Les aventures de Mark Twain

President Taft said: " Mark Twain gave pleasure -- real intellectual enjoyment -- to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."

How true. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is one of only a handful of men in American history I wish I could travel through time to meet. He has created several of the most memorable characters in all of literature.

The Adventures of Mark Twain, while not a very accurate biography, is still highly entertaining and offers viewers a brief glimpse into the man, his life, writings, trials and tribulations. After all, how many 100% accurate film biographies would be worth watching? Most would be as boring as watching a chess match in slow motion. The film makers took some liberties, but the end result is one that Mr. Twain himself would probably enjoy. The final scene is heart touching and unforgettable.

Frederic March has a wonderful time playing the great author with all his humor and wisdom. This film is often overlooked, but it is one of the great bio-flicks. The settings, cast, Max Steiner score, and magic of the adventures add up to a funny and touching movie.

With a film like this available, I can report that the rumors of Mark Twain's death are indeed exaggerated.

He's now been physically dead all of 95 years, but Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) is still the most popular novelist and writer in American history, and one of the few great American writers to merit his own film biography. There is no film (at the very least no remembered films) about Charles Brockden Brown (our first major novelist), Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper (whom Twain hated reading), Hawthorne, Melville, Howells, James, Crane, Dreiser, Wharton, Alcott, Cather, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wouk, Salinger, Vonnegut, or Bellow. You have to go back to Edgar Allen Poe (the subject of several films, including a silent one (THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE) by D.W. Griffith) to find another major American writer who is a subject of biography. There is also a film on the life of Jack London made in the 1940s. But the key is that Poe, London, and Twain had interesting lives meriting filming.

The film is true in its outline but the fleshing out is questionable. For example, Twain did go into the mining fields of California and Nevada in the late 1860s, but he probably did not win the jumping frog contest that was the basis of his first literary success, "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Nor was his literary rival, Francis Bret Harte (John Carridine), the man who lost that contest. But there was a contest he apparently witnessed in 1865, and he expanded on it for his classic short story.

Some aspects of the story I am surprised to find in the film. The infamous Whittier Birthday Speech fiasco (although still debated) did occur in 1876, and somehow hurt his acceptance by the eastern literati whose "gods" (Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow) were somewhat laughed at in it. Also there is the frightening story of the Paige Typesetter that helped bankrupt Twain (forcing him to go lecturing and writing around the world in the 1890s.

The fact is, the film is actually better in presenting Twain's literary and private life than the average movie biography of that period or even now. March looks like his subject (and his make-up ages him properly). He knows how to do the delivery of the comic lectures perfectly. Note how at one point when he says to the audience, "The last time I went south....", March points quietly but prolonged downward, so the audience realizes he means "the last time I went to Hell...." We are used today to Hal Holbrook's "MARK TWAIN TONIGHT" performances, with his southern delivery, but March is just as effective in his way.

The other performances are good, with Walter Hampden lecturing March about what gentlemen of his class consider REAL literature, or with Percy Kilbride as a typesetter who trains Twain, and who later claims he helped make Clemens Mark Twain. Alexis Smith manages to portray Livy (Olivia) Twain as the perfect love match she was. The film does not hesitate to show Twain's career had as many missteps as successful peaks. It does avoid his attack on American Imperialism, and it does not detail the series of family deaths that plagued his last decade (two daughters and a nephew followed Livy to the grave before Sam followed her in 1910). But for getting the general outline correct, and for casting the film correctly and producing it very well I can say it deserves a "10" out of "10".

Arguably the gentleman born in Hannibal Missouri with the arrival of Halley's Comet named Samuel Langhorne Clemens at birth is America's greatest man of letters. Though his character was a great deal more complex than what you see in slightly over two hours Mark Twain, The Adventures Of Mark Twain presents the most positive aspects of his character as realized on screen by Fredric March.

Warner Brothers did a fabulous makeup job on March and his skill as a player makes you really believe you're watching Mark Twain in action. At least this is the public image that Twain liked to convey that of a shrewd observer into the foibles of the nature of man.

One of the things that does show is the love match that was made with Olivia Langdon and Sam Clemens. It's not much of a part in terms of something to work with, but Alexis Smith is a kind and loving help mate to March something the real Olivia was to Clemens. Mark Twain's private life contained not a hint of scandal in all of his 76 years on earth.

In wartime especially American audiences liked to see those values affirmed. But with the deaths of Olivia and a favored daughter, the shrewd cynicism of Twain multiplied exponentially. What we don't see in the last several years of his life Twain becoming a brooding pessimist about life and the afterlife in general. The rollicking humorist that wrote about the Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County became an almost Stephen King like figure when his posthumous story The Mysterious Stranger was published. If there's a more pessimistic work out there, I'd like to know about it.

When Alexis Smith says to March in the film that he's captured youth itself on page, she was referring to Tom Sawyer. In that and to an even greater extent in Huckleberry Finn, Twain was able to channel his Mississippi childhood into the book. It's not the adult Twain who observes human nature in either book, but it's the child Sam Clemens. That's the power both works have and they are what set Mark Twain's name firmly among literary immortals.

The Adventures Of Mark Twain received three Oscar nominations, for Special Effects, for Art&Set Direction, and for its musical score by Max Steiner. Special mention should also go to Donald Crisp who plays Twain's literary agent especially for the lengths at which he goes to find the guy who published that jumping frog story under a pseudonym.

The Adventures Of Mark Twain succeeds in capturing the public Mark Twain and the private Sam Clemens. I think the viewer will like both of them when they see the film.

In spite of the discrepancies it was a fine movie. I have read most of the biographical works and this gives a wonderful picture of who Mark Twain really is. It captures his love of his wife & family very nicely. I recommend it to all that enjoy Mark Twain. The acting was better than average for that period in movie making.