Uncle Tom's Cabin

Long before 12 YEARS A SLAVE or DJANGO UNCHAINED or even ROOTS back in 1977, there was UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. First a groundbreaking abolitionist novel in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, it became a staple of 19th century theater after the Civil War. Those theatrical productions stressed the epic aspects of the book while turning the characters into archetypes that became stereotypes. Once the new medium of film arrived there were no less than 10 silent versions before this one. The most prominent and noteworthy being Edwin S, Porter's 1903 version which is staged as a series of tableaux involving the novel's main scenes including an impressive (for 1903) ice floe sequence. Before the era of radio and television and even film, the story of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN was well known to audiences all over the country, even in the South, and it could always be counted on to pack em' in and turn a profit.

As the silent era drew to a close Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, decided to mount this lavish production which can easily be thought of as a silent version of GONE WITH THE WIND. At a cost of almost $2 million in 1927 currency and over 2 years in production, the film was one of the most expensive movies of the silent era. In addition to the trials and tribulations of the cast and crew over such a lengthy period, director Harry Pollard fell ill with a dental infection and had to undergo 6 operations. The ice floe sequence was originally filmed on location on a frozen river in the Northeast but, like D. W. Griffith's sequence in WAY DOWN EAST, most of it wound up being duplicated in the studio. Then right after the picture is ready for release, sound arrives and the film has to be refitted with a 1928 soundtrack of music and effects causing more delays. By the time it finally hit the screen, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN seemed old fashioned and wound up losing money.

The most difficult aspect for a 21st century audience is to try and view UNCLE TOM'S CABIN as a product of its time. Even in 1927 it was a cross between Progressive Era thinking and 19th century theatrical traditions. The casting of white actors in the major "mixed race" roles and the slave girl Topsy in blackface is hard to accept today yet it was standard practice then and the performances, though highly melodramatic, are effective. The two "modern" performances come from James T. Lowe as an intelligent, strong, and sympathetic Tom (he resembles Samuel L. Jackson) and George Siegmann as Simon Legree who could give 12 YEARS' Michael Fassbender a run for his money. Considering when it was made, the horrors of slavery are not glossed over and the movie winds up being a cross between GONE WITH THE WIND and 12 YEARS A SLAVE. Fascinating yet appalling, still engaging, and a history lesson on slavery and the public's expectations at that time. BTW the film's running time is 112 minutes not the 144 minutes listed here. That was the original running time before the film was shortened and altered by distributors and exhibitors after its initial preview. That version is lost.

UPDATE: Kino has now released the movie on Blu-Ray and though the film is the same as the DVD, the picture is sharper, the 1928 Movietone score sounds better, and it now comes with the 1958 re-issue version narrated by Raymond Massey. It also has 2 other silent versions from 1910 and 1914. Too bad they couldn't have included Edwin S. Porter's 1903 version which Kino also has. There's an informative commentary by Edward J. Blum about the historical background of the novel and a 31 page booklet about the movie. A must for people concerned about the history of race in this country.

This is perhaps the best film adaption of the classic Harriet Beecher Stowe novel. One of the more expensive films for the time, a price tag of $1.8 million, it is brimming with brilliant photography and fine performances. A film beautifully restored with the original movietone score and one of the few surviving works of director Harry Pollard, a lesser known name in the annals of cinema history but nonetheless an innovative filmmaker. Mr. Pollard successfully captures the mood of the old pre-war South while emphasizing the horror and immorality of slavery. James Lowe gives a fine performance in the title role, obedient yet not lacking integrity. Some characterizations may seem degrading to today's audiences, but this film was groundbreaking for its sympathy for African-Americans of the time. This film is also important in that it features a great actress of the silent period and wife of the director, Margarita Fischer. I had seen many striking photos of Ms. Fischer in Daniel Blum's Pictorial History of the Silent Screen and was delighted to find one of her few surviving films on video. She stars as Eliza, a fair skinned servant who eventually falls into the hands of the sinister Simon Legree, played by George Siegmann. Ms. Fischer gives a powerful performance of a young woman defying the evils of a cruel world and there is a memorable scene of her flight to freedom across the ice flows with her son. This was this lovely actresses' swan song, for she retired prematurely after this film and lived many more years. An early appearance of Virginia Grey as Little Eva, Harry Pollard's mastery of filmmaking, and Margarita Fischer's beauty and talent all combine to make film preservation an important cause.

While it is a great shame that, apart from James Lowe there are no African Americans in any other major roles, one sometimes needs to be positive about such things and give praise and recognition to what little there is. And there is a veritable galaxy of black stars amongst the minor roles. There is Louise Beavers, Gertrude Howard and Mildred Washington and, amongst the children, once and future Our Gang stars, Pineapple (Eugene Jackson) and Stymie (Matthew Beard) as well as Hannah Washington (who appeared in one of the rival "gang' films)and all the baby Potts. The very brief scene where the black women discuss with irony the horrific "white" wedding of George and Eliza is one of the most telling moments in the film.

One reviewer notices the presence of George Siegmann from Birth of a Nation (he was however an enormously prolific actor) but fails to spot Griffith's fellow Kentuckian, the wonderful Madame Sul-Te-Wan who provides for my money some of the most electrifying seconds of black defiance in that wretched Griffith film.

