DVR Diary: TAMANGO (1958)

On one hand, John Berry's Tamango feels like a film about a decade ahead of its time in its blunt treatment of slavery and resistance. On the other, it might be of a piece with such contemporary pictures as Salt of the Earth and A King in New York, gestures of nothing-to-lose leftism from filmmakers blacklisted or effectively exiled from Hollywood. This was a time when the film mecca could still produce stuff like Band of Angels with Clark Gable as a sympathetic slaveowner. In Europe, Berry and a team of writers adopted a story by Prosper Merimee, the original author of Carmen, about a blighted romance between a slave ship captain and his black mistress Ayesha -- she who must obey. The girl is Dorothy Dandridge, going farther afield in search of work after Hollywood failed to do much with her. The captain is that improbable international he-man, Curt Jurgens. She thinks she has a privileged position as the captain's lover, but is told he plans to dump her and get married when he finishes the current middle passage, his last. That is his plan, but he finds Ayesha more difficult to dump than he thought. Meanwhile, a captive warrior, the title character (Alex Cressan) appeals to her sense of morality and racial solidarity. When Tamango leads an uprising, Ayesha must choose between her white lover and the outgunned but adamant Africans. She chooses the Africans, which is to choose death.

Jurgens carries the film, making his slaver something more subtle than a seaborne Simon Legree. He has a great scene when he tries to cajole some hunger-striking prisoners to eat. He addresses them patiently, soothingly explaining how good the food is. When one still refuses to eat, he lets it slide, merely suggesting that he might try it later. But when the next man knocks his bowl away, the captain gestures to his crew and the victim is abruptly grabbed and unceremoniously thrown into the sea. It's a great shock moment to remind the viewer that lethal force never lies far below the slavers' civilized surface. During the revolt, he's determined above all to make sure that Ayesha survives, and you can see some quiet agony as it becomes clear to him that she won't leave the hold and prefers to share the rebels' fate. Yet it seems he can write her off all too easily after he orders a cannon fired into the hold. Dandridge has a much more flamboyant moment of agony moments earlier as Ayesha's survival instinct struggles with her conscience, with a feeling that she should not abandon the rebels even if it means her death. In a way it's a camp moment out of classic cinema, almost out of silent cinema as she marches toward the steps to the deck while the rebels chant some sort of defiant death song. She's about to climb up as the song seems to possess her. Haltingly she babbles the syllables, almost not knowing what she's saying, until finally she gives in completely as if ironically liberated by her choice of certain death. I can't quite say hers is a great performance, but that's a great melodramatic movie moment. It's right, however, to close the film with Jurgens and the cannon in Berry's abruptly matter-of-fact fashion. Snuffing the romanticism of Dandridge's big scene that way drives home the indifferent injustice of slavery in effective fashion. Tamango's grim finish helps make it seem more like a Sixties of Seventies film than the Fifties film it is, though Dandridge's histrionics are more in keeping with that decade. Compared to later slavesploitation cinema, Tamango is arguably more politically correct because it insists on the dignity of the enslaved in a way more hard-hitting treatments of the peculiar institution would not. That doesn't make it a better film than, say, Farewell Uncle Tom, but Tamango definitely deserves more attention from movie buffs than it's received in the last sixty years.

THE KEEPING ROOM (2014)

Daniel Barber's Civil War picture is a misanthropic piece of work in the most literal sense. Julia Hart's screenplay effectively declares war on men, uniting mistress and slave at the tail end of the war in resistance to rape and pillage by Union soldiers. Sisters Augusta (Britt Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and a sole slave, Mad (Muna Otaru) are all that's left on the family farm as the Confederacy faces its reckoning. Like Scarlett O'Hara and her sisters, Augusta and Louise have to work in the fields alongside Mad in order to survive on humble crops. Louise is still spoiled enough to protest, asking why "the nigger" can't be left to do all the work. As Augusta explains, "It's like I said, we're all niggers now." You get the sense that she doesn't just mean herself and her sister, but says this in the spirit of the John Lennon/Yoko Ono song, "Woman is the Nigger of the World."

We're well past the legend of Sherman's March as a bloodless ravaging by this point in history. In its place, Keeping Room shows free-ranging Union foragers (led by Sam Worthington) committing random atrocities as they close in on our heroines' farm. Once they arrive, the film becomes something like a feminist version of Straw Dogs as the women fight off the blue bellies, though not before Louise, barely recovered from a raccoon bite, is raped. Add to this terror images like horses hauling a burning coach and its dead driver, or Augusta's discovery of a friend's pasty corpse, and Keeping Room seems to be a horror movie first and foremost.

The screenplay may insist too much that gender trumps race. It seems too good, if that's really the word, to be true that Mad forgives Augusta for shooting her returned lover in the back, mistaking him for another intruder. It's true enough that Mad was ready to shoot the same man in the back until he turned to reveal himself to her, but by this point in the film, long after Augusta and Mad had exchanged angry slaps, writer and director apparently have decided that race is no longer an issue. Instead, they have Mad recall the repeated rapes she suffered while still a girl in a mysterious plantation shed. On top of that, they have Augusta execute a wounded forager who had effectively surrendered, as if she was obliged to show him no mercy after killing the other man. In a grim parody of the end of Glory the dead forager and the dead freedman are dumped into a common grave, though Mad offers a dubious Augusta a spiritual assurance that the more innocent of the two is not really in the same place as the other.

In a final irony, as the main army advances on the farm, the only way the women can escape from the house of war is to become men by stripping the uniforms from the soldiers they've killed. You could argue that they've already surrendered much of their femininity, by the standards of their own time, by becoming killers, but the real message of this coda is more likely that there's no place for women in a world of men at war, so women must transform in one way or other in order to survive. It should be a happy ending since it looks like their plan will work, as long as they remain those few steps ahead of the soldiers swarming over the farm in the final shot, but at the same time it's an act of surrender -- just not the fall of the slave-plantation world we'd expect to celebrate. The Confederacy is dead, but injustice persists -- and the Confederacy's conquerors are perpetrating it. The Keeping Room may overstate its main point at times, but it's still an honestly unsettling movie about two civil wars: the one we see ending, and one that many say goes on today.

THE INNOCENTS (Los Inocentes, 2015)

Not to be confused with the Hollywood ghost story adapted from Henry James, Mauricio Brunetti's film puts a supernatural spin on the slavesploitation subgenre and is ultimately more effective as a horror film than a slavery expose. Argentina managed to abolish slavery without civil war in the 1850s, but Los Inocentes, like a miniature echo of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, shows a generation paying in blood for the blood drawn by the lash.

The screenplay by Brunetti, Natacha Caravia and Andres Gelos is flashbacky in a manner appropriate for a film haunted by curses. The main story, set in 1871, sees Rodrigo (Ludovico Di Santo) return to his father's plantation with his pregnant bride Bianca. The plantation is pure South American gothic, with Rodrigo's mother Mercedes, after whom the place is named, a madwoman whose moaning is muted only in the Madonna's presence, while the old man (Lito Cruz) is a brutal boor dripping with contempt for his son. Some of the old slaves have stayed on as servants, despite the plantation's horrific history. The flashbacks show how Rodrigo's childhood slave playmate was hanged for daring to play on a swing, and how a slave woman was burned at the stake for the double offense of getting raped by the planter and burying a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a superstitious attempt to end the drought that the planter blames on persistent slave paganism. These dead haunt the present but seem to target Rodrigo and Bianca more than the old man.

Los Inocentes isn't EC Comics-style American horror in which the dead avenge themselves on the truly guilty. It's more effective as a horror movie for having its curse reach out indiscriminately at the plantation family. The suffering of innocents is precisely what should be horrible about a curse, but to the extent that Americans expect the guilty to suffer, or assume that those who suffer are guilty of something -- like all those teenagers Jason Voorhees supposedly punished for premarital sex -- those who watch the Argentine film on Netflix may be taken effectively and shockingly by surprise by the direction it takes toward the end.

The picture benefits from Hugo Colace's moody cinematography and a cast whose costumes and performances fit the period nicely. Lito Cruz's vicious patriarch is especially impressive, a secular horror of privileged vice in his own right. You feel he's done a good job destroying his family before the ghosts even get started, and his lustful attention to Bianca is nearly as scary as whatever the ghosts have in store for her. There's something inscrutably blank about his expression when we last see him, facing the ultimate fulfillment of the curse, that makes you wonder whether he understands what's happened and why. We know and wonder why he, of all people, is left standing, but it should be clear to viewers that he hasn't exactly gone unpunished.

Too Much TV: UNDERGROUND (2016-?)

