I’m old enough, even as a working TV critic, to remember when NBC presented the first telecast of the 1939 epic Civil War saga Gone with the Wind (a two-part prime-time presentation that ranked, for a long while, as two slots on TV’s all-time highest-rated Top 10). TCM has shown Gone with the Wind enough times in recent years that its telecast no longer is news – although, with intermission and widescreen intact and with no commercial interruptions, it’s still one of the best ways of experiencing it. But tonight, TCM is pairing its 8 p.m. ET showing of Gone with the Wind with another movie version of a hugely influential book set in the South. Long before Margaret Mitchell wrote her Gone with the Wind romance novel in 1936 (with its Vivian Leigh-Clark Gable movie adaptation arriving within three years), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a serialized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That was in 1851 and 1852, with the completed novel published as soon as the story was complete. And its impact then, as an abolitionist narrative dramatizing and decrying slavery, was huge, especially in the North, and is credited with helping to spark the Civil War. Once movie filmmaking developed enough in the early 20th century to tell even portions of such a complicated story, silent shorts soon followed, as early as a two-reeler stage version in 1903. Tonight at midnight ET, TCM presents a longer, more elaborate movie version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, filmed in 1927, the year Hollywood began converting to motion pictures with synchronized sound. This Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though, produced by Carl Laemmle and directed by Harry A. Pollard, is silent. It’s also, from this distant era, politically incorrect in many ways. Except for Uncle Tom himself, played by James B. Lowe, all the major slave roles were played by white actors – some, like Mona Ray’s caricatured Topsy, in blackface. But remember: In The Jazz Singer, the movie made that same year of 1927 that ushered in the cinematic sound era, Al Jolson played his biggest musical numbers, including “Mammy,” in blackface, too.