March 25 was the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade. Two new movies—both named Amazing Grace—commemorate the evils of enslavement and the movement to abolish it. Both movies take their name from the Christian hymn, its music derived from African folksongs with lyrics by English slaver John Newton. In Michael Apted’s U.K. version, which opened in the city last month, Ioan Gruffudd (who played Mr. Fantastic in Fantastic Four) portrays an even more phenomenal superhero, real life English politician William Wilberforce, who spearheaded the struggle to ban Britain’s trafficking in human cargo.

For decades, Wilberforce and his merry band of abolitionists used petitions, boycotts and demonstrations to convince Parliament to pass the 1807 law that finally ended the English Empire’s transshipment of human chattel.

Director Jeta Amata’s Nigerian version, The Amazing Grace, features a slave uprising and is a biopic about Newton, who realized the errors of his ways and devoted the rest of his life to abolishing slavery. Newton became Wilberforce’s mentor.

Since 1915, slavery has been at the heart of some of filmdom’s greatest productions, created by top talents ranging from showmen to artistes to blockbuster filmmakers to the Hollywood Ten. The buying and selling of human flesh has appeared onscreen in various forms, including “white slavery,” but motion picture human bondage appears primarily in four film genres.

Antiquity has provided fertile ground for moviedom’s depiction of slavery. Cecil B. DeMille directed the biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, as a 1923, black and white silent film, then as the beloved 1956 VistaVision remake starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as pharaoh. Forced, unpaid labor is often slavery’s raison d’etre; the Exodus saga of enchained Hebrews “way down in Egypt’s land” building Rameses’ pyramids is the quintessential tale of brutal bondage. With its special effects parting of the Red Sea, The Ten Commandments is the archetypal liberation story, resonating in segregated America as Rosa Parks literally refused to take a backseat to “whitey,” and Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Heston returned as another enslaved Jew in 1959’s Ben-Hur. Its memorable galley-slave and chariot sequences—with Heston drag racing Stephen Boyd’s centurion—scored the future NRA prez Oscar gold. Ben-Hur won 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (William Wyler) and, like Commandments, commented on the state of Israel’s birth.

Rome is the setting for many slave productions, the best being Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Spartacus. The narrator opens by saying: “Even at the zenith of her pride and power, the Republic lay fatally stricken with a disease called human slavery. The age of the dictator was at hand ...” Kirk Douglas stars as the gladiator who rallies a slave army that almost defeats Laurence Olivier’s legions to topple the Roman Empire.

Woody Strode, as African slave Draba, is executed and hanged for refusing to kill Spartacus in the ring—referencing American race relations and lynching. Spartacus/Douglas expresses the gospel according to the downtrodden: “When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That’s why he’s not afraid of it. That’s why we’ll win.”

After their rebellion is quahsed, the Romans offer captured insurgents a deal: hand over their leader and live, or face mass crucifixion. Douglas rises to turn himself in and spare his beaten men, but Antoninus (Tony Curtis) proclaims, “I’m Spartacus!” followed by the other rebels declaring themselves “Spartacus.”

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, known for humanistic, anti-fascist scripts, was Tinseltown’s highest paid screenwriter during Hollywood’s Golden Age, writing such classics as 1944’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Trumbo adapted Spartacus from the novel by his fellow blacklisted ex-Red, Howard Fast, who was persecuted by Senator Joe McCarthy. In 1947, Trumbo became one of the Hollywood Ten—leftists refusing to inform on other progressives when summoned to Washington to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The studios blacklisted the “unfriendly” witnesses, who were cited for contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

After Trumbo was freed, he wrote scripts under pseudonyms, winning a 1957 Oscar under an assumed name. With Spartacus, Kirk Douglas played his greatest role—offscreen—ensuring Trumbo received screen credit, thus helping end Hollywood’s blacklist. The slaves’ refusal to inform on Spartacus is Trumbo’s condemning “naming names.” In Spartacus, Crassus also mirrors McCarthy when he says: “Lists of the disloyal have been compiled!”  

In Richard Lester’s 1966 comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Zero Mostel plays Pseudolus, whom Marcus Lycus (Phil Silvers) calls “the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all Rome!” What makes Pseudolus such a conniver? When Hero (Michael Crawford) tells him, “People do not go around freeing slaves every day,” Pseudolus cracks: “Be the first. Start a fashion.” Pseudolus is motivated by his all-too-human desire to be free, something Mostel—a Jew blacklisted during the McCarthy era—related to. (African-American comedienne Whoopi Goldberg played Pseudolus in 1997’s Broadway revival.) 

Film’s fascination with ancient slavery continues. The TV mini-series “Spartacus” aired in 2004, and in Mel Gibson’s 2006 Apocalypto, enslaved Mayans are sacrificed by pagan priests. The film 300 depicts the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, pitting Spartans against Persians bent on enslaving Greek city-states. HBO’s current series “Rome” also features episodes directed by Apted.

Ironically, while Greeks and Romans spoke of democracy and Republics for themselves, they owned slaves—as did Americans. This “peculiar institution” is portrayed in some of Tinseltown’s boffo box office hits, although not always authentically. When Chris Rock, whose 2003 Head of State is about America’s first black president, was asked how Hollywood depicted slaves, he replied: “Not really good.”

The comedian/filmmaker could have easily been referring to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation or 1939’s Gone With the Wind. Both blockbusters portrayed contented banjo-strumming, watermelon chomping “darkies” enjoying antebellum plantations until the Civil War upset the South’s “natural” order. During Reconstruction, white knight/night riders (Klansmen in Griffith’s despicable epic) help restore white supremacy, returning newly freed, uppity blacks to their “proper” place: Jim Crow.

Rock claimed that black director Reginald Hudlin “wanted to make a movie about the Middle Passage. White studio executives asked: ‘Why do the slaves want to be free? What’s their motivation?’ The film never got made …” Rock acidly observed. 

Louis C.K., who co-wrote Rock’s new comedy I Think I Love My Wife, added that Steven Spielberg’s 1997 Amistad was a movie that did get made about the horrific transshipment of blacks from Africa to America, but noted, “Amistad is about a white guy. Matthew McConaughey drank and went to court,” where he and John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) defended Africans led by Djimon Hounsou, who commandeered a slave ship. The 1993 indie Sankofa also exposed Middle Passage horrors.

Hollywood’s John Brown, the most militant Caucasian abolitionist, is portrayed as nuts. Raymond Massey played him as a madman in 1940’s Santa Fe Trail and 1955’s Seven Angry Men. According to conventional (Confederate) wisdom, any white taking up arms to free blacks must have been insane. But history proved Brown to be 19th century America’s most logical white, as it took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to abolish slavery—56 years after Britain banned the slave trade.  

Not all Tinseltown productions about America’s peculiar institution are peculiar. According to Rock, “Alex Haley’s Roots is probably the best.” During the broadcast of the 1977 mini-series, 66 percent of the nation’s TVs were tuned to the tale of Kunta Kinte’s kin and their journey towards jubilee.

Marlon Brando considered 1969’s Burn! about Caribbean slave revolts, his most interesting film. The black power movie was directed and written by Gillo Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas, who’d created 1965’s anti-colonial The Battle of Algiers.

Blacklisted talents, long devoted to racial equality, returned to movies with anti-slavery sagas. John Berry directed 1959’s Tamango, with Dorothy Dandridge, and the Hollywood Ten’s Herbert Biberman—who’d directed 1954’s Salt of the Earth—helmed 1969’s Slaves, starring Ossie Davis. Muhammad Ali played an ex-slave elected to the Senate in 1979’s made-for-TV movie, Freedom Road, based on Howard Fast’s novel.

Twentieth century-set slavery pictures moved from plantations to concentration camps primarily during World War II. Secretly co-written by blacklistees Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, The Bridge on the River Kwai is about Allied POWs forced by Imperial Japanese soldiers to construct a railway bridge in an Asian jungle.

Hitler’s Final Solution spawned many Holocaust pictures, including adaptations of the Anne Frank saga about the teenage Jewish diarist who went from hiding in a Dutch attic to Bergen-Belsen. Confronted by Nazism, the innocent girl, played by Millie Perkins in George Stevens’ 1959 The Diary of Anne Frank, muses: “In spite of everything, I still believe … people are basically good at heart.” 

Forced labor camps were also powerfully portrayed in Italian cinema. Pontecorvo and Solinas’ 1959 Kapo features a camp uprising. In Lina Wertmüller’s 1975 Seven Beauties, Giancarlo Giannini’s Latin lover woos a repulsive Nazi camp commandant. In 1997’s Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful, actor/director Roberto Benigni spares his son from fascism’s horrors, convincing him the death camp is a big game. Spielberg directed the greatest concentration camp film, 1993’s Best Picture, Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson as a real-life righteous rescuer of Jews.

While most forced labor camp pictures deal with fascism, 1970’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel about Stalin’s gulag archipelago. Just as Greeks and Americans spoke of democracy but owned slaves, some American Communist Party members turned a blind eye to Stalinist police states.

