In the book by Defoe, after he becomes a rising success as a tobacco plantation owner, her is eager to start off on a brand new adventure buying and selling black Africans. Any film treatments of Robinson Crusoe own up to this?
The movie Crusoe starring Aidan Quinn, starts off with him leading a party that captures a runaway slave, followed by a trip to the slave market, where he tells a dealer that he wants something like “5 bucks, 4 women, all with good teeth.”
Amusing anecdote: 4 or 5 years ago, I was working for a company that was doing something in the HD video space. We were getting ready for a trade show, where we would be demoing our equipment in a booth partnered with a (now defunct) content provider. We asked them for some HD content for the demo, and one day before we had to pack everything up and ship it, they sent us a clip containing the two scenes I described above, and nothing else. Needless to say we wound up putting up a very dull nature show instead.
The 1975 movie Man Friday tells the story from the point of view of Friday (and sig nificantly changes it in the process). It doesn’t, as far as I can tell, say that Crusoe himself was a slave trader, but European slave traders feature prominently in the plot:
The 1975 movie Man Friday, starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree, was a vehicle for social commentary (like so many movies back then). I don’t remember clearly, but it probably included something about the slave trade.
ETA: Damn it. Next time, CalMeacham. There will be a reckoning.