My local cable provider picked up WGN America just in time for the first season -- it has earned a second -- of Misha Green and Joe Popski's series, the first event in a new wave of slavesploitation that will include a remake of Roots and a new Birth of A Nation movie taking the Nat Turner rebellion as its subject. While any slavery show is inescapably a commentary on American race relations, Underground can be enjoyed as a short-season series in the modern mold, full of plot twists, complicated characters and various degrees of darkness, along with some decent action. The plot is simplicity itself; we witness the planning and execution of a mass escape of slaves from a Georgia plantation, though the execution, predictably enough given the twists and complications, doesn't go quite as planned. The opening episode does one thing right above all; it introduces most of the major slave characters in one sequence as two of the escape plotters determine who can be useful or dependable. Characters are identified by name, assigned skills and character traits. It might seem like convenient exposition by some dramatic standards but I'd bet that TV viewers would like more such exposition than they normally get. By giving us a diverse cast of slave characters the creators can have things both ways in their portrayal of slavery. They can give us a crowd-pleasing narrative of resistance while showing the diversity, moral as well as vocational, of slave experience. Inevitably in an ambitious modern TV series you can't have a cast comprised entirely of innocents and moral exemplars, since you want to keep the possibility of betrayal in the air. The best case of this among the slaves is Cato (Alano Miller), trusted enough by the master to be promoted to overseer, self-interested and cunning enough to be a constant threat to the conspirators, yet also the person who starts the breakout ahead of schedule, for reasons of his own, almost immediately after his promotion. With him in the group, solidarity among the "Macon 7" can never be taken for granted. More ambiguous still is Ernestine (Amirah Vann), a privileged house slave and lover of the married master (Reed Diamond), whose daughter -- theirs, in fact -- unexpectedly joins the runaways. Underground is brave enough to show that real passion exists between slave and master and may contribute to self-loathing on both their parts. It's part of a complex brew that makes Ernestine an amoral yet sympathetic character, one willing to murder a fellow slave, who was in on the plot, in order to save her daughter from recapture, and finally willing to murder her lover/master with the comment that they're both going to Hell, only he'll get there first. You can identify a few of the Macon 7 as good guys, but ultimately none of them are squeaky-clean by the end of the season.

Underground hedges its bets a little by foregrounding its white characters early on, but they mostly recede to their more proportionate place as the season progresses. Along with Tom Hakes, the master, we're introduced to his brother John (Marc Blucas), who's become a lawyer in the north and is summoned back south to become Tom's campaign manager (whatever that means in the antebellum era) in an upcoming election. Tom doesn't know that John and his wife Elizabeth (Jessica DeGouw) are abolitionists who will turn their new home into a station on the Underground Railroad. The preservation of their secret is the constant subplot of the first season, while we wait for members of the Macon 7 to show up at their doorstep. This subplot gets mighty melodramatic if not soap-operatic at times, as when a U.S. Marshall finds out the secret but promises silence in return for sex from Elizabeth. Unsurprisingly, we learn that John's hands are not exactly clean; he'd once provided legal services for a slave auction, as we learn when a violent escapee whose wife was sold on that occasion shows up suddenly to take the Hawkeses hostage. The point of all this isn't to reduce everything to shades of gray, however, since on a show like Underground there's very little uncertainty about who the good guys and bad guys are, even after all their flaws or redeeming qualities are taken into account. The one exception to that may be the slave-hunter August Pullman (Christopher Meloni), who seems simply to be too much of a badass to be dismissed as a villain, though the idea that he does his thing for economic reasons (as opposed to anyone else?) doesn't really add much depth to him. I expected to see him dead by the end of the season but he seems to be unkillable, though many have tried. Thankfully Underground hasn't been killed, and I've tried and given up on enough shows this season to appreciate its virtues. If not a true top-tier series, I'd still put it in the top ten of the new shows I've watched this season.

On the Big Screen: 12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013)

The history of slavery on film is inseparable from the fantasy of mastery. For that reason, any movie about slavery risks being seen as exploitation. It's always about what the master can do, potentially provoking prurient curiousity, as much as it's about what slaves endure. In the camera eye, the essence of slavery isn't merely exploitation; it is cruelty. The new film by the British director Steve McQueen, acclaimed by some as the best film ever made about American slavery, is no different. The true-life ordeal of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is upstaged, despite the best efforts of star and director, by the spectacle of the monster master. Northup, a free black from New York State who was kidnapped by slavers who enticed the many-skilled man, a husband, father and homeowner. As a free-born citizen of a free state, Northup didn't have to carry papers proving he wasn't a slave, so once taken south, he can't prove his free status. The film follows in the footsteps of Uncle Tom's Cabin as Northup first toils under a "good" but ultimately ineffectual master (Benedict Cumberbatch), then suffers under a Simon Legree type (McQueen alter ego Michael Fassbender). In effect, farce is repeated as tragedy, as one can only laugh at Northup's struggles with Cumberbatch's overseer. Paul Dano's performance may type him once and for all as cinema's designated whipping boy -- white division, of course. He's the nearest thing this film has to comic relief, introducing himself with an inanely offensive work song like something out of Blazing Saddles. He's so unmenacing a figure that it's hard to take him seriously, though his part of the film has a cruel punch line. Humiliated by Northup, the Dano character tries to string the slave up, only to be thwarted by an overseer who has promised to protect Northup. The overseer then leaves Northup to barely avoid strangling in the noose by standing tip-toe in mud until Cumberbatch can figure out what to do with him. In a telling shot, slave children play in the background as Northup struggles for life. McQueen holds the shots of Northup struggling for very long periods. It's a chancy tactic, since there's often a temptation to laugh when this sort of shot is held for too long. Northup's ordeal, however, is only a prelude for the over-the-top antics at Fassbender's plantation.