Science-fiction genre films spawned futuristic pictures of human bondage. In 1968’s satirical Planet of the Apes, the human Heston is captured by highly evolved apes and imprisoned at a homo sapien zoo, in a clever commentary on race, class and Darwin that was co-written by blacklistee Michael Wilson.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a dystopian novel about totalitarian thought police watching people through TVs. Orwell’s chilling Big Brother fable was adapted in 1956 and 1984, starring Edmond O’Brien, then John Hurt, as Winston Smith who rebels against the double-talking regime that declares: “Freedom is slavery.” In 2006, Tim Robbins directed a stage version of 1984, reflecting torture and totalitarian tactics at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA secret prisons and elsewhere, which he wants to film. Futuristic national security states are also depicted in 2006’s V for Vendetta and Children of Men.

Why has there been a silver screen slave procession continuing into our age?

Hollywood stresses the individual, and in slave pictures, the white characters. But imagine how much more dramatic Gone with the Wind would have been if Spike Lee, instead of Southern belle Margaret Mitchell, wrote it. Instead of focusing on Rhett romancing Scarlett, Prissy and Mammy might lead a Nat Turner-like mass uprising, burning Tara to the ground.

If drama is conflict, the struggle to be free is the stuff high drama is made of. What’s more gripping than the battle caused by involuntary submission to those who own and exploit others as pieces of property?

Unfortunately, the yoke of human bondage remains among us today. As the world’s oldest international human rights organization, London-based Anti-Slavery International (ASI), points out: “It is something we think of as part of our history rather than our present. But the reality is slavery continues today.” (See: www.antislavery.org.)

Two-hundred years after Britain outlawed the slave trade, slavery is still making headlines. Recently, it was revealed that an ancestor of Rev. Al Sharpton—who went to Sudan in 2001 to oppose slave trading there—was owned by arch-segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond’s forebear. Ironically, both were presidential candidates. A genealogist contends white ancestors of White House contender Barack Obama owned slaves. Obama admits a forebear was rumored to be Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ cousin.

This year is also the 400th anniversary of the 1607 founding of the Jamestown, Va., settlement by undocumented English aliens, who imported Africans in 1619, before the Mayflower. On Feb. 24, 2007, Virginia became the first state to officially apologize for slavery with a unanimously passed General Assembly resolution.

According to ASI, although outlawed by conventions such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Women from Eastern Europe are bonded into prostitution, children are trafficked between West African countries and men are forced to work as slaves on Brazilian agricultural estates. Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race.” On March 21, Reuters reported that members of Mauritania’s light-skinned Moorish elite still own black slaves “passed on as family chattels from generation to generation” and subjected to “non-paid work, punishment, forced sex and other abuses.”

Amistad’s Hounsou was Oscar-nominated this year for Blood Diamond, about child soldiers during Sierra Leone’s civil war. Slavery persists from Sudan to Saipan, the U.S. territory where Asian women are forced into the sex industry and sweat shops, according to Robert Greenwald’s 2006 documentary, The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress.

Another form of bonded labor is decried in two new documentaries, Danny Schechter’s In Debt We Trust and James Scurlock’s Maxed Out, revealing how credit cards and high interest rates turn millions into modern-day indentured servants. The U.S. military’s involuntary servitude—stop-loss—is challenged in anti-war documentaries such as The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends. But for a classic in social commentary dealing directly with race and class, check out Killer of Sheep which is finally being released in cinemas (see FILM page 20).

Although the Transatlantic slave trade ended, globalization engenders its own migration, and the 21st century peonage of undocumented workers is exposed in Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. And let’s not forget that 2006’s Best Picture Oscar-winner, Crash, ends with a Huey Newton-quoting petty black criminal stumbling upon a van-full of Chinese “illegal” aliens. Rather than profit from trafficking in human cargo, he emancipates them.

In 1903’s The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Intertwined with slavery, racism remains resonant in Bush’s America, where the police fusillade that killed unarmed African-American Sean Bell in Queens on the eve of his wedding day surpasses outrages committed by 19th century Simon Legree-like slave drivers.   

Abolitionist William Wilberforce was nicknamed “the Nightingale of the House of Commons” because he’d sonorously break out into songs like “Amazing Grace.” From Egypt to Rome to Jamestown to Tara to the River Kwai to Dachau to Darfur to the Gulag to the Kalua Cabaret to the Planet of the Apes, within the context of Hollywood, nothing sounds sweeter than the song of freedom. 

Ed Rampell wrote Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States. Luis I. Reyes co-wrote Hispanics In Hollywood, A celebration of 100 Years in Film and Television.