2008 REPERTORY: Oldies but Goodies

[oscar jubis]

MANDINGO (1975)

Mandingo was produced towards the end of a 10-year span in which the Hollywood studios bankrolled a slate of original and provocative films. Some of these films were made by emerging young directors like Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and Malick. Others by older directors taking advantage of the relaxed censorship and Hollywood's aim to appeal to the counterculture, mainly young America. The latter group includes Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, and Richard Fleischer (son of Max, the creator of those classic Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons). A central theme in Richard Fleischer's films is the decay of American society, whether in the near-future (Soylent Green) or in the South circa 1840 (Mandingo).

Mandingo is loosely based on a novel by Kyle Onstott and scripted by Norman Wexler (Oscar-nominee for Joe and Serpico). The ailing owner of a slave-breeding plantation (James Mason) finds a bride (Susan George) for his only son and a "Mandingo stud" (boxer-turned-actor Ken Norton) to breed and prizefight. This is a magnificently mounted, high-budget production of a film that deals with slavery and its implications more incisively and thoroughly than any other film before or since (only the relatively recent and sanitized Nightjohn and Manderlay come close). Mandingo is bound to make a lot of viewers of all races uncomfortable for a number of reasons. Many seemingly feel that slavery is something better left unexamined. They should stay away from a film that takes an unflinching look at the most lamentable time in American history.

By far, the best analysis of the film I could find was written by Robert Keser for The Film Journal: The Eye We Cannot Shut: Robert Fleischer's Mandingo. Here's an excerpt:

"Nor has time blunted the critical edge of this remarkable and deeply political film, long championed by Robin Wood as “the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood” (2). Without sentimentality or official pieties, Fleischer uses an unbridled and passionate melodrama to lay bare how slavery, the economic enterprise that turns humans into commodities, could not but distort the entire web of human relationships enabling it. To appropriate a phrase by John Berger from another context, Mandingo uniquely serves as “the eye we cannot shut”, the persistent vision of competing powers – the slave’s physical strength (and by extension sexual potency) against the master’s sovereign power to define reality and decide life or death.

Widespread audience acceptance at the box office surprised even its makers (the director himself said that “I was really not prepared for the great success of the film”). (3) Contrary to popular formulas in Hollywood, Mandingo provided no conventional heroics or even moral growth and made no attempt to manage audience reactions with distancing irony or historical panaceas. It also remains an unashamedly secular vision through the lens of 1975, joining such key films of that year as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon and Dog Day Afternoon, and social critiques from the year before like Chinatown and The Conversation. The fall of Saigon, the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, and the Khmer Rouge seizure of a U.S. ship, made a heady political backdrop, as did the (still unsolved) murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Manson family’s attempts to assassinate the U.S. president. At that year’s Oscar ceremonies, Bert Schneider, producer of Peter Davis’s Vietnam critique Hearts and Minds which won for Best Documentary, took the opportunity to read a telegram from the Viet Cong (the contemporary equivalent of congratulations from Osama bin Laden). Clearly, movies were offering no easy escape hatches, and Mandingo firmly refuses any reassurances that the system works. If the film points toward liberation, it is simply by exposing the social mechanisms that supported racial and patriarchal domination."