Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 29, 2019

Was Arthur P. Jacobs a masochist, or at least a glutton for punishment? Jacobs didn’t have a ton of credits as a producer, but he did have a couple of sizable hits in vastly different genres with both What a Way to Go! in 1964 and Planet of the Apes in 1968. However, in between those two smashes Jacobs made the perhaps unfortunate choice to produce one of the biggest behemoth flops of the decade, the musical version of Doctor Dolittle, which came out in 1967 and threatened to erase all of the profits 20th Century Fox was still amassing from The Sound of Music. Jacobs may have been stung from the experience, since by all accounts there were frequently bouts of chaos during both pre-production and the actual shoot, and once the film opened, things went from bad to worse. That said, Jacobs must have subscribed to the “pick yourself up and dust yourself off” adage, because a mere two years later he was back with another musicalized version of a classic British tome, the 1969 version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which, while less costly and troublesome than Doctor Dolittle, was another pretty spectacular flop at the box office. (It might be noted in passing that Jacobs had a kind of annus horribilis in 1969, since his non- musical The Chairman didn’t exactly have hordes lined up at the ticket booth begging to get into a showing.) Some producers may have stopped at those two musical strike outs, but Jacobs persevered, and in fact as the seventies got underway Jacobs reportedly entered into a multi-picture deal with the Sherman Brothers, who had of course become household names initially courtesy of their long association with Walt Disney and such classics as Mary Poppins. Kind of interestingly, Jacobs had had Leslie Bricusse write both the screenplay and music and lyrics for Doctor Dolittle, but by the time Goodbye, Mr. Chips rolled around, had consigned Bricusse solely to composing and lyric writing duties, with Terence Rattigan handling the screenplay. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn returned to the Doctor Dolittle model, with the Sherman Brothers providing both screenplay and song score for both pictures.

For reviews of the two films included on this release, please click on the following links:

Tom Sawyer Blu-ray review

Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray review

Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video quality of each film is assessed in the above linked reviews.

Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio quality of each film is assessed in the above linked reviews.

Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplements for each film are detailed in the above linked reviews.

Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not sure if either of these Mark Twain classics really needed to be musicalized, but the results here are often quite engaging. Huckleberry Finn probably has a more deliberately serious subtext, but both films offer excellent production design and some winning performances. Technical merits are generally solid, though I thought Tom Sawyer looked considerably better than Huckleberry Finn, and this two-fer comes Recommended.