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| Walter Hitchcock and George Shelby and Sam Lucas as Uncle Tom. |
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Dir: William Robert
Daly
Prod: J.V. Ritchey
Scr: Edward McWade
Phot: Irvin Willat
Premiere: August 10,
1914
54 min.
Sam Lucas has the dubious distinction of being the first
black man to play Uncle Tom, both on stage and on screen. This and a few other
things make this movie, already by 1914 the seventh film adaptation of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s 1852 landmark, best-selling, Civil War-sparking, unconsciously
racist saga condemnation of slavery in novel form, a real up and down viewing
experience.
Lucas was born free, some dozen years before the Civil War
began, and never experienced slavery personally. He began as a guitarist and
singer, then joined one of the many of America’s thriving African-American
minstrel-show companies. (Yes, there was segregation even between groups of
performers that wore blackface . . . wheels within wheels.) He wrote songs,
became known for a sad-sack comic archetype in revues.
Rich from his successes and looking to create some serious
acting possibilities for himself, he backed a production that featured him as
the first African-American Uncle Tom in a stage production (it flopped). He
featured in the groundbreaking black musicals of Bob Cole and the Johnson Brothers
such as A Trip to Coontown and The Red Moon. He became known as “The
Grand Old Man of the Negro Stage.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is one of those hated classics taught in schools, and in truth it’s a turgid
melodrama with cardboard characters put in motion to illustrate abolitionist
and evangelist Christian ideology. However, Stowe found as did James Fenimore
Cooper and the dime novelists of the day that style was not as important as
plot, and this one had a doozy.
Nice, well-meaning slaveowners (?) are forced to sell two of
their human properties, Tom and George Harris. George’s wife Eliza decides to
escape and runs north, child in arms, across the semi-frozen Ohio River,
leaping from ice cake to ice cake. The golden-curled girl-child Little Eva, devoted
to Uncle Tom (whom she owns), grows ill and dies at length, and eloquently (a
nice trick stolen from Dickens, who had a thing about killing off child
characters to generate readership). The beloved, gentle, passive, obedient, and
homily-laden old Uncle Tom gets sold hither and thither, enduring abuse until
he is finally beaten to death by some of evil slaveholder Simon Legree’s
overseers . . . whom he does forgive before he dies, triggering their
conversions, like a modern saint.
The factual background of the controversial novel was
disputed, but didn’t deter it from becoming the most read novel of the 19th
century. Eliza Crossing the Ice and the Death of Little Eva became iconic,
engrained moments in American popular culture.
Its illumination of the detestable practices of slavery helped
ignite the dissolution of the “peculiar institution” – but it crafted some
horrible stereotypes as well. “Uncle Tom” is a hateful byword now, fighting
words for decades in fact, designating an African-American subservient to
whites. (Tarentino and Samuel L. Jackson skilfully deconstructs that archetype in 2012's Django Unchained, via the character of Stephen, a sinister and brilliant"house slave" who conspires with his twisted master to keep everyone else down.)
Stowe’s typifying of “happy, lazy darkies,” tragic mulattoes, dark-skinned “mammies,” and Tom himself, created images problematic and best, destined to get stuck like sand in the gears of understanding.
Stowe’s typifying of “happy, lazy darkies,” tragic mulattoes, dark-skinned “mammies,” and Tom himself, created images problematic and best, destined to get stuck like sand in the gears of understanding.
The film’s casting and its shooting contrasts are peculiar. Lucas
is the only black actor credited, although there are plenty of black extras.
Eliza isn’t black, nor is the child actress made up in ridiculous blackface as
the mischievous, thieving, and lying but supposedly endearing slave orphan
child Topsy, the original model for the “pickaninny” – a shiftless, comic
grotesque that wound up being as dehumanizing as any of the abuses pictured in
the book. Lucas himself acts in a subdued and dignified manner, but he’s really
just there to suffer. His Uncle Tom, as written, is black Jesus, an inoffensive
and unthreatening Lamb of God.
The film’s shooting style is schizophrenic as well. All
interior and most “dialogue” shots are presented in a very staid, stage-bound
manner, with the principals all lined up and facing front. However as soon as
the camera gets outside, things get interesting. Some of the film was shot on location
in the South; there are marvelous river vistas, and kinetic shots of a
steamboat landing and sailing off. An ambush and gun battle is shot with
careening perspectives, sweeping pans, and innovative POV shots.
And a surprising moment. A fellow slave shoots Legree dead
in revenge for the killing of Tom; as he does the gun extends forward into the bottom
of the frame from his perspective, as if held by the cameraman, and fires. The
audience is encouraged to be complicit in the murder of a racist. It was a
remarkable flash of empowerment – it would take 57 years and the birth of Blaxploitation
film before an African-American person in film would take up arms against white
enemies again.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry,
in chronological order. Next time: ‘The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old
England.’
