Uncle Tom's Cabin

An earnest attempt to depict the harsh realities of slavery, Harry Pollard's Uncle Tom's Cabin was-at an advertised cost of $2 million-of the most extravagant epics of its time. Margarita Fisher stars as Eliza, a slave who flees a Kentucky plantation after her son and a dignified father figure, Uncle Tom (James Lowe), are sold to a rival landowner. Her Dickensian quest eventually places her in the backwater kingdom of the sadistic Simon Legree (George Siegmann). But the film's most memorable sequence is Eliza's flight to freedom across a treacherous ice floe (a staple of the many stage productions, which D.W. Griffith shamelessly appropriated for his 1920 film Way Down East).