Uncle Tom's Caboose

A threadbare stock-company rattles into a whistle-stop town, its rolling caboose doubling as dressing-room, dormitory and battered shrine to melodrama. Inside, rouge-smeared divas rehearse the saccharine martyrdom of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ while the outside world—a kaleidoscope of train whistles, brass bands, heckling farmers—keeps barging in. The film pirouettes between onstage hokum and backstage bedlam: Eliza’s ice-floe escape becomes a banana-peel avalanche, Eva’s ascension is yanked heavenward by a sandbag, Simon Legree is upstaged by a goat in Union blues. Between botched cues, the leading man courts the leading lady with wilted bouquets, a prop pistol misfires into the prompter’s britches, and a chorus of painted pickaninnies moonlights as baggage handlers. The final curtain drops not on Stowe’s tear-stained tableau but on a locomotive pulling away with half the cast in nightshirts, the other half in blackface chasing the caboose across the prairie—America’s racial guilt and showbiz delirium welded into one runaway farce.