April 6: Independent-International: Write about a movie by Sam Sherman. Here’s a list.

The source material for this movie is Géza von Radványi’s 1965 epic, a massive, $5 million European co-production that featured Herbert Lom (yes, Chief Inspector Dreyfus himself) and Gert Fröbe (Goldfinger!). It was meant to be a prestigious, sweeping adaptation of the Stowe classic.

It had already been released by none other than Kroger Babb in 1969 (thanks, Good Efficient Butchery) with an hour chopped off. He re-released it under the name Cassy, and it bombed again.

Enter Sam Sherman. He looked at this three-hour prestige piece and saw a void where the commercial elements should be.

Needing money, Babb sold it to him, and Sherman had Al Adamson cut forty more minutes off the already-trimmed-down Babb cut. When Napoleon (Aziz Saad) is killed by an alligator, he cut that part and has an entirely different actor, Prentiss Moulden, take over. Napoleon makes it to a plantation where the widow Melissa (Mary Ann Jenson) is, well, inserted into the Herman Lom villain-led film. As she nurses him back to health, she also ends up asking him to hold her, and then that gives us a whole bunch of lovemaking, which only ends when three bounty hunters catch him, sexually assault him and then pour burning oil all over him while we watch. Marilyn Joi also shows up as a runaway slave who also gets raped, because that’s what audiences were looking for in 1977, said no one other than raincoaters.

In the original, Uncle Tom (John Kitzmiller) dies and forgives the whites for how they treated his people. In this one, well, everyone who had been impacted by the slavers gets some revenge, including castration. We close on the bad guys getting lynched, which is exactly the kind of revenge Southern whites feared. 

This was re-released yet again three years later as White Trash Woman. RIP Sam Sherman. I can only assume that they cremated you, because after watching this, I have no idea what size coffin could contain balls as big as yours.