Tom Sawyer

It is said that director William Desmond Taylor intended a sequel that would detail the rest of Mark Twain's classic. Two hour movies were not popular in 1917, despite the success of D.W. Griffith's work. Since the original book was just a series of episodes, it is surely no grounds for condemning this old film for the same quality. Actually, it is rather entertaining and faithful to the book for the episodes it contains. For proper enjoyment, though, you have to project yourself via mental time warp back to 1917 and the film technology of the era. If you can, you can see Mary Pickford's brother Jack doing a good job of bringing that eternal scamp Tom Sawyer to life. And it is a chance to see the work of William Desmond Taylor whose death a few years later was one of the greatest Hollywood mysteries of all time.

Mark Twain had just died six years earlier when the first feature film, the earliest existing film on his character Tom Sawyer, was released in December 1917. Called simply "Tom Sawyer," the Paramount Pictures movie starred Jack Pickford as Tom.

If the last name sounds familiar, yes, Jack was Mary Pickford's younger brother. "Tom Sawyer" was one of his first starring roles. His debut in a major part occurred earlier in the year when he played Pip in the feature "Great Expectations."

Jack, along with his older sisters Mary (Gladys at the time) and Lottie exhibited a talent in acting as youngsters. Their from improvised mother, Charlotte, deserted by her alcoholic husband, saw an opportunity to make some money and allowed the three to go on the Canadian stage. The trio were so talented and successful that by 1900 the kids and mom relocated to New York City where the action was for theater. Once Mary signed with Biograph Studios in 1910, she was able to get acting jobs for Lottie and 14-year-old Jack. Her brother appeared in several bit parts while in New York City before Mary signed that very lucrative contract with Paramount (specifically Famous Players-Lasky) in 1917. One of the clauses in her million dollar pact was for the studio to sign her two siblings to lucrative salaries.

On the 80-plus films Jack was in before Mary's arrangement, the consensus was her brother was a pretty decent actor. He gained good notices in his "Great Expectations" role as Pip, positive reviews as Tom in "Tom Sawyer" (even though his 21-year-old age belied the younger fictional Sawyer), as well as his follow-up in May 1918's "Tom And Huck."

A year earlier, Jack had met and married rising movie actress Olive Thomas, a former Ziegfeld Follies star who had an affair with the married founder Florence Ziegfed. A former model who won the "Most Beautiful Girl in New York City," sponsored by a New York artist, she appeared on several magazine covers, including the Saturday Evening Post, before getting the Ziegfeld chorus girl position. Olive became the first "Vargas Girl," drawn by a famous Peruvian artist noted for his racy portraits. Ziegfeld bought a Vargas nude of Thomas and hung it up on his office wall.

She and Jack met in 1916 just as she was getting into film and before Mary signed her contract. A quickie marriage, without the Pickfords present, turned out to be one of the wildest marriages Hollywood would ever see. Screenwriter Francis Marion, who had rubbed elbows with them frequently at Mary's house, described them as "two innocent-looking children; they were the gayest, wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway. Both were talented, but they were much more interested in playing the roulette of life than in concentrating on their careers."

After "Huck And Tom," Jack volunteered in the United States Navy in 1918. He got in trouble for operating a bribery scheme where he received money from rich men who wanted to avoid the military during World War One. He also was caught running a racquet where he arranged young women for the officers where he was stationed. Jack survived the accusations leveled at him and returned to film acting after he was discharged.

For its time, this is a pretty good version of Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer", with a good selection of sequences from the novel and a well-cast Tom Sawyer in Jack Pickford. It creates the right atmosphere, and believably brings to life several of the well-known characters. Besides the story itself, the movie gives you a chance to see what Jack Pickford was able to do before his personal weaknesses and problems derailed his career, and it also offers a rare chance to see one of the surviving films of ill-fated director William Desmond Taylor.

Pickford seems a natural for the part of Tom; not only does he look the part, but he had the same personality of a likable wastrel. The silent screen made it particularly important for an actor to look right in the part of such a well-known and popular character. Pickford's roguish smile and mannerisms generally work pretty well.

The story takes a selection of the episodes from the novel, and most of them work as well as you could ask, given the lack of spoken dialogue and other limitations. The fence-painting scene, one of Twain's finest gems of humor and psychology, is enjoyable to watch even without all of the nuances that the written story was able to add.

So many film adaptations of Twain's popular stories have been made over the years that it's not very hard to find versions of "Tom Sawyer" that would work better for today's audiences. But for those who enjoy silent films, this one still works well enough to be worth seeing, and it is also interesting as a small piece of movie history.

Julia Crawford Ivers' adaptation of Mark Twain's classic 1876 novel is faithful to the highlights of the first half of the book, and since the sequel 'Huck and Tom' hit screens just three months later this film was presumably always intended as Part One of a lengthy two part film. We therefore get the whitewashing episode, the introduction of Becky Thatcher into Tom's life, the business with the bible study tickets and the exaggerated reports of Tom's death, concluding with his appearance at his own funeral.

