." He and his brother Robert proceeded to elevate the slave's image by altering his name (he is Nigger Jim no longer, just plain Jim) and giving him a couple of songs to sing. "Gotta get away to Cairo/Ai-ro/Illinois!" he croons brightly with Huck as they pole their way upstream toward freedom and a soundtrack record album...
...Huck himself (Jeff East) has been changed into a sort of homespun civil rights worker who comes easily to his vision of the brotherhood of man. "Why, Jim!" he exclaims, looking at the slave's wounded neck. "Your blood's red same as mine!" Twain's Huck, it will be recalled, was a good deal troubled by matters of conscience, and it took him most of the book to wrestle down the acquired prejudices of Southern boyhood. Hardly a doubt stirs this Huck, of course. He is a real nice boy from the very start -maybe just...
...strength in Paul Winfield's performance as Jim and some smoothly flowing, elegant camera work by Laszlo Kovacs. This current adaptation (turned out under the auspices of the Reader's Digest) represents at least the fourth effort to bring Huckleberry Finn to the screen, and once again Huck has been smothered by the pasty good taste from which he always tried to es cape. There is no reason why a funny, fierce movie could not be made from the book. For the present, though, you still do not know Huck and Jim with out you have read...