The Adventures of Mark Twain | |
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Directed by | Irving Rapper |
Written by | Alan Le May Harold M. Sherman |
Produced by | Jesse L. Lasky |
Starring | Fredric March Alexis Smith |
Cinematography | Sol Polito |
Edited by | Ralph Dawson |
Music by | Max Steiner |
Production company | Warner Bros. |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date |
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Running time | 130 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $1,623,000 [2] |
Box office | $2,350,000 [2] |
The Adventures of Mark Twain is a 1944 American biographical film directed by Irving Rapper and starring Fredric March as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Alexis Smith as Twain's wife Olivia. Produced by Warner Bros., the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including that for Best Music for Max Steiner's score. Irving Rapper was hesitant to direct the film but was persuaded by Hal B. Wallis. [3]
A group of people are watching Halley's Comet overhead when Judge Clemens is called away for the birth of his son Samuel. The film proceeds to depict elements of many of Clemens' best-known stories as if they actually occurred. Thus, as he grows up, Sam plays with his friends Huck, Tom, and the slave boy Jim on a raft on the Mississippi River, providing a fictitious "real-life" basis for the novels Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .
The teenage Sam goes to work for his brother Orion, publisher of the Hannibal Journal newspaper, but after three unhappy years, runs away to become a riverboat pilot. After a rough start, he thrives under the tutelage of Captain Horace Bixby and becomes a highly skilled pilot on the Mississippi.
One day, he spots a pickpocket robbing Charles Langdon, a passenger aboard his ship. Among the possessions Sam forces the thief to return is a small portrait of Charles's sister Olivia. After seeing it, Sam falls deeply in love. As they become friends, Sam tells Charles that he is going to marry Olivia. To that end, he gives up his job to seek his fortune with his friend Steve, prospecting (with little success) in the west.
When he finally gives up, he becomes a newspaper reporter in Nevada. Steve persuades him to enter a jumping frog contest (taken from Twain's first major story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County") against Bret Harte. Steve cheats by secretly feeding lead buckshot to Harte's champion frog. Their frog wins easily, but Sam sheepishly admits to Steve that he bet their money on the champ. Sam then writes the story and, under the pen name Mark Twain, tries to get it published.
When the Civil War begins, Sam leaves Nevada, narrowly missing J. B. Pond, who has come from the East to find the writer of the frog story. (In real life, Clemens went to Nevada after the war started, partly to get away from the conflict.) The "Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is published in newspapers and is widely enjoyed as a welcome change from the grim war news. (In real life, the frog story was not published until the war was already over.)
When the Civil War ends, Pond finally finds Sam. He signs him up for a lecture tour. Charles and Olivia ("Livy") Langdon are in the audience of his very first lecture, where his humor and wit make him an immediate success. He marries Livy, despite her father's initial opposition, and becomes a famous writer and lecturer.
However, Sam wants to become more than just a humorist. He invests in a typesetting machine and establishes a publishing company. Both ventures require more and more capital, so Sam has to keep writing furiously for years. Finally, he turns to businessman Henry Huttleston Rogers to extricate him from his financial mess. Rogers tells him he can avoid bankruptcy, but only if he does not honor his overly generous contract to publish Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. Dismayed to find Grant poverty-stricken and dying, Sam decides that the country owes the man so much that going bankrupt is a small price to pay. (In reality, the company did publish Grant's memoirs—about eight years before Clemens met Rogers—and the venture was a huge success. The business did, in fact, eventually go bankrupt, but not because of Grant.) Though Rogers persuades the creditors to accept half payment, Sam is determined to pay in full his staggering debt of $250,000. To do so, he embarks on a strenuous worldwide lecture tour, leaving behind Livy to care for their daughters.
At last, he manages to pay everything off and is reunited with his now-ailing wife in Florence. She is very proud when she receives word just before she dies that her husband is to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, which she considers the greatest honor a writer can attain.
Sam himself dies when Halley's Comet returns in 1910 (as he had predicted). Afterward, his spirit is called away by Tom and Huck to join them in the afterlife. Before walking away, Sam tells his grieving daughter (who cannot see him) that the rumors of his demise are greatly exaggerated.
Contemporary assessments were mixed. Bosley Crowther gave a generally negative review in The New York Times , calling it a "lengthy and desultory picture" and "a spotty and often inaccurate chronicle", and complaining "This spotty character of the picture is due not alone to the script but also to the direction, which is strangely inconsistent throughout." [4] He continued by saying "Mr. March's performance of Twain is agreeable," but called Alexis Smith's portrayal "colorless and conventional". [4] Variety ran a positive review, calling it "an educational yet highly entertaining biography of the immortal American ... The stars, notably, perform their assignments with extraordinary compassion and understanding, particularly March in the title role." [5] Harrison's Reports was also positive, calling it "an excellently produced, heart-warming human-interest drama, well acted and directed. Fredric March portrays Twain with deep understanding." [6] David Lardner of The New Yorker dismissed the film, writing that it wasn't much worse than most biographical films and "does have its good moments", but "once more biographical inaccuracy is rampant, and once more the best dramatic possibilities have been overlooked." [7]
The Adventures of Mark Twain has been called "perhaps the most impressive of all Forties large-scale biopics" by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in their book Hollywood in the Forties. [8]
The following were nominated for the 17th Academy Awards:
According to Warner Bros. records, the film earned $1,736,000 in the U.S. and $614,000 in other markets. [2]
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
The Miracle Worker refers to a broadcast, a play and various other adaptations of Helen Keller's 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life. The first of these works was a 1957 Playhouse 90 broadcast written by William Gibson and starring Teresa Wright as Anne Sullivan and Patricia McCormack as Keller. Gibson adapted his teleplay for a 1959 Broadway production with Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Sullivan. The 1962 film also starred Bancroft and Duke. Subsequent television films were released in 1979 and in 2000.
Henry Huttleston Rogers was an American industrialist and financier. He made his fortune in the oil refining business, becoming a leader at Standard Oil. He also played a major role in numerous corporations and business enterprises in the gas industry, copper, and railroads. He became a close friend of Mark Twain.
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is an 1865 short story by Mark Twain. It was his first great success as a writer and brought him national attention. The story has also been published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. The narrator describes him: "If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."
Woodlawn Cemetery is the name of a cemetery in Elmira, New York, United States. Its most famous burials are Mark Twain and his wife Olivia Langdon Clemens. Many members of the United States Congress, including Jacob Sloat Fassett are also interred there.
Following the Equator is a non-fiction social commentary in the form of a travelogue published by Mark Twain in 1897.
Jane Lampton "Jean" Clemens was the daughter of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Langdon Clemens. She founded or worked with a number of societies for the protection of animals.
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum is located on 206-208 Hill Street, Hannibal, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi River in the United States. It was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as author Mark Twain, from 1844 to 1853. Clemens found the inspiration for many of his stories, including the white picket fence, while living here. It has been open to the public as a museum since 1912, and was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 29, 1962. It is located in the Mark Twain Historic District.
Olivia Langdon Clemens was the wife of the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known under his pen name Mark Twain.
Mark Twain's legacy includes awards, events, a variety of memorials and namesakes, and numerous works of art, entertainment, and media.
Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a writer and Congregational minister from Hartford, Connecticut. He was a close friend of writer Mark Twain for over forty years and is believed to be the model for the character "Harris" in A Tramp Abroad.
Mark Twain: The Musical is a stage musical biography of Mark Twain that had a ten-year summertime run in Elmira, NY and Hartford, CT (1987–1995) and was telecast on a number of public television stations. An original cast CD was released by Premier Recordings in 1988, and LML Music in 2009 issued a newly mastered and complete version of the score. Video and DVD versions of the show are currently in release.
Clara Langhorne Clemens Samossoud, was an American concert singer, and the daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain. She managed his estate and guarded his legacy after his death as his only surviving child. She was married first to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then to Jacques Samossoud after Gabrilowitsch's death. She wrote biographies of Gabrilowitsch and of her father. In her later life, she became a Christian Scientist.
Quarry Farm is located on East Hill overlooking Elmira, New York, and the Chemung River Valley. In 1869, Jervis Langdon purchased the property as a vacation home for his family. When he died the following year, it was inherited by his eldest daughter, Susan Langdon Crane. It remained in the Langdon family until 1982, when it was donated to Elmira College as part of the founding of the Center For Mark Twain Studies.
The Californian was a San Francisco literary newspaper published weekly from May 28, 1864 until February 1, 1868.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called the "Great American Novel," and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He also wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and non-fiction. His big break was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867).
The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his family from 1874 to 1891. The Clemens family had it designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the American High Gothic style. Clemens biographer Justin Kaplan has called it "part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock."
Langdon is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Francis Sayles was an American character actor at the beginning of the sound film era. In the short dozen years of his career he appeared in over 100 films, most of them features. While he was normally cast in small uncredited parts, he was occasionally cast in featured roles, as in the role of Dickman in the 1934 film, One in a Million, starring Dorothy Wilson and Charles Starrett.
The Center For Mark Twain Studies is a cultural humanities site associated with Elmira College. The Center manages two historic sites, the Octagonal Study and Quarry Farm, where the American author, Mark Twain, composed many of his works, including his 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The center also includes exhibits and archives. It administers research fellowships and delivers extensive programming, including lectures series, symposia, teachers institutes, digital resources, podcasts, and the quadrennial International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies.