Uncle Tom's Cabin

Eliza flees across the ice with her son, George escapes separately, and Tom is sold south to Simon Legree, all staged at full studio scale over two years and close to two million dollars. James B. Lowe, a Black actor, plays Tom with a restraint the rest of the production does not share: Margarita Fischer, the director's wife, is Eliza, and Topsy is a white actress in blackface. Watch it for Lowe, and for what a major studio thought a prestige picture about slavery should look like in 1927. Harry Pollard for Universal.