Topsy and Eva

There's a decent print of this movie in the Library of Congress. Despite reports elsewhere, there is no cartoon cat in this film. Four months before this movie's premiere, an animated cartoon was released with the same title, starring George Herriman's character Krazy Kat.

The sisters Rosetta and Vivian Duncan toured in vaudeville for years with a "tab" production of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in which they depicted Topsy and Eva. When the Duncan Sisters (as they were usually billed) became popular, they increasingly revised their act so that it moved farther away from the source novel ... enlarging Topsy's and Eva's roles, and reducing Uncle Tom to a genial patriarch. In burnt-cork body paint and a nappy wig, Rosetta Duncan sang, danced and literally climbed the scenery as Topsy. In crinolines, ringlets and a deathly pallor, Vivian Duncan emoted as Little Eva St Clare and staged an elaborate death scene.

Not only does this film version of "Topsy and Eva" radically depart from the original "Uncle Tom's Cabin", it even deviates from the text of the Duncan Sisters' stage productions. We realise early on that this will not be Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel unfolding, as we see the births of Little Eva and Topsy, depicted as follows: a white stork delivering a white baby to the luxurious St Clare mansion ... and then a black stork dropping a black baby into a dustbin(!) outside a slave shanty. In this prologue, we also see brief shots of Heaven … depicted here as racially segregated.

Topsy is the main character in this movie. When the black girl who "jes' growed" is auctioned as a slave but nobody will bid on her, Little Eva purchases Topsy for a nickel. That's the one part of this movie that I found plausible: slaveholders often refused to buy children, since their upkeep in food usually exceeded any labour they performed. There's a gooey romantic subplot between Mariette (the niece of Simon Legree) and George Shelby, son of a prominent slaveholder.

As Topsy, Rosetta Duncan never stops moving. She wears an unfortunate blackface make-up, leaving her eyelids apparently their natural colour, as well as her lips. (It's difficult to be certain in this monochrome film.) Rosetta Duncan performs some ridiculous set-pieces, as when she dresses up as Santa Claus and comes down the chimney to give the St Clare family "Christmas presents" ... namely, their own possessions which Topsy previously stole from them.

Uncle Tom is portrayed in this film by Noble Johnson, an African-American actor of light complexion who was often cast in white roles. (For his most famous role as the Skull Island chieftain in 'King Kong', Johnson wore dark body make-up.) Johnson was a talented actor who typically gave dignified and restrained performances. In this movie, Noble Johnson portrays Uncle Tom as an illiterate patriarch who goes along to get along, and who doesn't seem to resent being another man's property. The youthful Johnson's hair is dusted with powder here, to make him seem the elderly patriarch.

Vivan Duncan was 30 when she played Little Eva in this movie: although under 5 feet tall, she's clearly an adult woman playing a pre-teen girl. Duncan tricks herself out in golden ringlets, crinolines and petticoats: the result is quite pretty but unconvincing.

SPOILERS COMING. In the sisters' stage performances, Eva's death scene was always an elaborate set-piece: here, Eva has a long languid deathbed scene but she ultimately recovers. The dialogue implies that she was saved by the prayers of Uncle Tom and Topsy.

I was pleasantly surprised by the effective performance of Henry Victor as Eva's father in this silent film; talking pictures would soon reveal Victor's bizarre accent (he spent his childhood shuttling between England and Germany), and would also reveal that he wasn't usually a very good actor. Gibson Gowland is also excellent here as slimy Simon Legree.

The Duncan Sisters were hugely popular stage performers in their day, so this movie is useful as a visual record of their act. Since much of the act's appeal lay in the minstrel-show jokes and songs performed by Rosetta, it's a shame that this silent film does not record the sisters' voices.

I'm trying to appraise "Topsy and Eva" on its own merits rather than as a (very loose) adaptation of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", but the sad truth is that "Topsy and Eva" just isn't a very good movie. Despite its historical importance, I'll rate this minstrel show just 4 out of 10.

The film debut of the famed Duncan Sisters (Rosetta and Vivian), the film is an amalgam of their musical stage hit and the play by Catherine Chisholm Cushing, which was based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Duncan sisters rely very much on their musical version, obviously minus the banter and hit songs. Into this stew came director Lois Weber, who bailed early on. In came Del Lord, a Keystone Kop and director of shorts (an odd choice indeed). Finally, D.W. Griffith was brought in during the last week or so in an attempt to bring some narrative sense to what the sisters and director had wrought.

The end product probably matches the Duncan Sisters' view more than Lord's (assuming he had one) with Rosetta as Topsy and very much the star. Even Vivian as Eva is shunted into a supporting role (with no songs to sing), although she looks quite fetching with her masses of blonde hair. Others in the cast include Nils Asther as Shelby, Gibson Gowland excellent as Simon Legree, Myrtle Ferguson as Ophelia, Noble Johnson as Uncle Tom, Marjorie Daw as Marietta, and Henry Victor as St. Claire. Carla Laemmle plays the angel. Also in the crowds are Lionel Belmore, Dot Farley, and Mary Nolan.

Released thru United Artists and produced by Joseph Schenck (the closing logo is an oval with "MP" prominent and with "PDA" beneath), the film has the reputation of being a flop but may not have been as big a dud as rumor has it. During the initial big-city run, the Duncan Sisters toured with the film and performed a pre-show act with their hit songs from the stage production. This portion of the film's release did big business, but after the sisters left and the film played smaller cities and towns, it died. Still, it seems to have about broken even.

