Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971)

So much average

One of my all time favorites.

A Masterpiece!

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

In Goodbye Uncle Tom, two documentarists "travel" to the old American South and explore the slave economy. This world is recreated in all of its brutal and corrosive details, from the shipping to America of slaves in the hulls of ships - the sickening conditions with diarrhoea-ridden slaves chained in their own filth is emphasised - to the brothels where large Mammies coral underage girls for the delectation of white clients. The film is made on an enormous scale. The scenes in the slave markets and on the plantations have literally hundreds of extras, and the marshalling of crowds alone makes the film an exceptional achievement. This is no low-budget cheap-flick but a full, cinemascope extravaganza featuring vast hordes of extras, sweeping crane shots and unfeasibly intricate dolly shots which travel through large sets and teaming crowds, a swarming mass of human flesh, the sheer scale of which leaves one's mouth dropped open in wonder. That wonder is turned into awed disbelief as the brutal, nerve-wrecking content of the film unfolds before one's eyes. This is Gone With The Wind mixed with a supersized portion of Salo.The film is completely plot less. It features a series of set-pieces - all based on research into actual conditions, events and personages - each of which show an aspect of the slave trade. A bustling church has a preaching pro-slavery Pastor presiding over the gelding of African bucks. A mansion is filled to the brim with dozens of slaves, making beds, cooking dinner and helping Missies to dress. A group of nasty-looking rednecks roam a swamp, massacring escaped "merchandise." The scenes get nastier as the film progresses - which seems to be the only logic to the film's progression. There is a particularly insane sequence in which a "veterinary" tells us of his work on the slaves, a sequence redolent of Mengele and the atrocities of the Nazis (the ludicrous German accent this character is given encourages us to make this leap). The final old Southern section of the film concerns a young virgin girl taken to a "breeding farm" and mated by with a nasty, violent old buck stud - the fat "farmer" pontificates merrily about stock as the victim is led to an event which is destined to rip her sexual organs to shreds… What is especially freakish about the film is its overwhelming prurience. The camera lingers over the naked male and female bodies of the slaves, and revels in their degradation. This creates a profoundly uneasy feeling in the viewer. It is not merely that this film offers an indictment of an economy in which human flesh became literally a commodity, backed up with the most noxious racial supremacism, but that it dwells so excessively on the minutiae of humiliation and hatred. It almost wills itself to become a repellent and fascinating object - which one could argue is the more honest attitude to take towards human evil. It is as if Goodbye Uncle Tom were the vomit of history flung in the face of the audience, and the audience were being tempted to dance in it a little, as well as vomit over themselves.The end of the film - and it is a long (123 minute) film - is as extraordinary and thoroughly reprehensible as the rest. We suddenly cut to then contemporary America, and watch a black preacher/panther walking along a Florida beach, watching the frolicking wealthy whities at play. He reads The Confessions of Nat Turner - a true-life account of a slave who massacred a number of slaver families in 1831 - and fantasises about killing the honkies around him. Those fantasies are shown to us by the filmmakers in lurid detail, and whitebread families get axes in their heads, knives in their stomachs and their babies battered against walls. This is an incendiary sequence, and must have been particularly shocking in 1971.It is very difficult to know what to make of Goodbye Uncle Tom. On the one hand, its lurid exploitative nature is enough to repel even the most hardened of extreme cinema enthusiasts. What is more, the economics and morality of the film's actual making is enough to send one reeling in horror in and of themselves. It was filmed in Haiti, and a thank you appears on the credits to Papa Doc. It is doubtful any of the thoroughly degraded extras were paid very much for their work, which suggests that the film is itself a product of a coercive and slave-driving economic system; and let's not forget, Haiti was a former slave colony. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine a film which did more to make the realities of the slave-based economic system more palpable and horrifying. In refusing the audience the comforting delights of character individuation, journeys, change and anything other than economic/racial relationships, the film does constitute an effective dramaturgy for dealing with such an unmitigatingly inhuman episode in human history. In a way, a film like Amistad makes it all alright that slavery happened, because the liberal humanist Spielberg pulls out the trump card of the dignity of the human spirit, the chance for which to triumph slavery (like the holocaust) happened to offer. There is absolutely no human dignity on show in Goodbye Uncle Tom. Slavery is not a business where dignity comes into the equation. One of the film's most intriguing characters in a slave who boasts of his price in the market, his value to his masters, and the healthcare and help in old age which a good master can provide for him. He is an embelmatic proletarian historical figure...What is on show in Goodbye Uncle Tom is a dazzling display of film-making technique. From an editing, cinematographic and staging point of view, the film is a masterpiece.

