If it's a cliche, you can safely bet that Mark Twain may have said it first.

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"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody wants to do anything about it", Frederic March says here in character, and of course it get laughs. He had a view of the big and mighty Mississippi that influenced not only his stories but his view of the world around him. To Samuel Clemens, the world started and stopped with the river that divided the east from the west and carried goods from the north to the south, so when the steamboats were docked with the civil war, to him, it was as if the world stopped moving for him.

Frederic March is every inch Mark Twain here, only rivaled on stage and TV by Hal Holbrook, as much Twain here as Raymond Massey was Abraham Lincoln just a few years before. His tales of the Mississippi flow from the veins of his own life, aided by the loving assistance of his wife (Alexis Smith). But this isn't just a story of "I wrote this, and then I wrote that", but how he influenced the publishing world as well, even if it lead him to bankruptcy for a time.

This doesn't paint Twain as a grownup version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but there's always the sign of the little boy living through these stories. He's a raucous jokester, a hot tempered artist and an incredible storyteller, definitely an incredibly devoted family man. It's obvious that he'd appreciate my own joke as a younger on a 7th grade history test, putting Sam Clemens down as a test paper answer over Mark Twain then bringing the test to my teacher to have the answer marked wrong changed to correct.

The supporting cast here is vast and incredibly good, featuring Alan Hale, John Carradine, Donald Crisp, Percy Kilbride, Willie Best and C. Aubrey Smith among the many familiar faces. I learned from this what a mark twain really is in terms of river jargon, and the importance of Halley's Comet in his life. The film only received three technical Oscar nominations, but deserved so much more, perhaps at least for March over Barry Fitzgerald who was nominated for leading and supporting for the same film, "Going My Way".

This is a joyous film in so many aspects, filled with wit, heart, history and the idea that if the problem with the human race is the human race, then Twain indeed was a member of an advanced species of that race that has yet to be surpassed.

score 8/10

mark.waltz 3 December 2019

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5296583/