Uncle Tom's Cabin (film Adaptations) - Later Films and Other Cinematic Mentions

Later Films and Other Cinematic Mentions

For several decades after the end of the silent film era, the subject matter of Stowe's novel was judged too sensitive for further film interpretation. In 1946, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer considered filming the story, but ceased production after protests led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

• A German language version under the title Onkel Toms Hütte, directed by Géza von Radványi (1907-1986), appeared in 1965 and was presented in the United States by exploitation film presenter Kroger Babb.
• The next film version was a television broadcast in 1987 directed by Stan Lathan and adapted by John Gay. It starred Avery Brooks, Phylicia Rashad, Edward Woodward, Jenny Lewis, Samuel L. Jackson and Endyia Kinney.
• Versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin have featured in a number of animated cartoons, including Walt Disney's "Mickey's Mellerdrammer" (1933), which features the classic Disney character performing the play in blackface with exaggerated, orange lips; the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Southern Fried Rabbit" (1953), where Bugs disguises himself as Uncle Tom and sings "My Old Kentucky Home" in order to cross the Mason-Dixon line; "Uncle Tom's Bungalow" (1937), a Warner Brother's cartoon supervised by Tex Avery; "Eliza on Ice" (1944), one of the earliest Mighty Mouse cartoons produced by Paul Terry; and "Uncle Tom's Cabana" (1947), a six-minute cartoon directed by Tex Avery.
• Birth of a Nation (1915) deliberately used a cabin similar to Uncle Tom's home in the film's dramatic climax, where several white Southerners unite with their former enemy (Yankee soldiers) to defend what the film's caption says is their "Aryan birthright." According to scholars, this reuse of such a familiar cabin would have resonated with, and been understood by, audiences of the time.
• Dimples, a 1936 Shirley Temple film, is a humorous look at the opening night of the 1853 play version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in New York. The film's last scene features a minstrel show starring Temple and Stepin Fetchit.
• "Uncle Tom's Uncle," a 1926 Our Gang (The Little Rascals) episode, has the kids creating their own "Tom Show."
• In the final scene of the Abbott and Costello film The Naughty Nineties, Costello is seen comically in drag as Little Eva in a showboat performance of the novel. He "ascends" to Heaven on a wire that gets caught.
• A highlight of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951) is a ballet, "Small House of Uncle Thomas", in traditional Siamese style which has been organized by Tuptim, on the subversive theme of Eliza's escape.
• In Gangs of New York (2002), Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis's characters attend an imagined wartime adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin with a deus ex machina ending. An actor portraying Abraham Lincoln is suspended in mid-air as he speaks consolingly to the blackface actors portraying Stowe's characters. The nativist audience members respond by shouting racist epithets, throwing objects at "Lincoln," and rioting to calls of "Down with the Union!" (It should be noted that Gangs of New York, the film, took great liberties with its source, Gangs of New York, the book, so much so that the book is not officially acknowledged.)
• In a deleted scene of the Indian film Rang De Basanti (India's official entry to the Oscar 2007), Indian revolutionaries are shown opting to watch the film while they were starving.
• A number of other movies have utilized characters, plots, and themes from Uncle Tom's Cabin, including An Uncle Tom's Cabin Troupe (1913); the Duncan Sisters' Topsy and Eva (1927); and 1938's Everybody Sing (which features Judy Garland in blackface).