Huckleberry Finn (1974 film)

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Huckleberry Finn

Directed by	J. Lee Thompson
Produced by	Arthur P. Jacobs
Written by	Robert B. Sherman, Richard M. Sherman, Mark Twain
Starring	Jeff East Paul Winfield Harvey Korman
Music by	Richard M. Sherman Robert B. Sherman Fred Werner
Cinematography	László Kovács
Editing by	Michael F. Anderson
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	(USA) May 24, 1974 (Sweden) March 3, 1975
Running time	118 min.
Country	UK / U.S.
Language	English
Preceded by	Tom Sawyer
IMDb profile

Huckleberry Finn is a musical film version of the Mark Twain boyhood adventure story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It starred Jeff East as Huckleberry Finn and Paul Winfield as Jim. The movie was produced by Reader's Digest and Arthur P. Jacobs famous for producing The Planet of the Apes series of motion pictures. Along with the Twain story, the film was also a musical, with memorable screenplay and songs by the ubiquitous "Sherman Brothers," aka Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman. Songs such as "Freedom" and "Cairo, Illinois" are particularly memorible. This film was a follow-up to the previous years' highly successful Tom Sawyer which was produced and written by the same team. Jeff East played the role of "Huckleberry" as well. But unfortunately, 1974's Huckleberry Finn was riddled with setbacks. First and foremost was the death of Arthur Jacobs half way through shooting. The second problem was the poor direction of J. Lee Thompson who didn't seem to know how to handle synchronized musical direction. Third was the unfortunate timing of writer Robert B. Sherman's artificial knee operation (also mid shoot, and amongst the first procedure of its kind). With no competent pilot at the helm, the Huckleberry raft ran adrift and scattered into an unmendable number of pieces. Roberta Flack sang the beautiful lost classic, "Freedom" but insisted on guitar backing her up. She threatened to sue if the Original Cast album were released with heavy orchestra and so although the album was recorded and printed, it was never released. There are still some excellent moments in the film, and wonderful musical numbers "Freedom" being one of them.