dorozco028-847-359337 I just watched Mandingo and can't for the life of me figure out why this film would get any critical reviews. You can't criticize the truth unless you yourself are part of the lie or involved in hiding the truth or you just want to ignore the truth and live in a fantasy world. Like those freaks that refuse to acknowledge the holocaust really happened or say it wasn't that horrible. This film hits you with the truth about 1840ish slavery with a vengeance, shocking, sickening, and uncomfortable as it should be. It doesn't sugar coat the South and especially the Deep South with shades of romantic Gone with the Wind feel sorry for us we lost our culture nonsense, but shows in detail all the dehumanizing, sickening, savage racist attitudes that existed in the south at that time. The buying and selling of human beings should be as sickening and repulsive as it gets and left to me this film would be mandatory viewing by all high school students in this country to help them understand the barbarism of slavery and how it's residue still affects and infects this country to this day. If you get a chance to rent or view this film a note of advice, be prepared for the truth!

Scott LeBrun It's very easy to see why this film wouldn't sit well with some people, black and white alike. Its vision of an ugly, vile, racist South is pretty hard hitting and memorable. It seems there is no depth to which it won't sink. The critics were plenty vocal about their dislike, while in actuality the film became an unlikely box office success. Nowadays it's seen by some as a camp classic, which is understandable given how theatrical it gets. It's essentially a period soap opera that happens to wallow in a lot of trash - there's violence, sex, and nudity, both male and female. It's based on a novel, by Kyle Onstott, and a subsequent play, by Jack Kirkland. The hilariously cast James Mason drawls his way through the role of a bigoted plantation patriarch in 1840s Louisiana, with Perry King playing his son. Among the story threads are the hideous envy that Kings' lowly wife (an over the top Susan George) shows towards the "wench" (Brenda Sykes), whom King is rather sweet on, and Kings' acquisition of a slave (the appropriately cast Ken Norton) whom he hopes will achieve tremendous success as a fighter. It's simply a hoot to see this cast - also including Richard Ward, Lillian Hayman, Roy Poole, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Paul Benedict, and Ben Masters - sink their teeth into this melodramatic material, given unflinching and straightforward filming by Richard Fleischer and shot by Richard H. Kline with an accent on the unglamourous. Maurice Jarres' score is extremely flavourful and adding to the appeal of the soundtrack is the presence of the great Muddy Waters, singing "Born in This Time". The pacing is very unhurried, allowing us to really feel the discomfort of such scenes as slaves being stripped naked and whipped on the behind, or the sight of Mason resting his legs on a young slave boy hoping that the kid will absorb the rheumatism out of his body. One thing is for sure, and that's that "Mandingo" is the kind of experience you don't soon forget. One way or another, it affects you, and if anything it deserves some respect for not whitewashing the attitude of the times, revealing every sordid aspect of slavery and also giving its victimized characters a measure of dignity, and hope, in the face of total domination. The actors certainly play this for all that it's worth; Norton, in the central role, may not possess much in the way of acting chops, but he still has a quietly powerful physical presence. All in all, audiences should find it...interesting, to say the least. Followed a year later by another Onstott adaptation, "Drum". Eight out of 10.

