EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

Herbert Biberman was so against the U.S. Lend-Lease to the United Kingdom that the FBI suspected Jewish director of being a Nazi. After being investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to be questioned by Congress. Beyond being blacklisted, he was jailed for six months. Other than 1954’s Salt of the Earth, this is the only movie that he made after that. He was kept out of the Director’s Guild until he was posthumously added back in 1997.

His film Slaves was not well-reviewed. Vincent Carnaby summed up many other notes by saying that it was “…a kind of cinematic carpetbagging project in which some contemporary movie-makers have raided the antebellum South and attempted to impose on it their own attitudes that will explain 1969 black militancy. The result, which opened here yesterday at the DeMille and neighborhood theaters, is a pre-fab Uncle Tom’s Cabin, set in an 1850 Mississippi where everybody—masters and slaves alike—talks as if he had been weaned, at best, on the Group Theater, and, at worst, on silent-movie titles.”

Stephen Boyd — are you shocked that I am excited to mention that he’s in Marta? — plays the evil slaver in this. He said of being in it, “Some people have the impression that people are in this picture because they want to say something. I don’t have a damn thing to say. MacKay says it, and what he says, God knows….Show me a business anywhere which is successful, and I will show you a man who could very easily be MacKay. And that, to me, is really the point.”

He gets to purchase Luke (Ossie Davis), a slave who had been promised by his elderly master that he would get to be a free man. At the same auction, he also purchases Cassy (Dionne Warwick) to be his lover against her will.

Boyd has some involved speeches in this and excels at being evil. Davis is good as well and you feel for his character, a man sure he will never see his children again. While sold as exploitation, it’s nowhere near Mandingo or Goodbye Uncle Tom, but then again, the latter is as horrible as it gets.

Originally distributed unrated by Continental Distributing AKA the same Walter Reade Corporation that screwed up Night of the Living Dead‘s release and caused it to be a public domain movie. In fact, this played doubles with Night! It was rereleased in 1981 with an R rating by 21st Century.

You can watch this on YouTube.