Tom Sawyer (1917)

Director:

William Desmond Taylor

Writers:

Mark Twain (novel)
Julia Crawford Ivers (photoplay)

Release Date:

10 December 1917 (USA)

Genre:

Short | Adventure | Comedy | Drama

Plot:

Tom Sawyer, a young Missouri lad, finds fun and adventure with his pals Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn...

Plot Keywords:

Childhood Friend | Half Brother | Friend | Trading | Tobacco

Cast

Jack Pickford	...	Thomas 'Tom' Sawyer
George Hackathorne	...	Sid Sawyer
Alice Marvin	...	Mary Sawyer
Edythe Chapman	...	Aunt Polly
Robert Gordon	...	Huckleberry Finn
Antrim Short	...	Joe Harper
Clara Horton	...	Becky Thatcher
Helen Gilmore	...	Widow Douglas
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Carl Goetz	...	Alfred Temple

Runtime:

59 min | 44 min (2000 alternate version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Certification:

USA:Unrated

Filming Locations:

Hannibal, Missouri, USA

Company:

Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company

Movie Connections:

Version of Priklyucheniya Toma Soyera i Geklberri Finna (1981) (TV)

Good Version For Its Time, With a Well-Cast Tom Sawyer

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.