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The first film version of Huck Finn
appeared in 1920. Directed by William Desmond Taylor, it
featured Lewis Sargent (Huck), George Reed (Jim), Gordon
Griffith (Tom), Martha Mattox (Miss Watson), Katherine
Griffith (Widow Douglass), L. M. Wells (Judge Thatcher),
Frank Lanning (Pap), Orral Humphrey (The Duke), Tom Bates
(The King) and Eunice Murdock (Aunt Sally). As far as I know, it is the only film version of the novel that uses MT's "ending" -- i.e. what Tom Sawyer calls the "Evasion" and MT (when he read the sequence on his 1884-1885 lecture tour) called "The Escape": Tom's complicated and comic plan for rescuing Jim at the Phelps' plantation.
At the end of his 1930 Colophon essay on "ILLUSTRATING HUCKLEBERRY
FINN", E. W. Kemble says that in making the
film, Taylor "took a copy of the original edition and made
his characters fit my drawings." The two sets of still photos
below, from a 1920 magazine feature promoting the film
and a 1923 British edition of the novel that used images from
the film as illustrations, seem to confirm Kemble's
claim.
"I had not seen the book in years," Kemble also notes.
It had been over two decades since an edition using his
original 1885 illustrations had been published, so for him it
was a source of pleasure to go to the movie and watch "my
characters appear on the screen, resembling my types so
faithfully, even as to pose." For us, the way the movie
extended the cultural life of Kemble's re-presentations to a
new generation as well as into a new medium is a striking
reminder of how well his "types," which is to say his
stereotypes, fit the popular conception of MT's
"characters."
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 "1920 MOVIE ADVERTISEMENT")
