User Reviews

The animation here is very primitive.

What we got here is a re-telling of Uncle Tom's Cabin (as if no one could guess) with a lot of music and dancing.

The slavery theme is awkward by today's standards, but the slave owners were clearly NOT meant to be seen as the good guys. We all laughed when they got theirs on the ice.

There was ice in the 1860's south???

And the hippo that little Eva danced with was supposed to be a white girl I think. She cried when her friend got taken away. So I don't see a racist theme here. The slave songs might bring home harsh memories though.

And I'm sure the blacks back then weren't happy to be poor and uneducated. And was watermelon really that ubiquitous?

Those who wrote and filmed this cartoon (in fact Mannie Davis and John Foster) would I think have been both surprised and aggrieved that,getting on for a hundred years later, many of their compatriots would, where race was concerned, be so unable to distinguish between mockery and satire or would know so little about the history of the issue (their own history) that they would regard this film as racist.

I am not of course arguing that racism was somehow not racism a hundred years ago because "people thought differently then". Quite the contrary, I am suggesting that not only is this cartoon quite clearly not racist but that it is very clearly, rather splendidly and, for the time, rather unusually anti-racist.

Start with Uncle Tom's Cabin itself. People have rather forgotten in practice (although they know it in theory from their history books)quite what an important and influential book it was. Beecher Stow may have been white (and a Northern white at that) but she was a very worthy woman who did as much as anyone in her position could be reasonably expected do to combat the evils of slavery and racism.

There are elements of what I suppose one must call "maternalism" in the novel but these are in fact rather less important than many people suppose. The fact that the term "Uncle Tom" has come to be a synonym for a kind of black collaborator with a slave-owning society has done Stowe a grave injustice because Tom in the novel is a great deal more than that. He is in fact the worm that turns, the man who, as far as his religious principles allow, becomes an active opponent of the slavers and is murdered as a result.

The other thing that clouded the reputation of the novel and its author was the concerted campaign that was launched both to contradict the novel (as a libel of the noble South) and, at the same time, to palliate its effectiveness and deform its message. Two of the principle figures in that campaign were Thomas Dixon Junior, author of the Klansman and D. W. Griffith, director of the 1915 film based upon it. Both men quite explicitly regarded themselves as "setting the record straight" with again quite explicit reference to the shocking attack upon the South that Uncle Tom's Cabin represented.

How this campaign worked and how successful this "revisionist" view became I have argued quite extensively in other reviews (of the 1927 Uncle Tom's Cabin and of the 1927 film Topsy and Eva). In this view all problems started with the arrival of the Africans (Birth of a Nation) as though they had somehow come unbidden as clandestine immigrants, who had however been treated with kindness and consideration by the overwhelming majority of Southern gentlemen that owned them (this statement, slightly differently worded, occurs, quite extraordinarily, towards the beginning of the high-budget bells-and-whistles 1927 film of Uncle Tom's Cabin). Black slaves were happy in their gentle slavery, singing while they worked, plentifully supplied with watermelons, the "favorite food of their race" (to quote the rubric for a racist film of 1896).

Now these same stereotypes do appear in this film but with such heavy exaggeration and evident irony that it is clear the film is not mocking black people but the stereotypes of black people associated with the revisionist version of history.

The scene for instance of happy cotton-pickers is so wonderfully over the top that it completely ridicules the idea of happy slaves so crucial to the Dixon-Griffith view of the pre-bellum South and the irony is made even sharper when we see, immediately afterwards, a more realistic portrayal of slave labour and, a little later, the slaves, still singing, being dragged, chained, to the salve auction.

Nor does the gross behaviour of the whites at the auction correspond with the Dixon-Griffith image of the genteel South. Chanting "We want Lisa" in unison, they are more grotesque and threatening than the characters in the original novel. Topsy blows a raspberry and Lisa flees (with a passing tongue-in-cheek reference to another racial/racist stereotype - the mother bathing her baby. The savage bloodhounds who take up the chase are of course kin to the dog-featured men who control them.

The idea of the "Uncle Tom" is savagely mocked when we see the character polishing the enormous ball attached to his leg (no notion of "happy slavery" here) and he has to join the fleeing Lisa, still shackled, although it happily serves to throw at the villainous slave-owner as he topples over the rapids. At which point they (Tom, Lisa and baby and Topsy) can sing with genuine happiness at the end of their bondage and the.

There are some superb ideas and some superb pieces of juxtaposition. I just love the idea of little Eva as a baby hippo (for once clearly not placing her in any sense above Topsy). And then the scene on the steamer of the "blacks" singing and dancing with a certain melancholy charm below-decks (with the ominous bolted door clearly visible centre-screen behind them and a strange hammer that summons them to stop so that we can switch to their slobbish white masters singing country-and-western style above-decks.

The whole film serves as a fine commentary on the "revisionism" that had been sweeping the US since 1915 and which, alas, would continue to be the dominant mode for decades to come.

It was in fact made in 1930 as Dixie Days, this being a retitled rerelease. It was also rejigged in 1932 as Down in Dixie where the quartet end up at the North Pole where eventually the villainous slaver catches up with them but is summarily dealt with by a giant black walrus and our four heroes have the Missisisipi steamboat to themselves.