poe426 When heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier was preparing for his first fight with Muhammad Ali, one of his sparring partners was an up-and-coming contender named Ken Norton. Norton gave Frazier fits. One observer at the time suggested that Frazier's braintrust(s) might want to consider getting behind Norton as a title contender. In March, 1973, Norton was selected as another stepping stone in Ali's return march to the throne. By the time of this fight, Ali had been mercilessly hammered in a loss to Frazier (in March, 1971) and Frazier had, in turn, been dethroned after sitting on the title for two years by George Foreman (in January, 1973). Norton had been knocked out by unknown Jose Luis Garcia, so he wasn't considered much of a roadblock on Ali's way back up the ladder. Not only did Norton break Ali's jaw, he pitched a shutout. Norton won 12 out of 12 rounds. In the rematch 6 months later, Ali eked out a narrow win (I gave him the fight by a single point).It was because of his shocking win over the self-professed "Greatest" that many of us queued up to see MANDINGO (and the sequel, DRUM). While Norton had proved himself capable enough in the ring, it was clear that he wasn't exactly a natural when it came to acting (not that his role in either film stretched the boundaries of the craft in any way, shape or form). The sordid storyline, with its roots in Reality, was likewise less than compelling, but we were there to see Norton, after all (those of us who followed The Sweet Science, anyway). The highly-touted fisticuffs the promoters had promised were too few and much too far between for some of us.What prompts all this? Just last night, on MSNBC's COUNTDOWN with Keith Olberman, Right Wing Racist Rush Limbo referred to the current President of the United $tate$ as "a Halfrican." Thus far having proved himself a politician of uncommon Common Sense, Barack Obama labors to set right what the Republican Reich has undone over the past 45 years (today's jobless rate stands at a whopping 15%). For Limbo to take the same old road tred by so many lacking even marginal Common Sense in this country, it points up just how far we've really come, after all these years. Which is not very far at all.

jaibo In Richard Fleischer's richly imagined and deliciously baroque slave melodrama, the Old South is presented as a prison of the body and soul for both slaves and masters, in which both black and white inmates transgress the bars of their mutual cage, with catastrophic consequences. Set on a decaying plantation presided over by a rheumatic patriarch (a devastating portrait of human corruption by James Mason), the story has the heir apparent son rejecting his new white bride (who he is shocked to find is not a virgin) and finding refuge in the arms of his black "wench" mistress, with whom he shares moments of intimacy unavailable to him elsewhere. In turn, the wife chooses to manipulate her husband's prize Mandingo slave into bed, setting all of them on the road to a devastating tragedy.Mandingo is a film about bodies: bodies as commodities, bodies as skin colour, bodies as objects and subjects of desire, bodies as instruments and recipients of violence. The old South is a patriarchal, property-owning and white supremacist hell, but the inhabitants are possessed with sexual and emotional desires which chafe against the ideologies of their time and place. The scenes in which the white heir shares tender moments with his wench, or the white wife seduces the Mandingo are complex and intense scenarios. In sophisticated ways, they push their characters into attempting to create transgressive selves whilst at the same time temping the viewer to desire transgressively. All of the bodies of the four leads - Perry King, Brenda Sykes, Susan George and (especially) Ken Norton are eroticised by the camera and served up before the viewer as icons of sexuality; in this way, it is all the more ironic that the centre of power is the decaying body of James Mason's patriarch.The film shows consciousness, love and hatred being created and deformed in a corrupt society. Black is set against black, but a nascent awareness that this is unjust is beginning to blossom in some of the black characters (and even, dimly, in the white heir); sometimes the old ideologies re-assert themselves, nowhere more than in the tragic denouement, when the white master kills his wife and prize slave, insults his beloved wench and ends up shot himself, all because of his double standards are revealed when the wife gives birth to a mixed race child (murdered in its cradle by the whites); white women were expected to be exemplars of race purity, even whilst their men copulated with female slaves. Susan George's Blanch comes across as a neurotic, sadistic nymphomaniac but it is clear that she is a victim of patriarchy - abused by her brother, sold by her father, shunned and eventually murdered by her husband. She in turn metes out physical abuse to her husband's wench and compromises the Mandingo man. But this latter is a compromise which compromises us all, as the image of the huge and beautiful black man on top of the slim and pale white woman is indelibly erotic, and even though this is not a pornographic film, the implication of a huge black penis sliding into this woman is built intrinsically into the scenario, for the shock, delectation and seduction of the audience.Mandingo is complex, violent and sometimes luridly melodramatic. The characters speak in a rich and textured language full of demeaning imagery and Gothic cadences. It's a huge film, made with all of the resources of a major Hollywood studio - yet its a down and nasty film about an ugly era of history, an era of history which is part of what made America what it is today.