The story goes that when this played Times Square it caused a riot. I have no idea if its true or not, but if it did happen I can see why.The film is an examination of race relations that focuses on slavery. As an indictment of the institution of slavery this film can not be topped. This is a nightmarish look at what slave mills must have been like almost 200 years ago.The film exists in two versions that are very different different, and if you ever wanted to see how one film could end up as two different films, look no farther than this film (both versions are in the Mondo Cane box set)Both films contain much of the same footage cut for different effect.The original Italian cut deals more heavily with race relations now, while the American version deals more with the slavery aspect. The final moments of both versions makes more sense in context of the Italian version since in the final moments we see that in many ways things have not gotten all that much better for the black race. Both films also have a good amount of footage unique to that version. I doubt seriously that the footage could be combined to make one super film since you'd end up with a third film with a third point of view.I like both versions of the film. I think that right or wrong this is a film that will get you talking and thinking and wondering, which is what the film is suppose to do. I can't say that one is better than the other, both are flawed, however both should be seen, preferably with in a day or so of each other since the duel versions play off each other in unexpected ways.See these films., But be prepared to get angry. You may not get through them, you may not like them, but you will be provoked into a reaction on some level. For better or worse you will be challenged and moved which is what the point of the film is.9 out of 10.

MONDO CANE and AFRICA ADDIO creators Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E. Prosperi take us on a journey through time, back to the mid 1800's, not too long before the civil war. The movie is styled like one of their previous documentaries, with actors talking to the camera as though being interviewed, and just about every form of human cruelty being enacted on the Africans who have been dragged overseas to become slaves.The movie is certainly disturbing, and it did indeed enrage me that ancestors of mine took part in this treatment of fellow human beings. But the movie lost me whenever it tried to create a parallel between the climate between blacks and whites in the 1800s and the 1960s. Not that there weren't (and, unfortunately, still are) problems with racial tension in this country, but the movie seems to think that the average black person is still a savage at heart, just waiting for the right moment to break out an axe and slaughter the first white person he comes across. The movie climaxes with a radical black man reading The Diary of Nat Turner and imagining doing just that, including a horrific moment in which he smashes a baby's head against the wall.To me, the movie seems to have a negative opinion of just about everyone. Obviously, due to its decidedly anti-slavery stance, the slave traders are viewed as sick, inhuman monsters with only the faintest mask of civility on the surface. But the African characters are portrayed largely as ignorant buffoons, too dim-witted to understand what's happening to them.Later, during the modern day scenes, the sole black character is shown as having a major chip on his shoulder that has driven him nearly insane with rage, while the white people are a bunch of care-free bubble heads. Such generalizations and lack of depth or character development greatly lessens the power the movie may have had.But, as a purely gut-busting exercise in sleaze and disgusting imagery, GOODBYE UNCLE TOM sits confidently alongside other such gross-out movies as CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, SALO and MEN BEHIND THE SUN. Also, like those movies, GUT (hmmm, interesting abbreviation) goes so outrageously over-the-top in depicting its atrocities, most of the movie's true power is lost, and it becomes little more than a freak show.I hesitantly recommend the movie for fans of sick cinema as a curiosity. I warn pretty much everyone else to stay far, far away.

It has been about 3 years since i've seen this movie, and now that i know it's more widely available I cannot wait to get my hands on it again. The copy I originally viewed was in horrible shape. It was a bootleg of a version where the language was English, but the subtitles were in Greek!! So, this movie obviously strikes a chord with every viewer it reaches.American slavery movies always include a few heroes...the ones who aren't racist or fascist at all. This is not one of them. You can't help but feel utter contempt for all of colonial, pre-civil war America. After viewing it I couldn't stop talking about it for days. I would find it impossible for anyone to watch and not ask questions. I had read a few comments earlier how this was a European way of looking at American slavery. Perhaps that's why it's so unfriendly. The directors of this Italian flick are ruthless in sparing no American of a guilt-free conscience. One scene that particularly got me teary-eyed was when a white family is sitting down to dinner and they throw all of their leftover food to the "dogs" under the table...the "dogs" happen to be young, crying, black children.As ugly as the movie is, it truly is a piece of art, which could probably never be done again. Did you know that when it was released in America they gave it an "X" rating? You would think that in this century we could have more freedom to voice our opinion, but like i say, due to media outcry and politics, i highly doubt we will ever see a movie like this one again.