(no subs) Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Did you know that there's a Soviet-era movie based on "Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?" I find this film fascinating because it manages to do such a remarkably decent job portraying Mark Twain's Southern US. There are even real black people in it -- though clearly African by origin (thankfully, we're spared the pain of watching Russians doing blackface). Understandably, the producers couldn't find any real métis, so the role of Injun Joe is played by a Tatar actor.


All the written bits are in English.


Though with understandable mistakes every now and again.


Here, Tom is supposed to be writing "I have some more," but he writes "I have come more" -- probably because in Russian the Cyrillic "c" is pronounced like "s" and the actor makes an error. (In the book, it's actually "Please take it -- I got more.") The funniest bit that I found about the English, though, is that they clearly didn't have very good consultants, as is evidenced by what is scrawled on the fence before Tom whitewashes it:


That's pretty hardcore! :)

Now, I know you'll probably want English subs to this, but unfortunately I don't have nearly enough time these days to work on that (I have a 2-year-old and 5-month-old baby). So, this post is purely for those of you who are studying Russian and would not mind watching this without subs.

This film is in 3 parts, each over an hour long. You can get it/watch it via Arjlover:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3