Whitewash

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TOM SAWYER

Directed by DON TAYLOR

Screenplay by ROBERT B. SHERMAN

and RICHARD M. SHERMAN

"You blink a tear and the boy is gone," moans the sound-track chorus as the stern-wheeler chunks off downriver. The boy will be back in a couple of weeks--he's just taking a vacation with Judge Thatcher and Becky--but the kind of minds who find it natural and necessary to turn Tom Sawyer into a musical cannot be expected to resist topping their concoction with a thick glop of Reddi-wip sentiment.

The entire film is an exercise in false nostalgia, the good life of a Missouri River town in the 1840s being something modern audiences don't really know anything about without they have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But, as Mark Twain also said, "that ain't no matter." What is the matter is that the good, strong stuff of the novel--Injun Joe's mysteriously sinister nature, the murder in the graveyard, Becky and Tom lost in the cave, even Huckleberry Finn's subversive restlessness--is truncated and flattened. The idea seems to be to avoid offending those modern-day Aunt Pollys and Widder Douglases who think, despite such recent good examples as The Railway Children and Sounder, that the term "family entertainment" can only be defined as a synonym for blandness.

The scenarists, the Sherman brothers, are the songwriting team whose dwarf-sized talents were nurtured in the Disney forest (Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks). They have cleared away plenty of room for lyrical reflections on such matters as existence ("Man's gotta be what he's born to be") and mortality ("Sooner or later, just like a patater, man's planted in his grave"). They even empty Tom's whitewash pot of its humor and fill it with one of their characteristically neologistic songs, Gratification--which is not exactly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Tom is played by a redhaired, freckle-faced 12-year-old humanoid named Johnnie Whitaker, on leave from his true calling, which is shilling for a line of kid's clothes. Jeff East plays Huck like an old-fashioned fraternity boy dressed up for the Sadie Hawkins Day dance in Al Capp's Dogpatch. Warren Gates as Muff Potter and Celeste Holm as Aunt Polly struggle against the killing banality of Taylor's direction; but only Jodie Foster, as Becky, suggests that she somehow remembers what it is like to be a real person in a real world. . Richard Schickel

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