The really shocking thing about this million-dollar extravaganza is how regressive it is in its racial politics by comparison with the 1914 version. That film had an African American lead (the great Sam Lucas) but few if any other African American actors. Nevertheless its emphasis was fairly and squarely on the predicament of black people. In this film the whole story has been dissolved into a kind of "Southern" western with all the typical nostalgia for the elegant, aristocratic South in the good old days of slavery (much as one will find again in Gone With the Wind).

So, whereas the 1914 film begins by emphasising the ghastliness of slave-owning and the imperative for most African Americans to escape somehow to liberty (Shelby being quite clearly shown as an EXCEPTIONAL slave-owner), here the exact opposite is done with the Shelbies' "gentle rule of the slaves" being specifically misrepresented - one can hardly believe one's eyes - as "typical of the South". Except for a bad egg or two, slavery was a sheer pleasure, where black folk could play music, dance and eat water0-melons to their hearts' content.

I am loath to criticise any black actor but Lowe is every inch an "Uncle Tom". The story if well known. The great black actor Charles Gilpin (later the original stage Emperor Jones) was to have played the part but was rejected as being too "aggressive" and the part given to the almost unbearably docile Lowe. Again one prefers Sam Lucas in the part in the 1914 version but it would have been good to have seen the Gilpin version.

The 1914 film, although it of course preceded Griffith's racist epic Birth of a Nation, has a clear and conflictual relationship with the Griffith film which could even be seen as a perverse response to it. This film on the other hand seems pretty much like a continuation of Griffith's work. "The old Kentucky home" (vomit, vomit). It was indeed as just such a "corrective" to Stowe's novel that Dixon had envisaged the trilogy of novels that included the Klansman on which Griffith's epic is based. And between Dixon and Griffith's portrayal of slavery as the natural order of things via this "revision" of Beecher Stowe to the retrospective (and only mildly apologetic) defence of slavery one finds in Gone With the Wind, there is an absolute continuum.

And as for the stereotypes - picaninnies and water melons and all the erst of it - it is appalling to behold and again one finds none of this rot in the 1914 version. The 1914 version is not a wonderful film - it is a very rushed. low-budget account - but it at least has some kind of integrity. Here Laemmle and Pollard disgracefully cut everything out of the film that might have made it a more genuine criticism of racist America (the racist America that still existed - and still exists? - quite as much as the one that had existed in the 1850s) for fear of a white backlash.

A nasty element even in the original book is the way the angelic Shelby actually supports the system he supposedly rejects. In this version Shelby's behaviour is even more grotesque than in either the book of the 1914 film - "Hello, Jim Crow - how about a little dance!!!" - but his supine hope that the runaways do not get caught is seemingly sufficient to qualify him as a thoroughly decent "Southern gentleman"). We are on the way here to that later classic of disguised racism - To Kill a Mocking Bird - where it is not the plight of the negro that is to be pitied but that of the long-suffering "white" liberal.

There are of course rather a lot of bad eggs in the story (the film can hardly change that) but the conflation with the Civil War (nothing to do with the novel) allows the "Lincoln" card of unification to be played (again very Griffith) and all possible nastiness to be glazed over in a final apotheosis (the US cavalry as the heavenly host) where Tom's brutal murder is rather a secondary event and all focus is on the reunited family, a very white grandmother conveniently added (another change from the book) so that the film can come as near as dammit to suggesting that they are not really blacks at all....

It is a beautiful film (in terms of its production) but the beauty cannot make up for the racist beast that lurks throughout this film....

When I discovered that a filmed version of the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was available at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, I had to check it out. This particular version was from 1927 with synchronized music, sound effects, some singing, and one word of dialogue. It was also 112 minutes on Kino Video DVD. Now while there were plenty of exciting scenes of attempted escapes-like Eliza (Margarita Fischer) on ice floes in the dark with her son on her arms or a later sequence of her trying to recover that son as she runs after a horse wagon-and some tense scenes with the bullying Simon Legree (George Siegmann) when he gets his comeuppance, there were also some noticeably missing ones that made me wonder why some things happened the way they did. And while the title character is played by African-American James B. Lowe with dignity, the stereotyped pickaninny Topsy is obviously played by a white female named Mona Ray with all the embarrassing histrionics, including the eye bugging and-in deleted DVD extras-her referring herself as the N-word and trying to be white by powdering her face. That character and performance is the only really awful thing about this movie which, despite the many cuts, is mostly a compellingly filmed version of a famous novel, even with the setting changed to when the Civil War was going on. So on that note, this version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic work is well worth a look for any film enthusiast interested in this era of film-making. P.S. I was amazingly-and appallingly-stunned when a friendly slaveowner referred to little Harry as "Jim Crow". Also, though I didn't recognize them, Louise Beavers and Matthew "Stymie" Beard have cameos here.

Harry Pollard is my great uncle, and Margarita Fisher is my great aunt,I loved the movie and i couldnt belive that they had this on video.I remember as a kid all the stories and pictures about my aunt and uncle that my grandmother Katherine Havens would tell me and to see all this on the internet just blew me away. I had no idea that anyone really knew who they were or cared.

Thanks gina