Recensioni degli utenti

While this movie certainly suffers from the prevailing prejudices of the times it still carries great emotional weight and manages to humanize slaves and rightfully demonize the institution of slavery itself. Turkish actor Arthur Edmund Carewe is a little more believable as a light skinned black person than is Marguerite Fischer in her role as Eliza but Fischer's performance is pretty effective. I was a little surprised to find that she was once promoted as the "American Beauty". She seemed particularly unattractive to me and even though she had quite a successful film career prior to this film (her last) I can't help but think that being married to the film's director, co-screenwriter and co-producer helped get her cast. Still, standards of beauty are mutable and she is not the only actress from early twentieth cinema whose physical appeal is a mystery to modern eyes.

The oddly and somewhat eerily talented Lassie Lou Ahern plays her son Harry.Even though cross gender casting was not uncommon for child roles(nor for "Lassie's" either come to think of it) she is not very believable as a little boy. The fairly common habit in the years before and the early years of the 20th century of dressing up boys in girlish clothing doesn't help either. Still it is an amazing performance, for a 7 year old. Her acrobatic dancing being particularly notable.

James B. Lowe, the only actual African-American actor in one of the lead roles is outstanding as Uncle Tom. What is even more outstanding is the dignity and lack of minstrelsy in the way he is allowed to play him. Not at all typical of even the few films with sympathies toward the plight of black Americans and slaves from the start of American cinema to the late 1950's, this treatment and characterization of Uncle Tom goes a long way toward negating the ridiculous portrayal of the slaves of the kindly Shelby's as happy and content, even thankful (Tom and his wife proclaim how the Lord has blessed them with their life on the plantation)to be in bondage. For a slave, happiness was relative. I wish I could remember who said it but I have heard it said that 'the slave with a cruel master wishes for a kind one-the slave with a kind master wishes for freedom'. The myth of the contented slave grew out of the necessity for self-preservation and the fact that protests fell on deaf ears anyway. Certainly some slave owners were otherwise decent people who were also victims of the pseudo-science that proclaimed blacks as simple naive and in need of white guidance at one end of the philosophical spectrum and as sub-human and even evil at the other. The prevailing attitude was probably somewhere in-between. Certainly contact with slaves served to humanize them for some whites and their value as property and investment and laborers called for some humane treatment if only to protect them as such. The saintly Eva is a bit unrealistic but there certainly were many Southern whites who were rightly disgusted with slavery and the treatment of black people in general. Eva's declaration of love (and Aunt Ophelia's declaration of same after Eva's death) for Topsy is a major statement socially and cinematically. Affection on a non-patronizing level between blacks and whites on screen was almost never displayed and even more rarely stated outright. The physical contact between Uncle Tom and Eliza's mother Cassie was also exceptional. Even though the characters are both "black" the actress playing Cassie was not and the hand holding with and affectionate nursing of Lowe's Uncle Tom was the kind of action that would normally raise howls of protest from certain audiences. This avoidance of physical contact between especially a white female and a black male was still occurring even into the 1970's when some TV stations banned a special featuring a prominent white British female singer and a famous black actor/singer holding hands during a duet.

One of the first multi-million dollar productions, this film is not quite faithful to the book but still catches the viewer up in the plight of George and Eliza in particular and manages to indict the evil institution of slavery despite its concession to certain "sensibilities". A scene showing Uncle Tom rescuing Eva from the river was cut-probably so as not to give a black character too much heroic prominence but Eliza's escape over the ice floes is as realistic (even though it was done, or rather re-done on a studio backlot after having some footage shot on location originally) as anything of the times or even later. Actors and stunt people blend seamlessly and there is a real sense of danger conveyed.

Cinematically and dramatically the film more than justifies its huge budget and if a modern viewer can stomach some of the cliché portrayal of blacks and slaves and the cartoon-ish portrayal of some of the white characters they might find themselves understanding why Abraham Lincoln upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe was supposed to have remarked "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" Only a true Simon Legree could look at even this stylized portrayal of slavery and still support the "peculiar institution".

