Thoughts on Uncle Tom's Cabin

I recorded the 1927 version of Uncle Tom's Cabin last month when TCM ran it was part of the spotlight on slavery in the movies presented by Ben Mankiewicz and Prof. Donald Bogle. Apparently, this was the ninth version of the story filmed, and focuses more on the relationshpi between Eliza and George than on Uncle Tom, with Simon Legree only coming in the last third. Oh, and with the exception of Tom, all the main characters (notably slaves Eliza and George) are played by white people.

Well, the last third of what I watched. I don't know what if anything was missing from this version. IMDb lists the movie as being 144 minutes, but the print TCM ran was about 115 minutes. Some of that could be down to frame rate or intertitles, but I'm not certain about a whole half hour of the movie. Plus, the print TCM ran had a card about it being a Realart release, and not the Universal logo. That card also looked rather more recent, like this was from a TV print from when movies first started showing up on TV. The Kino Video DVD is also listed as 144 minutes.

Then again, there's also a discrepancy in the running time of some of the other silent versions. IMDb lists the first version, from 1903, as running 13 minutes, but Youtube has a buch of prints (since it's public domain) running from about 12 minutes up to about 19. Not having watched all the prints, I'd assume some of that is down to extra title credits added by the uploader.

I didn't realize until now that there was a 1965 European version with Herbert Lom as Simon Legree. Ooh, there's Vilma Degischer from the Sissi movies as Mrs. Shelby, Eliza's owner from the opening of the movie (at least the beginning of the 1927 version). I don't know that that one is on DVD.