MANDINGO (1975)

In 1840s Louisiana, Falconhurst is a plantation owned by the Maxwell family. It's a faded, dilapidated place; the grounds aren't kept up and the house is in disrepair. Warren, the patriarch (James Mason), spends his days buying and selling slaves (splitting up families without a second thought) and trying to find a champion fighter for bouts which plantation owners gamble on. His particular pride is a new muscular acquisition named Mede (Ken Norton) who is generally on the soft-spoken side but can kill a man with his bare fists—as we witness. He's also been bought with an eye to breeding more slave children (referred to as "suckers") to sell. Warren's son Hammond (Perry King, pictured at left with Norton) fancies himself a Southern gentleman, but in his father's estimation, he spends too much time having sex with slave women and fathering children who are then sold off. Warren arranges a marriage for him with his cousin Blanche (Susan George) so there will be a legitimate—and white—heir for the estate, but on their wedding night, Hammond discovers that Blanche is not a virgin, a fact which enrages him and sets in motion a Greek tragedy of betrayal and death.

This has long been derided as grindhouse exploitation, trash, and camp, but it deserves a better reputation than that. There is definitely a titillation factor here, what with a fair amount of bare flesh (including a full-frontal nude scene for Perry King), mixed-race grinding of loins, the whiff of incest, and some torture for good measure. The acting of Susan George (pictured with Norton) is of the soap-opera variety, and the fist fight scene is harshly violent. But overall, this is a dark and depressing affair, which I mean mostly in a good way. The Maxwells are portrayed as decadent and decaying, just like their estate. Slave life is not prettified, though with the focus on the owners, there are not fully fleshed out black characters. Mede, though technically the title character (a strong black man of Western African origin) is particularly passive, acted on rather than acting, until the very last scene. Ellen (Brenda Sykes) is Hammond's favorite slave mistress, and he becomes almost sympathetic in her presence, coming to the conclusion that maybe these slaves are actually as human as he is. But she is also more acted upon than acting; this certainly reflects a truth about slave life but it doesn't make for compelling characterizations.

In the beginning, I found Perry King off-putting as Hammond, but his performance is a complex one—he has to come off as weak but also strong at times; mostly despicable yet slowly discovering empathy; sexy yet disgusting. Supposedly, actors like Timothy Bottoms and Jan-Michael Vincent turned the role down; Vincent might have been interesting but I think he would have had a hard time with the weakness of the character. King does a fine job as the anti-hero of the movie, the only character that has the ability to change—though how much he has changed by the end is debatable, as the grim climax positions what we would label "toxic masculinity" as the one issue that Hammond cannot overcome. James Mason seems to sleepwalk through the film, but I think this was a deliberate choice to highlight the rot and corruption of the slave-owning class. A scene in which Mason sits with his feet on the stomach of a young black boy lying on the floor in order to transfer his rheumatism into the boy is low-key, ridiculous and horrific all at the same time. Ben Masters is fine in a small role as a decadent relative of Hammond; Paul Benedict (the white son-in-law on The Jefersons) is a slave merchant; Ji-Tu Cumbuka steals a scene as a troublesome slave. This movie is damned by being called the "dark underbelly" of GONE WITH THE WIND, but actually this film almost certainly gets closer to the truth of the slaveholder mindset than GWTW. It's also occasionally called campy but with the possible exception a few of Susan George's scene, it's not. If you have a strong stomach for multiple scenes of cruelty, I would recommend this, if for no other reason than for its uniqueness. [TCM]