A young Samuel Clemens (David Knell) gets his first taste of the Mississippi when he becomes an intern on a steamboat which begins to influence him in his writing, especially through the aide of his mentor, Robert Lansing who steers the boat. In a really bad wig that Nellie Olsen of "Little House on the Prairie" would have had one of her screaming fits over, future soap star Marcy Walker (who would play a modern variation of Nellie on "All My Children" just a year later) plays a polite young passenger who becomes entranced by his stories while her snooty parents go out of the way to meet only the right people. When you first see Walker, she appears to be an Nellie type character, and her mother is definitely a variation of Harriet Olsen. But as the story is developed, her character is more like Becky Thatcher from "Tom Sawyer".
This PBS movie, part of the Masterpiece Theater, is films rather than videotaped, although the print is not very sharp. If it had been videotaped, that might have suited it more because it would have looked like a film stage play which would Aid the structure a bit more. This is not the Mississippi of Edna Ferber's "Show Boat", although there are a few musical interludes that of course the feature plenty of banjos and singing servants, obviously bemoaning their life like Joe in "Show Boat" singing "Old Man River". While this may not be of interest to the mainstream, literary history students will be interested to see a slice of life through the witticisms of Mark Twain, although often it is not an easy life. Still, it's charming and light-hearted and historically important. I definitely felt the excitement of the wide Mississippi that I've only been able to cross over while traveling by bus cross country.
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