Cumberbatch plays a cluelessly pious master fond of reading the Bible to his slaves yet ultimately lacking in Christian compassion, while Fassbender finds justification for his cruelty in the same book. He's archetypically dissolute and depraved, a figure who would not be out of place in such less respectable fare as the Mandingo movies or Django Unchained, except that he'd rather see his slaves dance than fight. Essential to his archetype is the sexual exploitation of slaves, and the object of Fassbender's questionable affections is Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o), a mighty mite of cotton-picking productivity. She can pick more than 500 pounds a day while Northup is lucky if he can manage half as much. Fassbender's wife despises Patsy, in one scene hitting the young woman in the face with a full glass decanter. Fassbender himself abuses Patsy as much as he romances her, to say the least. McQueen manages to make this less exploitative than it might seem by deglamorizing Patsy. Nyong'o is a petite woman with close-cropped hair who accumulates scars throughout the picture. No one in the audience, presumably, would fantasize about possessing the wretched Patsy sexually, so Fassbender's lust seems unfathomably strange. Fassbender's performance throughout is fearlessly over-the-top, as it must be to break the spell of fantasy around the character's mastery.

Ejiofor is brilliantly indignant in the lead role, but the film's fidelity to history limits the actor's opportunities to dominate it while screenwriter John Ridley's attempt to make 19th century characters, free and slave alike, more articulate and deliberate in their speech than we are may distance audiences from Northup's emotional experience of his ordeal. Fortunately the visuals more than make up for any distancing effect the dialogue may have on uncomprehending viewers. McQueen has an interesting eye, often focusing on familiar objects in disorienting close-up or landscapes rendered abstract by reflection or atmospheric effects. One especially effective shot turns the blades of a steamboat paddle wheel into a red maw of death as Northup is carried down the river. His long takes are endurance tests for the viewer that hint at Northup's greater test of endurance. Ejiofor and Fassbender top a talented or at least game cast, from Paul Giamatti's brief but chilling turn as a slave trader to producer Brad Pitt's self-congratulatory cameo as a good white whose intervention finally frees Northup. There's a strange irony in the ending that McQueen may not have appreciated or even noticed: even at the heart of slavery's darkness there is still a rule of law that pries Northup from Fassbender's grip. Once Northup makes contact with people who can make contact with authorities in New York, the law, even in a slave state, works in Northup's favor. I'm not sure what this might prove to the audience, or whether it contradicts any impression the film meant to make. It's clear, however, that Northup is miraculously exceptional in acquiring a Get Out of Slavery card, while Patsy and the rest of Fassbender's victims are stuck with him. Some critics have suggested that Northup's limited ordeal doesn't get to the essence of the slavery experience, and the film itself has another kidnapped black draw comparisons between victims like Northup and "born and bred" slaves who have no fight in them. On the other hand, Northup's ordeal probably makes him a better audience-identification figure while augmenting the horror of the story by protraying slavery as something that can happen to anyone -- we even see a white man temporarily reduced to debt-slavery under Fassbender -- rather than something only certain people are born into. If McQueen manages to inspire more nightmares of enslavement than fantasies of dominance, then 12 Years will have lived up to its already lofty reputation among slavery pictures. For now, McQueen should be satisfied with having made one of this year's best films.

SLAVES (1969)

For the second straight year, one of the fall movie season's Oscar contenders will be a film dealing with slavery. Steve McQueen's fact-based Twelve Years a Slave promises to be a more serious if not more popular treatment of the subject than Quentin Tarantino's somewhat-unlikely crowd-pleaser Django Unchained, and it comes out of the film-festival circuit highly touted as one of 2013's best American films. In anticipation of the McQueen film's general release, let's return to the world of slavesploitation. Ken Norton's death last month put us in mind of his iconic performances in Mandingo and Drum, and exploitative films like those had an obvious influence on Tarantino, though probably not on McQueen. Herbert J. Biberman's Slaves will probably come closer to the McQueen film in spirit, but you can see the family resemblance to Django Unchained as well. No more than a thin, dimly discerned line separates slavesploitation from films and filmmakers that would shun the label. The subject matter touches too many nerves that, if not raw, are still tender. Part of the problem is that films about slavery tend to be about the corruption of masters as much as the they're about the oppression of slaves. The two threads are arguably inseparable, but combine them and you risk compromising a dignity on the part of the victims that some audiences (or critics) insist upon. The subject threatens to shift to the corruption of slaves as an inevitable consequence of the intimacy of plantation slavery. Any slavery film is a tightrope act and some people will never be satisfied, perhaps believing that American slavery is a subject, like the Holocaust, that can only be trivialized by fiction film.

