Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975)

Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo is a terrifying, thematically labyrinthine portrait of slave-owning America’s moral and psychological wretchedness, positing a corruption so deep that generations won’t succeed in washing the stain away (and haven’t). Reduced to a plot summary or recounting of “high points”, the film sounds lurid and exploitative, and has often been dismissed or mocked as such. But in its embrace of melodrama and what’s sometimes labeled “scenery-chewing” acting, it digs painfully deep into the sick underpinnings of the culture – one in which the economic model demands that the humanity of the slaves be denied, and yet in which their presence makes that impossible, generating hypocrisy upon perversity. Physicality and sexuality lies at the centre of the madness of course – the absence of imprisoning formal structures makes their relationships with black women more satisfying to the white men than those with their wives, to a degree that’s all but formally admitted and embedded in the culture, with the consequent flow of children being regarded as so much by-product; in contrast of course, the prospect of male black sexuality crossing the colour line is the ultimate horror (and a white woman who invited this would merely be sacrificing her right to go on living). But at the same time, the film takes us deep into how the white males project their own physical inadequacies onto their prize “inventory” – a prizefighting scene goes on virtually in agonizing real time, forcing us to confront the depth of the investment in blood and brutality and enforced submission. Indeed, the whole film is unnervingly direct and visceral, seeped in its time and place, even as the viewer inevitably looks for broader parallels or redemptions. But the only organized revolt depicted here is rapidly extinguished, and the ending suggests no immediate prospect of sustained resistance or relief, only of continuing madness in shifting configurations.