The Sisters then had cameos in the W.C. Fields film TWO FLAMING YOUTHS (now lost). MGM wanted them for THE Broadway MELODY, but they were tied up with a stage tour. But they did star in the underrated IT'S A GREAT LIFE in 1929, which was a modest hit. They were signed for the aborted THE MARCH OF TIME and appeared in a short (SURPRISE!) in 1935, yet again recycling Topsy and Eva with Clarence Nordstrom as the male lead.

The racially insensitive elements in the film along with the major character in black face doom this one from ever being seen by a wide audience. The pity is that Rosetta Duncan's great comic performance, which compares favorably on many levels to all those spunky/bratty Mary Pickford girls, is pretty much lost to the ages.

There was nothing purely fortuitous about the assault that was made on Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel. There was an entirely deliberate, though out campaign to subvert it on the part of certain white Southern revisionists who found its message unacceptable disputed the premise on which it was based.

For Thomas Dixon Jr seeing one of the many popular stage versions of UTCA was almost in the nature of a religious experience and he would devote the rest of his life (when he wasn't attacking the evils of socialism) to "correcting" the Stowe heresy. The first novel in his infamous Ku Klux Klan trilogy, The Leopard's Spots (the title itself announces the ideological difference)appeared in 1902 and deliberately recycles Stowe's characters - Shelby, Legree, George Harris - but of course to very different effect. The second of the three novels, The Clansman (novel and play) followed in 1905. D. W. Griffith's film version, The Birth of the Nation, followed in 1915 and was very directly responsible for the dramatic rise in the refounded KKK.

How effective the Dixon/Griffith campaign was both in establishing their revisionist view and in reframing Stowe's novel (as far as possible given the nature of the story) can very clearly be seen in Universal's million-dollar 1927 film-version of UCTA (see my review) especially when one compares it to the very different tone of the 1914 version. Here we have the Dixon/Griffith picture of the South - complete with pickaninnies and watermelons and happy, banjo-playing, dancing negroes living under that "gentle" system of slavery typical (as a titlecard from the film assures us)of the South and from which the rest of the story is therefore presumably an almost inexplicable aberration.

I was prepared to view Topsy and Eva in this context (especially given the involvement of Griffith) and dismiss it as racist nonsense and this resolve remained at first unmoved as I watched the rather shocking prologue of the two storks (described in other reviews) and winced at the burnt-cork blackface of Rosetta Duncan as Topsy. However the film steadily gained ground with me and I began to realise that, in its own quirky way, it actually avoids falling into the trap of "revisionism" in a way the exactly contemporary, more successful and more famous film of UTCA itself does not.

It does of course contain some outrageous caricature but, unlike the equivalent in UTCA, it is too bizarre to take seriously and is sometimes clearly ironically intended. The storks of the prologue are in fact a case in point (no one after all is going to take a "segregated" heaven at face value) and the difference between the wealth and plenty to which the white stork sails and the squalor to which the black stork staggers is in fact a satirical condemnation of the very different life-expectations of the two communities, based not on any natural difference between the white and black but quite clearly between their different social situations. One can I think safely assume that D. W. Griffith had nothing to do with this prologue because it expresses a view quite different from his own. Remember, for the revisionists, at this point in history, the blacks were not at all disadvantaged but were living under the gentle and benevolent patronage of their white protectors...

We cannot know exactly how the films differed from the stage show. Another reviewer is wrong in believing that the reprieve from death for Eva was a change. This was already the case with the stage show (all accounts agree) as the Duncans from the outset wanted to have no "sad or tear-inspiring situation" (so no whipping of Uncle Tom, no death of Eva).

Lois Weber walked out because she felt that film was racist and one cannot blame her. The Duncans themselves disliked the film because they thought the director (Del Lord) had turned their comic drama into slapstick nonsense. The most racist scene in the film is that set in a cemetery where two runaway slaves (who have appeared from nowhere) behave with all the typical superstition and stupidity commonly attributed to African Americans in comic shorts. This would seem exactly the sort of farce to which the Duncans objected.

Whatever is of value in this film owes, one suspects. nothing to either Griffith or Lord but is entirely due to the Duncan Sisters themselves. Say perhaps that the burnt-cork had in some way got under the skin of Rosetta Duncan; she talked often about it and dreamed of producing a dramatised history of the development of black music. Consider for instance the degree of intimacy between Topsy and Uncle Tom (a black man in a superior position, and what is in fact, a white girl, permissible here because Rosetta is in "blackface" but none the less noteworthy. Consider most of all the fact that Topsy represents a real feisty defiance in the face of oppression ("Yeah, you and who?") that one finds little of in either the book or the films of UTCA.

There is also a certain feminist reading, inspired perhaps by the probable homosexuality of the Duncans. Vivian was involved in a "lavender" marriage with homosexual Nils Asther, more, one supposes for the purpose of having a child than of camouflaging her sexual orientation. Rosetta seems never to have married. By this reading, this is the story of a love affair between Topsy and Little Eva, which is indeed very much how it comes over. The picture of that love, amounting to a passion, between black and white would obviously have been more effective and affecting had the actress been an African American but it remains impressive even as it is.

So, whatever its failings, this film does significantly depart from the systematic revisionist programme that began with Dixon, continued with Griffith, is omnipresent in the 1927 UTCA and is still deeply ingrained in that later "epic" Gone with the Wind (book and film).