Solomon Northup's story is remembered because he was literate (as well as able to play the fiddle) and his ordeal eventually ended (remarkably little aged by a dozen years of backbreaking toil on this telling).

Despite it's graphic depiction at one point of flayed flesh, it flows more like a bad dream than a movie; and it's trashier antecedents 'Blazing Saddles' and 'Mandingo' probably more truthfully depict how little black lives mattered in America in the first half of the nineteenth century.