Mark Twain's tale of two boys who decide to switch places and nearly change history with their prank. Anchor Bay has released this disc with an all-star cast and outstanding performances from all. The sets are rich and realistic, and Alexander Salkind, the man who brought us Superman, Supergirl, and the Three Musketeers movies by Richard Lester has produced this sleeper.

Mark Lester( grown a bit since Oliver)plays the dual role of Tom Canty, a poor thief, who is beaten by his horrid father played with zest by Ernest Borgnine,a nd the future King, Edward. While being chased for stealing a purse, Tom stumbles into the castle of Henry the VIII, played by Charleton Heston. Heston brings passion and humanity to his role as one of England's most notorious Kings. Helping Heston along is Rex Harrison as his advisor of forty years, who is quickly condemned by Henry and hustled off to the Tower to be separated from his head for High Treason-The reason-Henry doesn't like his hat. Tom finds his way inside the castle and stumbles across Henry's son, and they soon discover a remarkable resemblance. Edward decides he wants Tom to go to a masked ball as Edward and he will dress like the pauper. Unfortunately for him, he is soon tossed out of the castle, as the pauper, and Tom is thrown into the role of Prince. He denies he is the Prince, which leads to speculation that Edward has gone mad. In the meantime, the real Prince befriends a soldier of fortune, Oliver Reed, who confronts Tom's father and soon during a fight, Reed is outnumbered and left for dead. The father flees to join bandits in the woods, led by George C. Scott, dragging the Prince along. Soon Scott realizes there is more to the boy then even the father can see and lets him leave to rightfully take back the throne. In the meantime, Henry has died and the impostor Prince will soon be crowned as King. The remarkable cast also includes performances by Rachel Welch, Sybil Danning, and David Hemmings.

Picture-Both fullscreen and widescreen pictures are offered on the disc from the menu-a nice feature and the widescreen version is 16X9 and enhanced for widescreen televisions. The colors are a bit muted-a technique of the cinematographer to enhance the flavor of the time in England. The widescreen presentation is sharp and every detail of Henry's costume's are in rich detail. The gold embroidery does create some shimmer briefly. Sound-The DVD only offers Dolby digital mono and was a bit disappointing , much as the Three and Four Musketeers suffer from the same unspectacular sound. All these discs deserve the surround sound treatment. The scenes are teeming with life and great care has been taken to authenticate life in merry Olde England. The marketplaces, the palace parties, and the rich dialog all would benefit from such an enhancement. The sound that is there sounds a bit like television sound, not much of a dynamic range. The music by Maurice Jarre is unusual and almost comical in nature, sometimes not fitting the action very well. I would have preferred a more traditional , swashbuckling type of score

Not much in this department as it lacks subtitles and captioning but it does contain a TV spot and theatrical trailer. It would have been interesting to have commentary from the director or set designer, as some of the sets are absolutely stunning and authentic. An enormous amount of work went into the production of this film and I'd like to know more about it.

This is a high quality, well acted version of the Mark Twain classic. Salkind did a wonderful job in the sets and production and the performances by the cast are all very notable. I've never seen Heston look so good-even in those Ape movies. Costuming and sets are top-notch. The only sore spot is the sound-the film deserved better than 2 channel mono.