The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn dressed as a girl in the 1985 film Mark Twain wrote a novel, "Huckleberry Finn", in which an averagely naughty country boy who lived on the banks of the Mississippi in the nineteenth century, gets caught up in exciting events.

He and a black slave run away when Huck's father gets killed, but Huck returns to the town in disguise to try to find out what's happening. He goes, naturally enough, dressed as a girl.


Patrick Day makes a good girl In the book, he goes to a local woman's house to try to get information, but she sees that he is really a boy because of his masculine body language. I reproduce the text at the bottom of this page, with stills from the 1939 Mickey Rooney version.


The woman is suspicious The story has been produced many times as films, television features, serials and animations. Not all the versions include the girl's disguise sequence.

Versions made in 1985, 1939, 1959, and 1981 do include it; the 1979 version does not. There is also a 1975 version titled simply Huckleberry Finn, which is reviewed at:

Huckleberry Finn

These three pictures, right, are from the 1985 version with Patrick Day as Huck, which I consider to be the best and most believable. The cross-dressing sequence does not follow the book exactly; Huck encounters a woman in the town and her suspicions are aroused when Huck drops an apple into his lap by mistake, and clamps his legs together to catch it. A girl would spread her legs to let the skirt of her dress catch it.


The classic version is a 1939 film with Mickey Rooney as Huck; this follows the book more or less exactly, and I showstills from the film with the relevant text from the book on a separate page, linkled below.

There was also a 1931 production as well as several later ones. Many versions deviate from the Mark Twain story line quite a lot, and many don't include the sequence where Huck dresses as a girl. A 1974 tv version with Jeff East as Huck is in this category


Huckeleberry 1993 version This is the 1993 version with Elijah Wood as Huck


Eddie Hodges threads the needle And this is the 1960 version, with Eddie Hodges; the sequence of events is changed quite a lot, but the actual dressing, meeting and discovery scene is reproduced with only minor changes.


Huck has put on a girl's clothes This is a 1981 version, less authoritatively produced, with a folksy narration by Huck himself (played by Kurt Ida); this version has the feel of a 1960 production. Huckleberry is rather older. He is going in to the town and steals a girl's clothes from a washing line -- someone had left them out after dark.


The woman takes him in When some men come, he hides in a doorway; inevitably the lady of the house opens the door and Huck falls in to the house. She reads him almost immediately, and this sequence is relatively brief.



I reproduce the text from the relevant part of the book, and stills from the Mickey Rooney film of 1939 on a separate page:

The Book

HF 1999 and subsequently.


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