Herbert J. Biberman was a relatively minor figure in Hollywood who looms larger now as one of the legendary Hollywood Ten, the writers and directors who went to prison for refusing to testify on their involvement with Communism to the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a creator, Biberman is best known now, if known at all, for directing the 1954 film Salt of the Earth, a union-financed drama made with talent (including the actor Will "Grandpa Walton" Geer) that had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Slaves was Biberman's first picture since then, and his last; the director and co-writer would die in 1971. Co-written by Biberman with two other scribes, the film riffs on some of the tropes long associated with Uncle Tom's Cabin while doing without the more cloying elements (Little Eva, etc.) of the Stowe novel. Biberman's Uncle Tom surrogate is Luke (Ossie Davis), a trusted horse trainer and horse trader on a Kentucky plantation. We meet him returning from a trip to Ohio -- free soil -- where he conducted business for his benevolent owner. The master's trust is rewarded, while Luke's fellow chattels are astounded, by his refusal to take advantage of the opportunity to run away. Luke is a good Christian who respects the scriptural injunction on slaves to obey their masters. More practically, he's slowly earning money to buy his freedom, with an eye on making good money in the North to buy freedom for his wife and children. Luke's master supports this aspiration, but has proved fiscally irresponsible. Unable to pay his debt to a slave trader (David Huddleston), the master is forced to give up several slaves to the trader, including Luke and the more mischievous Jericho (Robert Kya-Hill). This is the first of several disillusioning moments for Luke, but there is worse to come.

Luke and Jericho are put on the market and made to prove their health by jumping up and down (see above) before being purchased by this film's Simon Legree, Nathan MacKay (Stephen "Messala" Boyd). Hailing from New England Puritan stock, Nathan has been captain of a slave ship, dealing with African chiefs who readily sold their own people to him. He collects African art along with Africans, and commissions African inspired fashions for his slave mistress Cassie (Dionne Warwick). MacKay is a satanic or Sadean villain, self-consciously evil, fascinated by the process of breaking people's wills and testing the limits of what people will endure. He seems to be testing his own will to power constantly, reminding the tempestuous Cassie that "I'm even more stubborn than you are. I have to be. I'm master." One gets the sense that his embrace of evil is an act of surrender, that he has seen things that so darkened his view of humanity (no pun intended!!!) that there was nothing to do but become a villain. Despite his love-hate relationship with Cassie and his interest in nubile newcomers, MacKay seems more interested in power than sex, and that keeps Slaves just sort of all-out slavesploitation -- though fans of "Mandingo fighting" should note that a drunken MacKay does compel two slaves to beat each other to the death with chairs at one point.

 

The Look of Love?

MacKay recognizes Luke's qualities and admits that he didn't pay what he did just to use him as a field hand, but his first priority is to break Luke's will -- while Cassie thinks of him initially as a pawn in her own personal power game with MacKay. Luke himself is more concerned with taking charge of a newborn girl whose mother died in childbirth, and with rescuing a teenaged girl from MacKay's depredations. Eventually the film restages the archetypal climax of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Luke risking a fatal whipping by refusing to divulge the hiding place of the girls (and Cassie), buying them time to escape with help from MacKay's estranged wife and one of her northern relations.

Biberman is not a very good director, and Slaves feels stagy and stodgy until it acquires some pace late. Once Luke and Jericho plan a mass escape requiring a schedule of distractions and misdirections the film's final act manages to maintain some honest suspense, but the tension dissipates once Mrs. MacKay takes on the role of dea ex machina. If the ultimate escape proves anticlimactic, you can argue that the real climax is Luke's confrontation with MacKay, but the moral of Luke's storyline is unclear. The script hints at a critique of Luke's Christianity, with a message that people should achieve their own salvation rather than depend on God, but Luke's sacrifice hardly seems like a vindication of anything he may have stood for. It may be significant that in his final moments he physically resists MacKay, attempting to seize the master's whip -- in an echo of Ben-Hur? -- but to some extent he still seems like a futile character. It's not so simple when the filmmaker denies himself the gratification of a revenge fantasy like Django Unchained. Biberman acknowledges the persistence of injustice as MacKay shrugs off both the burning of his cotton barn and the loss of human property ("There will always be more n*ggers in the world.") while Jericho, joining the ladies on the road to freedom, cautions that freedom "better be worth it."

