“12 Years A Slave”: There’s Another Version
Jeffrey Wells writes: You can get an instant Amazon rental of “Solomon Northrop’s Odyssey,” ‘(a.k.a. “Half Slave, Half Free”), a 1984 adaptation of Northrup’s “12 Years A Slave,†which of course is the basis for Steve McQueen‘s highly praised, same-titled film which opens on Friday. Directed by Gordon Parks and costarring Avery Brooks, Rhetta Greene, and Petronia Paley, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey was originally telecast on PBS on 12.10.84. You can half-tell that Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel was trying to be nice when he was wrote that “I don’t believe Roots was any more powerful or better acted than [Parks film].‒
