WEEKEND TV : ‘UNCLE TOM’S CABIN’ SETS RECORD STRAIGHT

This gets confusing. But the fact is that Uncle Tom never was an Uncle Tom.

The slave hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”--distorted and unfairly ridiculed through the years as a symbol of cowering weakness and black acquiescence to white racism--is actually a champion, a sterling man of enormous bravery and conviction. A real stand-up guy.

If nothing else, Showtime’s nice-looking production of this American classic (8 p.m. Sunday, with additional airings June 20, 24 and 29) sets the record straight by celebrating Tom’s unwavering fortitude. Here is an idealist who refuses to stoop to the level of his oppressors, a sort of early-day Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who withstands humiliations and floggings with his head held high, a man who dies a martyr’s death, winning a moral victory even in losing the ultimate battle.

Some of the story’s characters--Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, Topsy--still linger more than a century later as indelible stereotypes and metaphors for personality types. However, Stowe’s soppy 1852 novel is a classic not because it’s good literature--it’s hardly that--but because its outrage over slavery delivered a powerful abolitionist message that may have hastened America’s Civil War. As positive propaganda, capable of evoking fury, its oozy sentiment and melodrama was its very strength. Subtleties don’t arouse emotions or lead to social change.

As contemporary drama, though, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not very compelling, and one can think of numerous stories about the black experience that would have greater relevance today.

This new version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written for TV by John Gay and directed by Stan Lathan, adds nothing to our knowledge of the period or of slavery’s catalogue of horrors, instead relying mostly on Stowe’s thin, rigid characters to push the usual buttons.

Avery Brooks does well as Tom who, given up by his benevolent Kentucky master to satisfy a debt, becomes the property of the kindly Augustine St. Clare, played by Bruce Dern. Unfortunately, St. Clare is prevented from fulfilling the deathbed wish of his daughter, the tragic Little Eva, that Tom be freed. So Tom passes into the hands of that drunken, bullwhipping sadist, Simon Legree, played with supreme menace by Edward Woodward. Their clashes--which are the story’s moral core--match Tom’s inner strength against Legree’s inner demons.

Although Brooks and Woodward perform with passion, and Phylicia Rashad delivers a nice turn as the runaway slave Eliza, and Lathan and Gay have pared some of Stowe’s excesses, too many scenes remain stiff and unconvincing. And if the expiration of poor Little Eva doesn’t draw snickers--you know something’s up when her cough persists--nothing will.