Very disappointing...

So much average

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I can see why this was controversial, and no doubt it would be if it were released now (2013). It's stunningly unlike Gone with the Wind. The style is extreme Southern Gothic, (not to be confused with camp). Some shades of Tennessee Williams but goes beyond where he dared. The dialogue is a bit difficult, and DVD has no English subtitles, but you'll be rewarded if you stick with it. (No need to understand every word). I agree that Tarantino was influenced by it but his approach to the subject matter is very different. Mandingo stands on its own as a major work of the 1970s and it's certainly a film that deserves to be better known. Striking photography and music throughout. This film panders to no one, nor does it simplistically tell the viewer what to think about anything. We have the feeling we're on our own with this. Maybe it's no accident that that feels liberating. Fasten your seat belts and see it.

Conditions of slaves in the Deep South prior to The Civil War are given a fairly gritty and audacious treatment in this sometimes-sensational motion picture. Mason plays the patriarch of a large plantation who buys and sells slaves while looking for the perfect Mandingo (referring to an a-level breed of slave from a particular African region) with which to impregnate a female he owns. His son King, whose gait is affected by a childhood riding accident, aids him in his quest when he isn't deflowering the young female slaves, which is his right and privilege under the conditions of ownership. When it's time for King to marry, naturally he turns to a cousin (!) and proceeds to wed George. However, discontentment rears its ugly head almost immediately and he finds himself developing real feelings for one of his "bed warmers," the slave Sykes. Meanwhile, he has purchased towering Norton on his father's behalf and is using him as a stud for his female Mandingo and also as a fighter, which yields heavy cash for the estate. Unfortunately, when now-alcoholic George begins to grow jealous of Sykes, she puts into motion a series of events that leads to tragedy for many people. Mason gives an unfiltered performance of cranky, commandeering bigotry and, while it isn't the most pleasurable thing to witness, it is effective in its way. His character divests himself of rheumatism by pressing his feet against the abdomens of naked or semi-clad black boys! King somehow manages to invoke a strain of sympathy in his rash and regimented character, perhaps because even worse people surround him at various times. At around eighteen minutes in, he gives the world a glimpse of Perry, Jr. George is simultaneously desperate and vaguely sympathetic and yet riotously awful. Some of her tantrum scenes rank right up there with Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest!" Her "hair" remains an enigma throughout, sometimes thin and fine with frosted streaks and other times a wealth of thick brown fluff. Former prize fighter Norton has a eye-popping physique, which is shown to great advantage, but as an actor, he is pretty much knocked out in the first round. His character is given quite little to say, which helps. Sykes uses a tenderness and vulnerability to make hers one of the more endearing characters even if her vocal delivery is sometimes a bit contemporary. Others in the cast include Ward as a long-suffering slave, Hayman as a poor man's Hattie McDaniel, Masters as a sadistic, entitled monster, and "The Jeffersons" neighbor Benedict as a pragmatic slave trader. Tedrow, best known as one of "Dennis the Menace's" neighbors, appears as a worried midwife. Despite its reputation as a tawdry, exploitive piece of screen excrement, there are top-level creative people in many departments including composer Jarre, production designer Leven, costumer Roth and cinematographer Kline. It's just such an in-your-face, no-holds-barred, non-gilded look at the situation that, compared to so many other films depicting that era, that it stuns with regularity. There's no chance of seeing Ashley Wilkes toddling by. The dialogue is rough and crass, the violence is vivid, the sexuality is (or, at least, was at the time) eye-opening. The film is guilty at times of taking pleasure in the unpleasant, but it has merit for the way it refuses to turn away from the cruelty and oppression that American slaves endured. It's interesting to note the hypocrisy of the characters, too. King sees fit to sleep with every virgin slave and yet expects his betrothed to be intact. Filmed entirely on location, there is a bleak, rotten quality to the setting that makes the events even more downbeat. It's not a film for everyone, but it is one that simply could not and would not be made today and that holds a certain curiosity value. An even more raunchy sequel "Drum" followed a year later.

Richard Fleischer directs a hot-blooded drama set in the Deep South circa 1840. Warren Maxwell(James Mason)lords over a rundown plantation and his son Hammond(Perry King)travels to New Orleans in hopes of purchasing a top-of-the-line fighting slave, a Mandingo. Hammond finds a real gem in Mede( boxer Ken Norton)at an auction and plans on making a fortune by way of his fighting prowess. Back on the plantation, Master Maxwell puts the pressure on his son to produce an heir. He has his dark winches, but is all but forced to marry an alabaster-skinned Blanche(Susan George). When Hammond discovers she is not a virgin the marriage is a sham. Love, hate, deceit and murder.Very provocative for the mid '70s and a very talked about film. A little over two hours in length with some very sordid and graphic scenes. MANDINGO is based on the novel by Kyle Onstott and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Also in the cast: Brenda Sykes, Lillian Haymann, Ben Masters, Paul Benedict and Richard Ward.

I read "Mandingo" when it first was published. I am a Southerner: I must comment that slavery was almost as prevalent in the northern parts of the USA as it was in the southern parts. After all, "The Mason-Dixon Line" isn't exactly in what we Southernerns call "The Deep South". So, the thing to keep in mind is - if you're not really well-educated about slavery in this country - that some of the states thought-of as having no slavery is simply myth. Even in the northern cities, people owned slaves.Although some users say the book isn't nearly as sexually explicit as the movie is, I don't remember it that way, at all. In fact, the movie is truly "cleaned-up". In the book, the characters aren't much more than scoundrels; the movie attempts to show them as a rather untidy society. The novel makes it perfectly clear that the plantation is not much more than a shambles, purely for breeding; the characters are ALL over-sexed, even the old man ("Warren Maxwell"), James Mason's role.A male, "Mandingo"-slave was very desirable in many ways, especially for the huge bundle of "meat" usually found in their pants. If their is any doubt that white-folk are more common to "rape" and pillage upon black-folk, then just read-up on what's gone on in Africa, among its cultures, for centuries. Darfur ring a bell? News-reports about soldiers breaking women's legs so they can't run away from rape ? I am attempting to write a autobiography, and write at-length on this subject. Indeed, there were plantations such as "Falconhurst" (?), because humans are humans. HOWEVER, the majority of plantations with a large number of slaves knew their value - $10,000 per ? Indeed, there was always miscegenation on all plantations, because there is miscegenation in all of our cities: humans are humans. That director Richard Fleischer chose to direct a lurid film depicting a inflamatory situation is admirable, but certainly can't be taken as "truth" for all plantations ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.I agree with one user who wrote that Mason must have needed to pay the rent, when he chose this role. Same for almost everyone in the film. Jack Kirckland wrote filth, and that's what the movie needed to be. My opinion is that Perry King ("Hammond Maxwell") was very convincing in his role; as for his sexual-activity, he didn't know much better. All plantations had slaves with different "degrees" of blackness - after all, the "house-servants" were a more refined breed than those who worked the fields.True, it WAS illegal to educate Blacks. Can you really believe that all slave-owners stuck to that law ? Bull ! The scenes in "Mandingo" which were supposed to have taken place in New Orleans could have been much wider in description. "Octaroons" - a very low degree of blackness - were present in every prominent family in that city, simply because they WERE beautiful, and usually accepted by the general society. As deplorable as the sexual activity is in the film, it's practiced in every country in the world, because humans are humans.I don't know which version of the film I saw, but I thought it was too short.....not because I wanted to see more degradation: I wanted the characters to be fully developed. In the version I saw, I felt that whole scenes had been cut, and the whole story wasn't told.You can find as much "documentation" The Deep South was a very genteel part of our country, just as you can find some plantations were hell-holes. You can't judge one by the other. Anyone who denies this isn't being realistic - enjoy the movie and leave it at that. I felt the cinematography could have been better, but I don't have any idea what "generation" of tape I was watching. Perhaps DVD is much clearer.That's the way it is, Guys - truth is truth. Degradatiion IS a human-trait.........