This film is a wondrous curiosity.

It was made 12 years after The Birth Of A Nation and is on many levels a far more sophisticated piece of filmmaking -- and yet it also seems far more old-fashioned than Griffith's problematic masterpiece.

In the 1927 film, proscenium staging and histrionic acting clash with elegant studio lighting and bold camera movement, throwing the antiquated methods into stark contrast with the modern.  Every frame of Griffith's film is tense and alive with the impulse of innovation, while Harry Pollard's film shifts back and forth deliriously between styles, as though trying to improvise something respectable out of a grab-bag of conventions learned by rote.

The most emblematic shot in the film occurs at the death of little Eva.  From a close shot on the child the camera hurtles backwards on a track and then holds on a theatrical tableau in which angels appear by the magic of double-exposure to waft the soul of Eva to heaven.  A bold and expressive camera movement takes us into a shot that harks back to the stodgiest effects of an early Edison potboiler.

The whole film reels maddeningly between such extremes.  It's filled with some of the boldest and most beautiful images of the silent era, such as the lyrical passages on the riverboat and the banks of the Mississippi, and yet is drawn back relentlessly into visual mediocrity by a director who clearly had no vision of the medium as a coherent form.  His wife Margarita Fischer, who plays Eliza in the film (pictured in the still above,) said that Pollard, a product of the stage, always looked down on movies, even as he was cranking out hit after hit for Universal in the Twenties.  This movie was not one of them, though it did eventually make its money back in a series of re-releases -- one of them as late as 1958 (!) in a narrated sound version that eliminated the intertitles.

The fact that a film this disjointed could break even, and still be in theaters 30 years after its initial release, is a kind of confirmation of the old theatrical saw that Uncle Tom's Cabin is actor-proof and production-proof.  It's such an effective piece of melodrama that audiences are inclined to go with it no matter what.  I certainly found that to be true with this version, discombobulated as it is.  I could be gritting my teeth one moment over the black-face mugging of the actress playing Topsy, and fighting back a tear the next as stony Aunt Ophelia clasps her to her breast and says she'll love her.

Melodrama is a highly abstracted form whose stark dynamics work as a catalyst for emotions we may not have ready access to on a conscious level.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, by contstructing a finely calculated conduit for the often unconscious racial tensions of American society -- ferocious in her time and still potent in ours -- created a masterpice of the genre.