Uncle Tom's Cabin

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

Very hard to take, but, historically important and interesting. There are some wonderful scenes- Eliza and little Harry's escape from the plantation in the wintry night, their flight across the ice covered river, the surreal death of little Eva, the turning of the tables (first by Eliza and later by Cassie) that have enslaved women using whips to beat off white men! Margarita Fischer is quite good as Eliza. She has an interesting appearance that is quite right for this kind of melodrama. Virginia Grey as the impossibly saintly Little Eva is weirdly intense- sort of like those unsettling early performance by Jodie Foster. It works to make this character strange enough to be believable. Most of the actors playing Black slaves (some of them played by unnaturally painted white actors) have a more difficult time of it- James B. Lowe does his best and does bring some quiet dignity to the central role of Uncle Tom- but the script and conception defeat him at times. Arthur Edmund Carewe (an actor whom IMDb fascinatingly claims is of Native American descent- Chickasaw- and yet is said to have been born in Tebiziond Turkey?) is quite good as George Harris the light skinned husband of Eliza and father of Harry- although he barely appears in the film since much of George's story has been edited out. The most painfully offensive scenes belong to Mona Ray who plays the ridiculous caricature of the happy little mischievous slave Topsy. Interestingly the DVD has deleted scenes that push Topsy further towards a psychological study in self hatred- check them out of you rent this one- I am not sure if they were deleted in 1927 or at a later re-release date (Topsy uses the N word to refer to herself in the deleted scenes and in one fascinating scene ritualistically powders herself white in an attempt to become "good" like Ms. Eva. Of course, the film is a ridiculous and utterly offensive view of the history of slavery- that shamelessly panders to racist notions of European superiority. In this it does not depart from novel as much as make the narrative mo

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.

In these days Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel of Uncle Tom's Cabin is known more by historians as a contributing cause of the Civil War than as an actual literary work. I would happily include myself in that number. The only exposure I had to the story at all was in watching The King And I where Tuptim puts on the play for the king recognizing the story as an indictment of slavery. So sadly did the king, but that's another story.

What you're seeing in this 1927 version is not Harriet Beecher Stowe's story, it couldn't be because there are references in the film to the Dred Scott decision, the firing on Fort Sumter and the Emancipation Proclamation all in the future because her story was published in 1852.

What slaves, free blacks, and sympathetic northerners like the Quaker family you see who rescue Eliza and her baby are afraid of the new strict fugitive slave law. The law was part of the Compromise of 1850 which almost mandated help for slave catchers who found runaway slaves in the north. It was a stench in the nostrils of folks like the Quakers who were prominent in the anti-slavery movement.

We're not seeing Stowe's story, but we are seeing her vision of the cruelty of slavery as an institution. Even the idea that black people were to be thought of as equal was radical in too many eyes back in the day.

Stowe used a lot of what would later be labeled stereotypes, most importantly the phrase 'Uncle Tom'. That which denotes a person willing to accept inequality in all its forms. The criticism has certain validity, but I think for the wrong reasons.

As seen her old Uncle Tom is the elder head of the plantation blacks on a Kentucky estate who the master even trusts to go to free state Ohio on business for him. No one can believe that Uncle Tom actually returns, the criticism is that his pride is so broken he accepts what the slave owners give him.

Tom returns, not because he accepts, but because in that cabin are his wife and children, even in slavery he's a family man. This is the most horrible thing of all for Stowe, the human beings are property. Even the kindly masters shown here like the Shelbys, Tom's owners accumulate debts and have to sell Tom and break up that family. Families being destroyed is the cardinal sin for Stowe.

Except for young Virginia Grey playing little Eliza the innocent who hasn't learned to regard certain people as beneath treating as human, most people today won't know the cast members. Some might know Lucien Littlefield who has a small role as a bottom feeding slave dealer. This was not a profession that attracted the best in society. James B. Lowe as Uncle Tom you will not forget, he invests great dignity in the original Uncle Tom role of them all.

Most silent films have overacting, story qualities we'd currently consider to be politically incorrect, and or slow story. This is one of those movies that defies most silent film clichés. While there are a couple of silent film flaws like the man who's job it is to catch runaway slaves acts like comic relief and you could consider some of the slave dialogue to portray them as being stupid and illiterate, but there is so much in it that makes it feel real. Slaves hardly had any education anyway because their owners didn't care if they could use good English so it felt realistic in a couple of places. This is the first movie or one of the first to cast black people as slaves and they are well cast for the most part especially considering that these actors didn't have resumes to show if they had the goods to act in a feature film. James B. Lowe's performance as Uncle Tom creates a large amount of charisma because it is made clear that he is a nice man who loves anyone who shows him kindness. The comparison scenes showing how white slave owners have fun and how slaves have fun brought a lot of thought into how the slaves were still in a bad situation, but were happy when they had each other. The romance which is a main focus of the movie only comes into play a lot of the time, but soon shifts to another part of the plot making the movie more entertaining and a little more complex.

This movie shows the love and cruelty of humanity extremely well, not even for the time which makes this a must see for any silent movie fan. The movie even adds addition sound effects and voice overs to enrich the experience, a quality that was not often seen because it could only be done when the silent era came to a close. It is also a great way to know the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin if you don't like reading books. It shows how far movies have come since then, but I highly recommend it because of it's impressive story telling.