Monday, January 7, 2013

Shakespeare in Huckleberry Finn (The 1939 Film with Mickey Rooney)

Huckleberry Finn. Dir. Richard Thorpe. Perf. Mickey Rooney, Walter Connolly, and William Frawley. 1939. DVD. Warner Brothers, 2009.

Back in May of 2012, I wrote about some of the Shakespeare in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and a bit of that that made its way into a 1955 film version of the novel (for which, q.v.).

A little while later, I tracked down the 1939 film—the one with Mickey Rooney as Huck—and found a great deal more Shakespeare in it. I prepared a clip, uploaded it to the blog, and promptly forgot all about it.

But my forgetfulness is your (eventual) gain! Here's the clip:


I find that delightful. And I'm impressed by the playbill, too. Imagine being able to see David Garrick and Mrs. Siddons play these roles—fifty years or so after they died. Please note, also, the line that declares "Ladies & Children Not Admitted." Perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier in this post. I apologize if any Ladies or Children have been offended.

Links: The Film at IMDB.


Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest