Richard Fleischer (1975)

‘Expect the savage.  The sensual.  The shocking.  The sad.  The powerful.  The shameful … all that the motion picture has never dared to show before.  Expect the truth.  Now you are ready for Mandingo.’

I took my seat prepared to experience everything the wordy poster for Richard Fleischer’s film advised.  Expectations were largely disappointed though the film is occasionally shocking and, all told, verges on shameful.

Based on a ‘big, bold, best-seller’ of 1957 by Kyle Onstott, adapted for the screen by Norman Wexler, Mandingo centres on racist structures and atrocities in the antebellum South and the coming of age of Hammond (Perry King), the son of plantation owner Warren Maxwell (James Mason).  Hammond marries his nympho-dipso cousin Blanche (Susan George) but soon suspects that she’s had incest with her brother Charles (Ben Masters).  Hammond buys a black woman called Ellen (Brenda Sykes) as a sex slave and gets her pregnant.  He also buys, at greater expense, a Mandingo slave, Ganymede (Ken Norton), known as ‘Mede’, and trains him to be a successful and, from Hammond’s point of view profitable, bare-knuckle prize-fighter.  While the men are away from the plantation, the spiteful, drunken Blanche horsewhips Ellen, who falls downstairs and loses her baby.  When she receives a ruby necklace from Hammond, Blanche assumes she’s set for a reconciliation with him until, at dinner one night, she sees that Ellen, who is serving the meal, is wearing matching ruby earrings.  Blanche pulls off her necklace and chucks it in her soup. The next time that Hammond is away, she seduces Mede.  Warren Maxwell, getting impatient for a grandchild, locks Hammond and Blanche in a room together.  He seems to have achieved the desired result when Blanche announces she’s expecting.  A thaw in relations between her and Hammond lasts only until Blanche gives birth to a mixed-race baby, who is killed on doctor’s orders.  Hammond takes revenge on his faithless wife by poisoning her.  He then orders Mede into a cauldron of boiling water.  When Mede refuses, Hammond shoots him and, when he falls into the cauldron, uses a pitchfork to drown him.  An elderly slave called Agamemnon (Richard Ward), although he’s previously reproached Mede for Uncle Tomism, grabs Hammond’s shotgun and threatens him with it.  When Warren Maxwell arrives on the scene, branding him a ‘crazy nigger’ and demanding that he put the weapon down, Agamemnon shoots Warren instead and makes his escape.  Hammond weeps by his father’s dead body.  Mandingo ends, as it began, with Muddy Waters on the soundtrack, singing a bluesy song with music by Maurice Jarre.

Mandingo exploits themes that are hackneyed but commercially reliable; American critics who’ve slated the film and made it notorious may also have helped ensure its box-office success.    Kenneth Robinson in the Spectator made the point that the contemptuous reception of the film in the US press was encouraging – on the dubious grounds that, not many years ago, any picture with a racial setting of this kind would have been taken seriously and even treated reverently.   It’s ironic, in relation to Robinson’s comments, that the people who made Mandingo seem to think they’re protected by the Hollywood tradition of using the iniquities of pre-Civil War plantation life to make morally serious comment.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis and Richard Fleischer want to pretend that a tough subject demands tough, uncompromising treatment.  But all this makes the picture sound hotter to handle than it is.  Every so often, Fleischer manages to leer.  A brothel door opens just wide enough to present a full-frontal nude employee; another prostitute gets so turned on by Mede that the towel covering her wobbling breasts slips off without her noticing.  For the most part, though, Fleischer handles the excitative aspects rather dutifully.  The sex is presented with a minimum of salacious flair.  The violence – whippings, fist fights, even the final carnage – is low on visceral effect.

The characters are Southern potboiler stereotypes.  There’s the tyrannical but straight-talkin’ paterfamilias; the son who has a conscience of sorts but will (therefore) never be the man his father is;  the spoilt belle-bitch; the silent, suffering black man who, against his will, demonstrates an ability to give a white woman what her white husband can’t or won’t; the nice, relatively sexless black house staff.  The slaves have fancy, allusive names – as well as Ganymede and Agamemnon, there’s Lucretia Borgia (Lillian Hayman).   At moments, Richard Fleischer seems easily shocked:  James Mason’s character refers to an abolitionist as a ‘bastard’ and the word reverberates on the soundtrack as if to imply we should be shocked by such reactionary profanity.

Susan George is quite powerful in Blanche’s nasty, petulant rages but overdoes the constant breathlessness.  Perry King gives a clear, competent performance as Hammond and Brenda Sykes does well in the underwritten role of Ellen – with her lovely, doomed features, Sykes manages to be touching without pushing for sympathy.  The heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton is, in terms of physical qualifications, an obviously suitable choice for Mede but he’s not so good when he tries to act.  Mede’s offended stares at Hammond are plain inexpressive – they suggest no feeling of hurt, betrayal or humiliation.  Norton speaks in an unassured, actorish voice – he sounds too well spoken and is incongruous in a film in which plenty of the dialogue is hard to make it.  The other most clearly audible performer is James Mason, who manages to turn the climactic mayhem into comedy.  Mason’s Deep South accent, shaky throughout, switches unexpectedly into Afrikaner for Massa Maxwell’s crucial abusive jeer at Agamemnon.   I wish I could believe this was an intentional attempt to draw a racist parallel between the southern states of nineteenth-century America and present-day South Africa.

[1970s]