This film was a brilliant and rather interesting period piece about a free negro from the North who is kidnapped and forced to work on cotton plantations in the south.

Throughout I could feel stirrings of the film Mandingo although the movie took a definitely (and probably deliberately) different path.

Despite trying to show the inhumanity of slavery in the South, the film’s “owners” were just really too nice and reasonable to get you very hot under the collar. Certainly there were some brutal scenes and confronting imagery, but mostly it failed in depicting the barbarity of human slavery.

Of course it could be argued that this film is far more authentic than shock-fests like Goodbye Uncle Tom. It perhaps more shows white owners carefully protecting Negroes as an investment they might look after say like an expensive horse they bought – certainly just as callous but not quite the sadistic world of Mandingo!