mandingo (1975)

By RM
friday, november 22, 2024 at 2:06:00 a.m. est

Well, if mandingo was “trash,” it was high-class, major-studio trash, not some kind of drive-in AIP-type movie!

I remember it being well-done for what it was, and probably more realistic with its sex-and-violence slant than the “sanitized” slavery movies of the past (not that the critics liked it any better!).

One scene remains in my memory, a good example of Fleischer’s quality as a director: when the white woman gives birth, the camera shows her absolute terror in closeup when she realizes the baby is black (she’s surrounded by people, of course, and knows what will happen to her).

And James Mason really seemed in his glory in his lurid, slave-whipping, sexed-up role!

-RM


N.S.: No can do, RM. It was mandingo, which began the blaxploitation movie tradition of sexual revisionist history, in which White slave owner ladies threw themselves at the slave men, and the slave owners were constantly whipping the slaves. In reality, slave owners typically sent recalcitrant slaves to the work house. As a matter of propaganda, the myth whereby White women threw themselves at slaves was invented out of whole cloth by “journalist” Ida B. Wells (1862-1931).

James Mason used to talk about movies like that—just to pay the rent.

“Yet Another Proud Black She/He/It Tells Off Stix and Schuyler”; and

“Mandingo: Boglerizing History and Logic.”