Added December 12 2005:

Wanted to mention to Joseph Ulibas that while he is right that this film marks an innovative use of a racially mixed cast thecharacters of the slaves George, Eliza and Topsy were all played by white actors.

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.

Well I didn't think I'd like this one but it turned out to be pretty good and with a few terrific performances. Based on the 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, this silent film is a grand melodrama with all the trimmings and includes some of the most famous characters and scenes in American literature. Oddly there has never been an American talkie version of this classic.

Released by Universal with a "no-star" cast, the film captures most of the highlights from the novel, including Eliza's flight across the frozen river pursued by bloodhounds (very well done), the death of Little Eva, and the villainous Simon Legree. The film gets better as it goes along building to the death of the villain.

Notable perhaps as one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to cast a Black actor in a major role (James B. Lowe as Uncle Tom), most of the other parts are also played by Black actors (but I suspect a few were whites in black face).

Margarita Fisher (in her final film) stars as Eliza, 10-year-old Virginia Grey in her film debut plays Little Eva, George Siegmann is a terrific Simon, Lucien Littlefield is the lawyer, Aileen Manning is Aunt Ophelia, Mona Ray is Topsy, and Eulalie Jensen is wonderful as Cassy. I spotted Clarence Wilson among the auction bidders; Louise Beavers is an extra.

The film was not a great success and Universal lost money but it remains as an interesting film version of the biggest-selling book of the 19th century. I taped this from TCM's May series on Blacks in films......

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.

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.

I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach watching this movie, which is disturbing in several ways. There is the content of Stowe's novel transcribed to film of course, depicting the cruelty of slavery, and the separation of families. However, in so many ways, we also see the struggle for America to deal with one of the shameful horrors of its past, and this was 62 years after the Civil War ended. If you've read the novel, you'll see that its basic framework is actually represented here, albeit shifted forward in time, but there are softening aspects which shift the tone. That was likely done in order to make it more palatable to white viewers, and southern white viewers in particular.

These aspects include:

• A Robert E. Lee quote on the evil of slavery, which is more than a little ironic.
• White actors playing all of the African-American characters, except Uncle Tom (James B. Lowe).
• The "typical" slave owner, as the movie puts it, is shown to be kind and merciful. The implication is that cruel slave owners were the exception to the rule.
• The extended sequence with Topsy, played in blackface by Mona Ray, is absolutely horrible. There is such blatant racism and in so many forms (she's idiotic, has imbecilic mannerisms, can't love herself because she's black, etc), that it significantly undercuts the anti-slavery message. It is just a shameful, shameful performance.
• By shifting the movie forward in time, the Union troops eventually arrive to 'save the day', as if all of the problems for African-Americans were solved in that moment.

On the other hand, there are many positives to the film:

• As in the book, the scene with Eliza (Margarita Fischer) running away with her son in her arms, across the ice floes of a river, is compelling, and really stands out.
• Simon Legree (George Siegmann) is played with the requisite cruelty, lechery, and coarseness. For that matter, so is the slave hunter Tom Loker (J. Gordon Russell). These characters are Stowe's, but I mean it as a compliment when I say they are positively Dickensian.
• James B. Lowe turns in a good performance, portraying dignity, faith, and stoicism.
• The scenes which have the whipped turning the tables and doing some whipping themselves are a little cathartic.
• It's a small moment, but in the scene on the riverboat when Eva (Virginia Grey) is handing out treats to the slaves in an act of kindness, one African-American girl (actually played by an African-American) turns away, with such a look of pain and forlornness in her eyes. How I would have loved to see more of this girl, and her story.

Unfortunately, it's the former set of things which were disquieting to me, especially knowing that 91 years later, America is still struggling to come to terms with its past, and with an internal rift that has race as one of its major components. So I sat there, uneasy, and as if I was seeing the evidence, not just of this crime against humanity, but of the inability to be completely truthful about it. It's as if you had a serial killer in your family tree, but you can't just acknowledge it, because the guilt and shame from being descended from great evil might be overwhelming if you did, or force you to consider what you might do today to help address the injustice.

Look, it takes a monster to believe that one race is superior to another, simply because of the color of their skin. It takes a monster to enslave human beings, to own them as property, and to subject them to all manner of cruelty. And it takes a monster to separate families from one another, to rip children away from their parents. The film is successful in showing this last bit, which was powerful, and had me thinking of passages in Elie Wiesel's 'Night', and frankly, recent shameful actions from the current administration. Did it really deliver on the first two? It seems to show that African-Americans are inferior, that they are childlike and foolish. It seems to say that Simon Legree was the exception, not the rule, that most slave holders were kind, and that most slaves were content. So no, I don't think it really delivers the message.

I'm not sure I can excuse it for not doing so 62 years after the war, when Stowe's novel was so much more powerful. I can't rationalize it as acceptable given other movies from the time period, or that the marketing department of Universal Studios was trying to appeal to southern viewers. I give the film credit for giving me a window into America, for making me look into the mirror, and for roiling all of these emotions in me. I wouldn't want to watch it again though.

This is movie is big! At a huge cost, which I cannot be definite Mr. Carl Laemmle, he of Universal Pictures fame brought us this movie. First of all, Universal released two kind of movies in those early days of movies, regularly pictures which played under the Universal logo and the big prestige pictures which went out under the Carl Laemmle presents or "gold" pictures as they were called. This was the one selected for the year 1927 and it was a hit, one of the top 20 of its year. Now unto the movie. I have never read the book but I know it is a very flimsy adaptation because the movie begins in 1856 when the book was published in 1852. It always involves the civil war and emancipation. The Civil War did not start till 1861. Already we know, they are taking detours and liberties from this book, the best selling novel of the 19th Century. This is a big movie after all, therefore the light-skinned blacks and leads of the movie are plain whites with a dash of ebony and potash that make them look like white-skinned whites. This is too distracting. Marion Davies in a movie in 1934 movie with Gary Cooper which I cannot remember the name for about three scenes pretends to be a black servant girl and the make-up people were very convincing in pulling this off. The story is melodrama. I'm sure the book is melodrama too but this is too excessive. No stops have not been pulled or upturned to make sure the audience is sufficiently entertained. The plot deals with two slaves who are kindly treated by their masters and are raised like one of the family. It isn't mentioned but it is implied that they were fathered by their plantation owners and thus the very light skin. They marry while the cotton barnyard of onyx faces dance and Jim crow about in splendid surprise while acknowledging that these two in house slaves are "almost" white. If delivered as sound and not as a title card, this line would surely get laughs. It's a pure groaner. Not too late, bad man plantation owner appears and is agree that old Harry - that is the male slave - dares to marry Eliza - the female slave - without his permission. He angrily and haughtily drags him away. Events happen which lead to both slaves in desperation not to be separated to get on the run. It might seem that I hate this movie. I didn't. It is too wheel directed to be hated, with big sets, action sequences involving an ice floe and waterfall and lifting of scenes from movies including the famous farewell scene from the Big Parade. Characters like Topsy and Eva the little white girl and black slave girl are never fully integrated in to the whole and I understand that some of Eva's scenes have been cleaned up for modern eyes. The version I saw did not have Eva referring to herself as a nigga etc. "Uncle Tom" is a term used by blacks to refer to a system following, obedient and benevolent black man who accepts or is seen as subservient to white interests. It comes from the characterization of the character in the book. You cannot tell this from watching the movie. A title card says he loves his masters but that's about it. He doesn't really act excessively docile meaning scenes have been omitted that were in the book that clearly spelled this out. The last thirty minutes is well-directed hokum. Even the ending is but who takes risks on such a big movie. Not intellectual or substantially good because it never fully takes you into the lives of the slaves beyond excessive stereotypes on both landowners and servitude aspects. It's crude but entertaining.

