- published: 30 Aug 2007
- views: 1075452
Riziero "Riz" Ortolani (born September 4, 1931 in Pesaro, Italy) is an Italian film composer.
In the early 1950s Ortolani was founder and member of a jazz band of national Italian renown. His first score he wrote for the 1962 Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti pseudo-documentary Mondo Cane, whose main title-song More earned him a Grammy and also was nominated for an Oscar as Best Song.
The success of the soundtrack of Mondo Cane led Ortolani to score films in England and the United States such as The 7th Dawn (1964), The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), The Glory Guys (1965) and The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966). Another world famous track was his main-title for the movie O Cangaceiro (1970).
Ortolani scored all or parts of over 200 films, including German westerns like Apache's Last Battle (Old Shatterhand, 1964) and a long series of Italian giallo, spaghetti westerns, Eurospy, exploitation and mondo films.
Other films Ortolani has scored include Il Sorpasso (1962), Io ho paura (1977), Castle of Blood (1964), Anzio (1968), The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968), Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso (1972), Africa Addio (1966), Addio Zio Tom (1971), House on the Edge of the Park (1980), Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and first series of famous La Piovra (Octopus, 1984).
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: