The New Pictures

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(Samuel Goldwyn Jr.; M-G-M), the fourth film version of Mark Twain's fictional portrait of the artist as a young rube, has suffered the melancholy fate of Old Hank Bunker. "Old Hank," said Huck, "he . . . fell off the shot-tower, and spread himself out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they say, but I didn't see it." Moviegoers may now see it, thanks to Sam Goldwyn Jr., who spent $1,400,000 making this movie version of the book. The film is distressingly flat, but then those who have not read the book may like it.

The movie starts out pretty much the way the novel does. Huck Finn (Eddie Hodges), the son of a town drunk in northeastern Missouri, gets awful sick of the "dismal, regular and decent" widow who has taken him in and is trying to "sivilize" him. So one day he cunningly fakes his own murder and goes poling merrily downriver with a runaway slave named Jim (tolerably well played by Light-Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore). But while the story goes down the river, the picture heads up the creek. The director and scriptwriter seemed determined to reduce Mark Twain's Huckleberry as rapidly as possible to the sort of fruity mush the customers are accustomed to. Most of the major episodes of Huck's hegira are drastically cut or dropped outright. And to chunk up the hole that is left, there is enough conventional "dingnation and sentimenterin' "--not to mention some moony tunes by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane--to provoke the full penalty prescribed by the author: "Persons attempting to find a plot in this narrative will be shot.''

As a matter of fact, persons attempting to find Huck Finn in this picture will be, to say the least, disappointed. As written, Huck was a young river rat who lived in a wharf barrel and smelt like his surroundings. As played by Actor Hodges, a stage child who got his start on Broadway in The Music Man, the prototype of frontier boyhood is a freckled-faced mother's darling who reeks of soap and suburban charm, and who looks exactly the way Producer Goldwyn wanted him to look: like "a Missouri Peter Pan." But Finn fans will forget this minor blemish as they contemplate the moviemakers' supreme achievement: from one of the funniest books ever written by the funniest writer America has produced, they have managed to eliminate almost all the laughs.

Dreams (Sandrews; Janus Films) is the second installment of the shrewdly ironic, lewdly hilarious trilogy, beginning with A Lesson in Love (1953) and ending with Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), in which Sweden's Ingmar Bergman (TIME cover, March 14) submits his front-line report on the war between the sexes. In Lesson, the war begins with crockery barrages. In Smiles, it ends in a saraband of sophisticated satire that the winners and the losers dance together. In Dreams, the last of the three released in the U.S., the battle rages in full fury, and Bergman zooms above the field like a happy gadfly, pranging everything in sight.

The picture tells two stories at once, playing one against the other for satiric effect. Two women, a middle-aging fashion editor (Eva Dahlbeck) and her young photographers' model (Harriet Andersson), go to Gothenburg, a city in southwest Sweden, on a story assignment. First day in town, the editor puts through a call to a lover she has lost, a pleasant but bored businessman (Ulf Palmer), and persuades him to see, her again. Caught in a mood between renascence and relapse, they make love in her hotel room. Abruptly he decides to go away with her. A knock comes at the door; his wife (Inga Landgre) walks in. Calmly and with devastating insight, the wife warns the mistress to break off the affair, not for the wife's sake but for her own. "He will stay with me, you know. Not because he loves me more but because he is tired. Besides, he has no money of his own." Faced with the awful truth, the husband is at least man enough to admit that he is not a man. In disgust, the mistress turns him out, then gasps in horror as she realizes that she will never see him again. Suddenly he opens the door. "My darling!" she sobs, "You have come back to me!" But he has only come back for his briefcase.

Meanwhile, the model has been picked up on the street by an aging sugar daddy (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who buys her a bundle of expensive presents that she cannot collect unless she goes home with him. On the way home, the sprightly quarry leads the hard-breathing hunter a merry chase through an amusement park; and before he can catch up with her, old age catches up with him. He collapses after a roller-coaster ride, and at home he has to rest. But he soon feels strong enough to offer her a bottle of champagne. In an uproarious seduction scene, the poor old goat discovers that all the time he has been after her virtue, the dear child has been after his wallet.

In both instances, the female proves deadlier--and livelier--than the male. The girl has more cunning, the woman more spirit, and in both instances Bergman obviously relishes the idea of feminine superiority. His actors, as usual, are excellent. And his direction of the camera is inspired--the long, slow opening scene in the photography studio, several minutes of wordless but pregnant silence, is a wonderful set piece of visual exposition. Bergman has said more important things than he says in this picture, but he has seldom said anything in a more vigorous and suitable style.

Sergeant Rutledge (Warner) is an embarrassingly bad film by Producer-Director John Ford. The forbearing viewer will recall with respect that Ford also directed such pictures as The Informer and Grapes of Wrath.

The trouble is that the libretto of this post-Civil War horse opera is both grand and comic, often at the same time. The title figure is a gigantic Negro cavalry sergeant (Woody Strode) who has been accused of the murder of his commanding officer and the rape and murder of the officer's daughter. The film might have made a fair courtroom drama if Director Ford had not decided to play the first half of it for laughs.

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