This movie is the origin of the stereotypical "Uncle Tom" not Stowe's novel. The three dimensionality of the characters in the novel is virtually stripped away in this movie version. The awkward "smiles" and inappropriate laughter of the black characters caters to the post-Reconstruction mentality of the re-claimed South. Stowe's novel has a much more realistic treatment of characters from both regions. The poignant scene between Topsy and Eva is rendered cartoons in the movie. The faith connection between Tom and Eva is completely absent from the movie, yet one cannot appreciate the true nobility of their characters without seeing this bond between them brought about by a shared love of the world beyond. This movie does not properly capture the traditional paternalistic objectification of the slaves that the Master Shelby takes for granted and haunts Mrs. Shelby nor does it capture the "enlightened" position of Augustine St. Clare, who still is not moved to actually free his slaves until it is too late. George and Eliza's "priveliges" are virtually ignored in the movie, hence the contrast with these and the definitive reinforcement of their slave status at critical moments is lost. Legree is more of a Grimm-like ogre than the unbelievably inhumane monster of a man he is in the novel. This is a Jim Crow movie, Stowe's is not a Jim Crow novel. The South lost the war, but it won with this movie. It is a distant cousin to Griffith's "Birth of a Nation."

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.

This big-budget, silent adaptation of Stowe's famous novel has not aged well. Presumably the producers did not want to alienate Southern viewers (the Civil War being only 60 years in the past): the film opens with a quote by Robert E. Lee condemning slavery and then introduces the first slave-holding characters as "Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, whose gentle rule of the slaves was typical of the South." While the slaves are mistreated in the film, the casual cruelty and wanton brutality described in the book is greatly toned down. The movie makes some significant changes to the story, notably shifting the period to the beginning of the Civil War (allowing the "Yankee" Army to free the slaves), eliminating the shootout between George and pursuing slave-catchers (perhaps the image of an escaped slave shooting at white men was considered too incendiary for the times), and adding a more 'Hollywood-style' ending (a last minute heroic rescue and the villain's righteous comeuppance). The film also combines the characters Eliza and Emmeline and eliminates most of the story that takes place amongst the Quakers in Ohio (all of whom, despite living in a 'free state', were breaking the law by helping the runaways - again perhaps to spare the audience's feelings). Like the movie, the novel includes many good, honorable, Christian slave-owners, but the book clearly distinguishes between 'being good' and 'doing good'. Self-righteous Northerners who promote emancipation but still consider blacks inferior are condemned as well as are 'benign' slave owners, who, despite their personal distaste for the system, do little to end the practice. The film is uneven at times, abruptly switching from high melodrama to broad comedy. While Stowe's book as some humorous moments (e.g. spitting tobacco juice, Ophelia's battle with her trunk), the movie movies pushes for laughs through stereotypes that parody both blacks (Topsy, the black children devouring a watermelon, slaves mugging and energetically dancing to 'Turkey in the Straw') and whites (lawyer Marks). The slapstick is badly dated, offensive to some modern sensibilities, and out of place in what is generally a somber and tragic story. The film is noted for having most of the significant black characters played whites in blackface with the exception of Tom himself, who was played by African American actor James B. Lowe. The main characters Eliza and George are not even in blackface and to modern viewers, the idea that the obviously white actors are runaway black slaves may seem ridiculous. The casting may have been part of an attempt to make the two more sympathetic to a largely white audience, but the book does makes it clear that Eliza and George were of mixed parentage and could pass themselves off as white if necessary. The arbitrariness of racial divisions is a theme in the book. The film has some good moments. Eliza's escape across the ice flows is well done and exciting and there is a visually striking scene in which Eva's soul ascends to Heaven. Lowe is good as Tom but needs to be appreciated in the context of the stagy, theatrical acting style that characterized most silent films. The movie is worth watching for fans of the book, social and cultural historians, and silent-film aficionados. Other viewers may find it offensive, dated, overly long, and/or slow moving.

