The Premise: Documentarians have traveled back to the antebellum southern United States during the pre-Civil War era when slavery was rampant. Their goal is to capture and expose the cruelty and horrors of the slave trade in as realistic a manner as possible. Witness slave ships with poor souls packed into the galley like sardines, naked, afraid and worked to the bone. See grotesque abuses of power where rape and beatings are only the tip of the iceberg. Men are strung up by their ankles, given forced enemas, treated like cattle. Women are subjected to breeding farms where babies are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The mask of geniality is ever-present on the faces of the white slave owners. The film ends with a cry of rage.

Addio zio Tom  a.k.a. Goodbye Uncle Tom is a deeply unsettling, unpleasant film. The sheer depravity and cruelty on display is beyond what all but the most hardened among us would find acceptable. As such, this is not a fun viewing experience. Somehow what makes it worse is that the film is shot with a skilled hand. Smooth tracking shots through the ship galley, the slave auctions and the breeding stalls only heighten how disgusting the acts on display are. In fact, the style of the film reminds me a great deal of several films by director Peter Watkins such as Culloden and La Commune (Paris, 1871) in both look and feel. Watkins isn’t mentioned anywhere in the extras as an influence though, so this could just be a coincidence. Juxtaposed with these shocking images are elaborately costumed southern belles and gentlemen in finely tailored suits cavorting about on picturesque lawns of stately antebellum mansions. Yet those same people say and do the most vile things that can be transgressed against a fellow human. The film is unapologetic in its immediacy and veracity. What directors Jacopetti and Prosperi, creators of the legendary Mondo Cane and who had previously courted racism controversy with their documentary Africa Addio, have attempted is to show the ugliness of a moment in history, giving us a front row seat to the atrocities and making the viewer feel somewhat complicit in these reprehensible activities. The closest the film comes to illustrating a point is with the violent, modern day “revenge” sequence at the end that may be perceived as too little, too late or that could just add fuel to the fire. This is where the key problem with the film comes into focus. What Jacopetti and Prosperi have not done is provided any sort of sense of context (they even admit this as a flaw of the film in the Godfathers of Mondo documentary included as an extra). As such, this barrage of awful imagery comes across more exploitive than instructional. In fact, I would guess that while the likes of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael were outraged understandably by Goodbye Uncle Tom, the grindhouse patrons of the time probably relished the disgusting events on display. The sort of people that get off on I Spit On Your Grave and Men Behind The Sun were most likely loving Goodbye Uncle Tom. There is a fine line one must balance upon when trying to drive home a message or make a point like this. If you come in swinging with a sledgehammer, don’t be surprised when you split open a bunch of heads.

Like Blue Underground’s previous 4K release of Night of the Blood Monsters, Goodbye Uncle Tom‘s UHD transfer looks amazingly clear with nice deep blacks, rich colors and no trace to be found of any kind of distortion or blemish in the image. A more vile film has never looked better. From an audio standpoint, the film has not just two different audio tracks, English and Italian, but actually two different versions of the film, each with their own dedicated UHD disc. It’s interesting to compare between the two. They are actually edited a little differently with the Italian version running about 15 minutes longer. While one may question why such a divisive film should receive the deluxe UHD treatment, Blue Underground has done their best to pack this disc with relevant extras to add more context to the film and even offer counterpoints to the film and why maybe it should be condemned. First we have two feature length documentaries. The Importance of Shocking focuses on the entire life and career of co-director Gualtiero Jacopetti and is an excellent overview of a complicated and controversial figure. The other documentary is The Godfathers of Mondo and gives a detailed overview of Jacopetti’s and Prosperi’s films and their working relationship. It’s also a really good doc worth checking out if you’re interested in the origins of mondo cinema. Also included is what seems to be a kind of followup featurette called “Goodbye Cruel Mondo” that features more interview segments with Jacopetti, Prosperi and Riz Ortolani, particularly on Goodbye Uncle Tom. Next we have a 50 min. segment of behind-the-scenes 8mm location footage from the film with comments by the production manager Giampaolo Lomi. It’s a good one if you are hankering for even more detailed comments around the production. The featurette “Mondo Mercenaries” is an interview with film scholar Mark Goodall (author of the book Sweet & Savage, about the mondo phenomenon) who provides more context on the mondo film movement and Jacopetti’s and Prosperi’s influence and place in it. Finally we have “Abjection Under Authoritarianism”, a strong condemnation of the film by Professor Matthew J. Smith who points out that while the film itself is reprehensible, the treatment of Haitian actors on set is even more so. He speaks of the exploitive nature of using these poor Haitian extras who most likely were unaware of what was going to be asked of them while they lived under the rule of a dictator that the filmmakers became friendly with. I appreciate that Blue Underground provided a counterpoint to the film and the filmmakers who espouse throughout the extras about how their intentions were pure, and that they were making an anti-racist film. Professor Smith is very eloquent and thorough in his objections to the film, and one almost wishes for more of this kind of extra. For physical extras, we have an essay from Dan Madigan that attempts to thread the needle, appreciating the film for it’s technical aspects and the idea behind it while also condemning it for its exploitive nature as well as for the mistreatment of the Haitians as Professor Smith discussed. Additionally included in the CD soundtrack of the film by great composer Riz Ortolani, and anyone who reads these regularly knows that I am a sucker for a bonus CD.

Love it or hate it, Goodbye Uncle Tom is a potent film that has lost little to none of its shock value in intervening years. Blue Underground has provided here what is most likely the definitive release of this extremely controversial film.