Readapting Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

During film's silent era between 1903 and 1927, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was adapted for the screen nine times. Some of the nine made film history. The 1903 Edison–Porter version, which preceded even the same year's The Great Train Robbery (usually cited as the first American narrative film), was the first American movie adapted from a novel, and also the first to use titles. Vitagraph's 1910 version was the first dramatic movie longer than two reels: its three reels were shown one at a time on three different days. The 1914 World adaptation was probably the first feature film to feature an African-American (instead of a white actor in blackface) in a central role. Nine adaptations in twenty-five years is almost certainly a record, too. More significant, however, is what together these films have to say about cultural history as itself a process of continuous selective adaptation. All nine were called Uncle Tom's Cabin : Edison–Porter (1903, 1 reel) Sigmund Lubin (1903, 1 reel) Vitagraph (1910, 3 reels) Thanhouser (1910, 1 reel) Imp (1913, 3 reels) Kalem (1913, 2 reels) World (1914, 5 reels) Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount (1918, 5 reels) Universal (1927, 13 reels) The five marked by asterisks have been lost. You can view versions of the remaining four at Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, an online resource that I have been building since 1998 to enable users to explore the story of Stowe's story as a cultural phenomenon.