But Muff Potter, Injun Joe and the scenes in the caves would have to wait for the appearance of 'Huck and Tom' (1918), in which the amiable tone that has so far prevailed presumably darkens considerably. Robert Gordon doesn't actually have that much screen time as Huck Finn in this first film and presumably comes into his own in the sequel (especially with his name coming first in the title).

The literary critic Leslie Fiedler made a name for himself writing the essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," in which he asserted Jim and Huck were in some way sexually or romantically attached in the book, "Huckleberry Finn." While the methodology by which he arrived at this conclusion was questionable, his inspiration, likely unconscious, was the interpretations some film directors have given to Twain's work, such as William Desmond Taylor's in this film.

It's not been uncommon to cast actors a lot older than Tom and Huck to play these characters. Finding actors between the ages of 12 and 14 to play these parts competently, at least in the past, wasn't easy. Romeo and Juliet have rarely been played in film by teenagers for this reason.

So we have Jack Pickford at the age of 21 playing Tom, and Robert Gordon at 22 playing Huck! Both are too tall, physically mature and attractive to be viewed as early adolescent boys. Gordon, dressed in a ragged shirt missing one sleeve, displays a muscular arm no 14 year old boy could have.

So the film becomes one about boys in their late teens, making scenes that are supposed to be evocations of innocence into something quite different. The scene where Pickford, Gordon, and 17 year-old Antrim Short as Joe Harper run naked (they're actually wearing undershorts, but the duration of the shots are so brief the impression is of nudity) through a glen, dive into the Mississippi, then wrestle each other in the water is a prime example. Indeed, when this film was shown on Turner Classic Movies, it was given a "TV PG" rating, undoubtedly for this scene.

It isn't, however, just about the actors being "too old" to play the characters. A scene early on in the film has Pickford come over to Gordon who is sitting by a water pump. Gordon then scratches the ground with his big toe in a way that seems to mirror Pickford's awkward exchanges with Clara Horton as Becky Thatcher later in the film. Gordon then points out he has brought a watermelon for he and Pickford to share. Pickford is elated, Gordon tears apart the watermelon, and they both eat from it, exchanging beaming glances at each other as they do.

Whereas people might argue as to whether Huck is flirting with Tom or not, one has to acknowledge Gordon's Huck does not fit the film stereotype of the Huck we've come to expect--he is not a cute, clean and orderly, freckled, red-haired kid. This Huck is a raggedy, dirty, "helter-skelter" (to quote a 1917 film review) "juvenile pariah" (to quote the subtitle introducing him in the film). Indeed, it doesn't seem far off to say this Huck seems like a very young, attractive, good-hearted, nice-natured version of the backwoodsmen in "Deliverance," a product of an isolated, impoverished, neglected and highly abusive childhood (which in this case is very much from Twain). This particular Huck _could_ flirt with Tom, and it seems more acceptable because both boys seem more like adults.

Undoubtedly, these things have to have had an impact on people like Leslie Fiedler indirectly through their influence on subsequent Twain films.

This is not to say these things in any way distract from the story. Taylor prevents this by keeping them as subcontext (in 1917 it's doubtful he could have done otherwise) and produces a film which could be argued as the one truest to the spirit of Twain's original, with Pickford, despite his age, as the most rambunctious Tom ever on film, and Gordon as a more realistic Huck than we'd see in later films.

Finally, for an 87 year old film, it holds up quite well, and its unusual subcontext gives it a daringness that makes it feel more like a film of today than of the time seven years after Mark Twain's death.

Addendum 5/8/06:

One thing I noticed about Gordon's Huck that struck me strangely is that with his wig of red wild curls and goofy expression, he seems curiously like Harpo Marx. Since Harpo developed the character around the time of this film, I wondered if it hadn't influenced the creation of the film Harpo.

The fact is, it did not. At the time of the First World War, there were many people who imitated an Irish stage comedian named Patsy Brannigan, who also had a wild head of red curls and just as wild a demeanor.

One critic of our time looked at the film and said Gordon's Huck was "a burlesque," not a legitimate attempt to portray Twain's character. The discovery of the Patsy Brannigan connection reveals that this wasn't a burlesque of Huck Finn, at all, but rather the playing of him as a totally different character, a (to then audiences) recognizable comic stereotype. Perhaps this was because of Gordon's age--Huck had to be modeled on an older character.

It is bizarre, however, to look at the Cocoanuts, where Harpo's red wig is as dark as Gordon's is, and compare the two wild characters to each other. It's strange (or maybe not so strange) to note 80 or 90 years after a film, the source of a character can become completely unknown, and a kind of fast forward anthropology has to be done.