The “pitiful” movie Roger Ebert called the “most disgusting, contemptuous insult” to cinema
Cinema history has spat out many movies that seem like they only exist to disgust and offend, and as a critic who dedicated his professional life to watching virtually every new major release over the course of decades, Roger Ebert saw quite a few of them.
Some films were so degrading, diabolical, and offensive that he could barely bring himself to review them, and he held an especially disdainful place in his heart for a highly specific and niche subgenre: the docudramas that eventually became categorised as Mondo cinema, the gift nobody wanted Italy to give.
Ebert had already blasted the co-directing duo Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E Prosperi’s 1966 effort, Africa Addio, as a “brutal, dishonest, racist film” that infuriated him on every imaginable level, so at least he knew what he was getting himself into when the pair prepared to unleash Farewell Uncle Tom on an unsuspecting world five years later.
The mid-19th century was a fractious time in the United States, to put it lightly, with the country increasingly divided over slavery, industrialisation, and human rights, to name but three major issues. It wouldn’t be impossible to make an interesting, insightful, and tactful doc about the period, but this wasn’t it. In fact, Ebert was completely and utterly abhorred.
“They have finally done it: Made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary,” he wrote. Jacopetti and Prosperi were placed squarely in the firing line, with their repeated attempts to make the most offensive and intentionally provocative, and not in a good way, pictures finally reaching the pinnacle, for lack of a better term.
In Farewell Uncle Tom, the use of relevant period-era documents technically qualified it as a documentary, but the events therein were dramatised by actors. The directors didn’t have to be so brutal, graphic, and horrific in those scenes, but based on their previous work, it was to be expected. That’s what they did, and Ebert couldn’t believe that “the whole distasteful history of these filmmakers was not enough to keep Farewell Uncle Tom out of town.”
“This is cruel exploitation,” he insisted. “If it is tragic that the barbarism of slavery existed in this country, is it not also tragic and enraging that for a few dollars the producers of this film were able to reproduce and re-enact that barbarism?” Jacopetti and Prosperi made a career out of it, and to make the whole thing even queasier, the production had the full support of François Duvalier.
Farewell Uncle Tom‘s re-enactments were shot in Haiti, where Duvalier had been elected president in 1957, and in 1964, he declared himself president for life, while he also had a habit of using death squads to eliminate his opponents, critics, and anyone else who even stood a chance of getting in his way.
Ebert theorised that the non-professional actors forced to degrade themselves probably only made “a few days’ pitiful wages,” and since the directors were personal guests of Duvalier, who were allowed to shoot anywhere they wanted, were given as many extras as they wanted, and had dinner with the dictator every week, what unfolded onscreen was only one part of a movie that was rotten to the very core.
