- published: 19 Dec 2015
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Oswald Norman Morris OBE, DFC, AFC, BSC (born 22 November 1915, Ruislip) is a British cinematographer. Known to his colleagues by the nicknames "Os" or "Ossie", Morris' film cinematography career spanned six decades.
Morris grew up in what was then Middlesex (now the London Borough of Hillingdon), and attended the Bishopshalt School. His interest in the cinema began at an early age; during summer vacations, he would work as a projectionist at the local movie theatre. Dropping out in 1932, he started working in the film industry at Wembley Studios as an unpaid gofer for Michael Powell, among others, eventually graduating to the positions of clapper boy and camera assistant on quota quickies. His career was interrupted by World War II, during which he served as a bomber pilot with the RAF, achieving the rank of Flight Lieutenant and winning both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Force Cross . After leaving the service, he joined Pinewood Studios as an assistant to such people as Ronald Neame and David Lean at their company Cineguild, before acting as director of photography (on the film Golden Salamander) for the first time in 1949. Neame has referred to Morris as "probably the greatest cameraman in the world". In the 1960 film of John Osborne's The Entertainer, on which Morris was the cinematographer, his name was incorporated into the story in one scene where a radio transmission mentioned the fictional "Sergeant Ossie Morris".
Eddie Lawrence (born March 2, 1919) is an American monologist, actor, singer, lyricist, playwright, director and television personality, whose unique comic creation, the eternally optimistic Old Philosopher, has gained him a devoted cult following for over five decades.
Born Lawrence Eisler in Brooklyn, New York, he began performing at the end of the Depression 1930s. Barely out of his teens, he gained a minor reputation as an original comic/raconteur who performed bizarre elocution of whimsical free verse in little clubs in the New York area as well as on the "borscht belt" circuit in the Catskills.
His first confirmed radio appearance was on Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1943, where he did World War II-themed comic impressions of Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Roland Young and Clem McCarthy. A preserved audio transcript of his performance was one of the selections included 16 years later on the 1959 LP Original Amateur Hour 25th Anniversary Album (UA UXL 2). On the recording, Major Bowes is heard inviting "Larry" to come out of the audience and tell us all he knows.
Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.
At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.
The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom: