MANDINGO
Directed by RICHARD FLEISCHER Screenplay by NORMAN WEXLER
Most of the suspense in Mandingo is generated by the unconscionable amount of time it requires for the blonde mistress of Falconhurst to invite into her bed the handsome black slave (Ken Norton) her husband purchased to improve the breeding stock down in the quarters. Until this moment we cannot be certain that the movie is going to employ every cliche of antebellum melodrama. The possibility that the perfection of its tastelessness will be marred through oversight or the impulse to provide novelty through omission is an irritant. There is great relief when, at last, our heroine (Susan George) succeeds in bending Norton’s innocence to her evil will.
Not that anyone is likely to be bored while the film is building up to this climactic vulgarity. Writer Wexler and Director Fleischer treat us to gaudy depictions of all the evils in the Old South that we have learned to know and loathe. We have scarcely settled into our seats before Falconhurst’s Young Massah is venturing across the color line to find true sexual happiness. Floggings, hangings, slave auctions and gory combats follow in quick succession. There are sadistic assaults on prepubescent black girls and a good deal of bother about incest. James Mason, as the plantation’s Old Massah, must spend much time with his bare feet pressed into a prostrate black child’s naked stomach because the doctor has assured the old man that this is a sovereign cure for his rheumatism. In the end all the white principals are required to exterminate one another in expiation of their sins. The final bloodbath is depicted in the same vulgar manner used to present the indignities suffered by the blacks.
If Mandingo’s makers had permitted themselves even a moment of genuine feeling, a single honest insight into the historical conditions they pretend to examine, they might have destroyed the distance their hack mentalities place between film and audience. As it is, derision finally gives way to numbness. There is not the slightest danger that this animated comic book can do anyone, of any race, any harm—unless Mel Brooks is looking to the Old South for his next subject.
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