Throughout, the actors strive to redeem the stiffness of the dialogue. Davis and the actress playing his wife manage to make their final night together moving despite the prevalence of talk over action, and Davis is an authoritative presence throughout, regardless of the film's view of his faith. Boyd is perfectly cast, while Warwick is an appropriately strange figure as Cassie, at once idolized (or fetishized) and despised by MacKay and on her terms at once arrogant, opportunistic and self-loathing. Both Boyd and Warwick have been accused of bad acting but are playing such unconventional or unfathomable figures that normal standards hardly apply. They don't manage to make Slaves a genuinely good movie, but they help keep it interesting. It would be hard for any film on this subject to fail to be interesting, since each is part of the ongoing drama of Americans addressing one of their nation's founding sins. We can debate whether some films are better on the subject than Slaves, but most of them are definitely more entertaining -- for good or ill.

Slavesploitation: the second wave?

One of the most anticipated films of 2012, promised for a Christmastime release, is Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the writer-director's melding of the spaghetti western and "slavesploitation" genres starring Jamie Foxx. In a sign that Django might start a trend, the Saratogian newspaper reports on the plans by Brad Pitt's production company to make a true-life slavery movie. Plan B Entertainment is still in pre-production on Twelve Years a Slave, which would be the British Steve McQueen's directorial follow-up to his highly acclaimed features Hunger and Shame and will reportedly feature Michael Fassbender, the star of both films, along with Pitt in a role to be determined and  UK star Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a man who lived through an African-American nightmare. Born free, Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery, which he endured for the title duration before managing to escape and publicize his ordeal. It seems such a naturally cinematic story that you wonder why Hollywood hasn't done it before.

So do two films make a genre? Hard to say; the pedigree behind Twelve Years doesn't imply an exploitation approach but the material is potentially so provocative that any treatment might qualify as an exploitation film. In cinema, slavesploitation denotes an allegedly insensitive emphasis on the degradation of slaves, particularly the violence inflicted on them and the sexual servitude to which they were reduced. Its roots are in literature, from William Styron's ambitious Confessions of Nat Turner to Kyle Onstott's Mandingo and its sequels, as well as global interest in the U.S. civil rights movement and race riots of the 1960s. Its magnum opus is Jacopetti & Prosperi's time-travel shockumentary Goodbye Uncle Tom but its best known product remains Richard Fleischer's 1974 film of Mandingo -- though some might include the Roots TV miniseries as part of the trend. The genre as a whole has a bad reputation because of the subject matter's provocative and potentially prurient nature, the horrors of slavery allegedly arousing some viewers while enraging others. I expect just such a response to the Tarantino film, as no doubt Tarantino himself does. Whether Twelve Years a Slave, or whatever it finally gets called, will position itself as the respectable, responsible slavery picture, or whether it will milk the outrage that any viewer should feel over Northup's story to controversial effect, is impossible to say right now -- it's still possible that the film will never get made. Still, it's an interesting coincidence to see two slavery films in the works all of a sudden, and I wonder what it says about 2012 compared to the combustible years when slavesploitation first cast its shadow across theater screens.  I look forward to finding out in either case.

THE ARENA (1974)

It's a stroke of exploitation genius. The women-in-prison movie was a big money-making genre in the sleazy Seventies, but how do you keep it fresh? You can change the locale from Central America to the Philippines or beyond, but after a while the camp in the jungle motif looks the same no matter where you shoot it. Why not take the idea back in time? And what more natural destination for the Roger Corman wayback machine than mythically decadent and exploitative Rome? It was a perfect opportunity for Corman to do something new with Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, the stars of his Philippine production Black Mama, White Mama. I didn't care much for that film when I finally saw it but the original audiences ate it up, so Corman wanted to reunite the glamazonian actresses in a similar tale of sporadic adversarity and uneasy alliance. He sent them to Italy with novice director Steve Carver to work for local producer Mark Damon, a long established expatriate American actor. The Arena had a happy ending after it wrapped when Markov and Damon married; they remain a couple today. As for the film itself, it fulfills the potential Black Mama, White Mama really only hinted at for Grier and Markov as a formidable female action team.

In the first century B.C., with memories of Spartacus's uprising still fresh, Romans are scouring the world for plunder and slaves. In "the Brittany," a raiding party attacks worshippers leaving some sort of druidic ceremony, slaughtering most of the natives but taking Boadicea (Markov) alive. In Nubia, Roman raiders interrupt the celebratory dance of leopard-skinned Mamawi (Grier) with a rain of arrows, seizing the woman after killing the men. You'd think they'd take more slaves to make the raids worthwhile, but maybe they just enjoy killing, or maybe they're trying to solve the Riddle of Steel. In any event, our hapless heroines end up practically shackled together in Brundusium, in the house of the lanista Timarchus (Daniele Vargas), his consort Cornelia (Rosalba Neri), his effete servant Priscium and a school of gladiators. The women are meant to be kitchen workers, servants of refreshments during the games, entertainment for Timarchus's cronies and comfort for the gladiators. But after the prideful Mamawi attacks a citizen-turned slave (Marie Louise) who'd insulted her race, and Boadicea intervenes to keep the Nubian from killing the woman, Timarchus gets a brainstorm. He'll liven up his games by matching his slave women against each other in the arena.

There's some training involved, but soon enough the women are fighting before crowds who aren't sure what to make of it all. Boadicea is matched against the film's comedy-relief gladiatrix, Dierdre of the Erse (Lucretia Love), a stereotypical carrot-topped dipso who quickly proves incompetent in the arena. But the audience is so amused by her pratfalls that they convince Timarchus to spare the clown. The next bout pits Mamawi against Livia, the onetime Roman citizen, who appeals to the crowd to be spared such shame. She wins them over, compelling Timarchus to replace her with Lucinia (Mary Count), the girlfriend of top gladiator Septimus (Pietro Ceccarelli). We'd seen him earlier breaking up the fight between Mamawi and Boadicea, so we're expecting one or both of them to get back at him later in the picture. For now, we see him watch in horror as Mamawi gets the upper hand over Lucinia and Timarchus orders the Nubian to kill her foe. She can't do it until Timarchus's archers make it clear that she has no choice if she wants to live. No Woody Strode style self-sacrificing heroics -- for the moment.

Lucretia Love (above right) was actually top-billed in Italian advertising for this picture. Maybe they gave her credit for genre experience for starring in Alfonso Bresica's Battle of the Amazons a year earlier.

Two thumbs down.

Finish her!

Inevitably, Mamawi and Boadicea are matched against each other. Like their male counterparts, they're invited to seek comfort with a bedmate the night before -- in what proves, shockingly, the film's only nod toward lesbianism, they're told they can choose a male or a female. Boadicea chooses the desolate Septimus, not to screw with him, except maybe with his head. But it doesn't take much convincing to get him to seek vengeance on Timarchus. Unfortunately, he's ratted out, captured, and sentenced to crucifixion -- but a sympathetic soldier allows him an honorable suicide. Now the question becomes whether Boadicea and Mamawi will kill each other or make a stand. This shouldn't be too hard to figure out....

Because the lesbian content is minimized to almost nothing, you might miss that Arena is basically a women-in-prison film, complete with an antique equivalent of a shower scene. The absence of lesbianism makes sense when you remember that same-sex desire was usually vilified in these movies, accentuating the unnatural power women wardens seemed to have in prison settings. In The Arena there's no illusion of female power; while Cornelia comes closest to a wicked-warden figure it's always clear that Timarchus is the master. In a way, that makes the gladiatrix uprising (oops, I spoiled it) even more of a titillating nightmare of female empowerment than the jailbreaks and riots are in the conventional WIP movie. This time it's unambiguously a war of women against men -- though the male gladiators join in as well. The WIP movie has a subtext of fascinated fear of the sexually liberated women, pandering to a male notion that these women need to be kept down and controlled before jolting them with the arousing terror of a female breakout. The Arena arguably makes this point more plainly by emphasizing the training mandated by men that turns the women into unstoppable killing machines. Movies have sent us mixed messages about the outcome of a gladiator-vs-soldier showdown, Spartacus of course favoring the gladiators while Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire noted their indiscipline and likely cowardice under battle conditions. The Arena is all the way with gladiatrices. Once the rebellion breaks out, Mamawi and Boadicea make mincemeat of the soldiery, and even the ridiculous Dierdre manages to kill a few. Think of it as sublimated sexual blowback. Men may want sexual superwomen but the revolution won't necessarily stop there.

Look into your hearts! I can't die here, like some gladiator!