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

This starts with Robert E. Lee proclaiming that slavery is evil. It's 1856. "Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, whose gentle rule of the slaves was typical of the South." They even arrange the marriage of two fair-skinned slaves, Eliza and George Harris. Uncle Tom is their beloved slave. However, the institution of slavery insists on tearing this happy plantation apart.

It's the classic anti-slavery book brought to film. There is no doubt that the attempt is sincere and the production does not spare the expense but there are elements which have aged very badly. First, all the main slave characters are played by white actors except for Uncle Tom. I get the idea of differentiating between light-skinned and dark-skinned slaves. It's a little jarring to have them actually be white or in one case, doing blackface. In one way, I understand playing to the audience of the day. In another way, it looks very bad to a modern audience. Of course, there are the white saviors all over this movie. The little girl is literally sainted on film. For me, the most compelling scene is the one female slave who refuses to accept an apple from the little girl. I'm glad that this movie has that one scene. It's almost self-aware of its own racial insensitivity. Again, times have changed. Audiences in its day would love the little girl sainted for helping the slaves. Finally, there is no excusing Topsy which was probably meant to be funny and heartbreaking back then but OMG. This has not aged well.

Just saw this movie on Turner Classic Movies last night. One of the BEST films I've ever seen! I laughed. I cried. I got angry. And I LOVED the ending. I loved the way the film was done, especially with the angel scene and the ghost. The locations were amazing and the actors and actresses were outstanding. I had no idea that slavery included the sale of white people as well. Little Eva's love for the slaves was so beautiful. She really moved me and when she died, I cried right along with Topsy. I cried when Tom was separated from his family and when the lead actress discovered her mother. I loved it when the army came to free all of the slaves and could feel the celebration coming through my television set. I truly wish that anyone and everyone who reads my words will have the opportunity to see this movie. I truly do think it's one of the best movies ever. A MUST see movie! Excellent!

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

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927) was a very big budgeted silent film production that was one of the first Hollywood movies to use an actual cast of black and white actors working together. Most of the movies made during this era were segregated or had actors working in "black face". Even though the movie is loosely based upon the novel, it's still hard hitting.

This late 20's adaptation of the classic anti-slavery novel is so syrupy that it'll give you diabetes. If you haven't read the book watch this movie. If you've already read the book, then don't. The film was well made and directed but it's too happy for it's own good. The highlight of this film is Simon Legree. He drips with sleaze and he ranks right up their with Krug from Last House on the Left (1972) as one of the most vile and scuzzy villains in movie history.

Recommended for true film buffs.

This is based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic anti-slavery novel. In 1856 Eliza and George (both slaves from different plantations) get married. However George's owner won't let Eliza's owner buy him so they can't be together. Still they manage to have a son named Harry. However Tom (another slave) and and Harry are going to be sold to someone else. Eliza takes her son and runs off but can she get away? Fast-moving adaptation. It was obviously a big budget film (Universal spent $2 million on it--a huge amount in those days) and it shows. The film is very anti-slavery but strangely has some of the worst black stereotypes in place. For example--all the black children devour a watermelon in seconds and other blacks are portrayed as stupid or dumb for "comic" relief. Also there are white actors in (obvious) black face and the two leads (Eliza and George) are white also. Still, back in those days, this was common practice. Even stranger Harry (as a little kid) is obviously being played by a little girl but then is played by a little boy when the story jumps to years later! The change is obvious and distracting. Still, this is a great movie.

Some of the character names (Uncle Tom, Little Eva, Simon Legree, Sambo) have become part of our language in good and bad ways. Also this is the movie that contains the infamous sequence of Eliza being chased over ice floes with hounds nipping at her heels! The movie also is well-acted (especially by Margarita Fischer as Eliza) and very moving at times (even though it does overdo it a bit with little Eva). There's also enough characters and situations for three different movies but they're never confusing and are always easy to keep track of. It's beautifully directed also and the most recent versions have a very good music score added and some sound effects. Complaints aside this is a very good film--probably one of the best silent film ever. Recommended.

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....

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.