Pasty Taste

By JAY COCKS

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Directed by J. LEE THOMPSON

Screenplay by ROBERT B. SHERMAN and RICHARD M.SHERMAN

It is safe to assume that Louisa May Alcott would have approved of this new screen version of Huckleberry 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.

Other refinements abound. "There's no way in 1974 we could give a black man the precise dialogue Twain gave him," commented co-Scenarist Richard Sherman. "First of all, nobody in the audience would understand him if he used the stereotypical dialogue--'Ah's gwine down de ribah'--so we had to handle the language and the attitude. We had to sustain the 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 the littlest bit mischievous --and besides, everyone here keeps him busy singing.

Along with the script, the Sherman brothers (Mary Poppins, Tom Sawyer) have supplied a typically cankerous score. Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) performs his task with the requisite banality, although there is considerable 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 a book by the name of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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