Steve Carver is best known to me as the director of that cheese epic and guilty pleasure of the Eighties, Lone Wolf McQuade, and The Arena shows that he hit the ground running. Aided by cinematographer Aristide (Joe D'Amato) Massaccesi, Carver gives the action a dynamic budget-epic vibe. The arena scenes may be underpopulated but otherwise the production values are perfectly adequate and even superior during the climactic escape and chase through the catacombs. A few cheesy moments are worth noting, however, like the way a man slashed across the throat clutches his head and the way a gladiator can manage to rape Dierdre while keeping his black trunks on. A little of that is probably inevitable, but it's not typical of the film. Francesco de Masi, who did a stupendous score for Lone Wolf McQuade, punches things up nicely here in his first work for Carver. Most importantly for the success of the picture, Grier and Markov are on their game, the latter for the first and only time in a marriage-shortened career. Doing their own fighting and stunts, the two rangy females are still occasionally gawky but mostly as convincingly forceful as they need to be and often more than that. To an extent, it's just a matter of Carver being a better action director than Black Mama, White Mama's Eddie Romero. But he also makes judicious use of huge, spaghetti-western scale close-ups that showcase the actresses emotions, Grier's especially, as well as their physical prowess. Let's not mistake The Arena for anything profound -- the previous paragraph notwithstanding -- but let's give credit where it's due some serious high-functioning kick-ass schlock like they hardly make anymore.

Listen to the hard sell on this trailer, uploaded by Keshizzz.

Yaphet Kotto in DRUM (1976)

Hammond Maxwell went through some harrowing experiences in Richard Fleischer's Mandingo, the hit adaptation of Kyle Onstott's slavesploitation bestseller, and he appears in the sequel, adapted from Onstott's own follow-up novel, a much changed man. What does a man have to go through to change from Perry King into Warren Oates? There are hints of Hammond's adventures since we last saw him boiling his prize fighting slave in a cauldron and mourning his murdered father. In Drum he tells us that he's been married twice, apparently not counting the bride he poisoned in the first film. Actually, there's only one reference to the events of Mandingo in the entire sequel, when Hammond mentions that he had to kill a favorite slave once because he let his pecker do his thinking for him. That may be because United Artists, rather than Paramount, distributed the sequel, but whatever the reason, Drum may as well start from scratch. Rather than the almost offensively tragic figure of Mandingo, where he was shown as much a slave of the system as his chattels, Hammond, as played broadly by Oates, is almost a comedy-relief figure, clownishly boorish and still not really as malignant or corrupt as his slaveholding peers. Most importantly, he isn't really Drum's main character. That's the man the film is named for, played by the returning Ken Norton between heavyweight fights. The point of recasting Norton is somewhat lost, though. From what I've read about Onstott's novel, Drum is supposed to resemble and remind Hammond of Mede, the character Norton played in Mandingo. The resemblance is never noted, however.

"We aint gonna worry 'bout that kind of henshit!" Warren Oates holds forth in Drum.

Drum is a scaled-down sequel, replacing Richard Fleischer with Steve Carver behind the camera and relying heavily on an obvious soundstage set for whorehouse exteriors during the opening New Orleans sequence. Carver is no nonentity; he deserves a small piece of genre immortality, in my book, for directing one of the last great B movies, the Chuck Norris-David Carradine showdown Lone Wolf McQuade. There's comparatively little action in Drum until the end, but Carver keeps things moving briskly with a visceral intensity. He might have kept some of the actors under tighter rein, but there'd hardly be a point to the picture had he done so. If Mandingo itself was an exploitation film, Drum exploits Mandingo. The only direction to go is over the top.

Mandingo plus homophobia plus homoeroticism (female category) plus castration anxiety plus a slave uprising equals Drum. Along with all that, there's a documentary style opening set in Cuba, and a narration detailing the spawning of Drum, the mulatto son of Marianna (Isela Vega), an aristocrat turned madam, and Tambura, a lion-hunting African warrior. To preserve what's left of Marianna's honor, her handmaiden (and lover) Rachel raises Drum as her own son and a refined house servant of Marianna's famous New Orleans bordello. Mild-mannered Drum is no fighter, but is pressed into combat when a slave scheduled to fight for the entertainment of bordello patrons is withheld by his master.

Drum's first fight pits him against Blaise (blogathon honoree Yaphet Kotto), who belongs to the flaming villain De Marigny (champion ham and future betrayer of the human race John Colicos). Blaise has all the advantages of experience and technique, but Drum's raw strength carries the day after he catches his man in a rib-snapping bear hug. Afterward, a disgusted De Marigny decides to castrate Blaise, but when Drum appeals for mercy, he makes a present of Blaise to the victorious slave (to Marianna legally, of course), along with the female slave of his choice. That bit comes with a catch; when Drum beds his female prize, De Marigny wants to join in. Drum can still have the girl to himself; it's not her the white man wants. But neither Drum nor Calinda (Brenda Sykes, also of Mandingo) wants any of that, and the formerly magnanimous De Marigny becomes Drum's mortal enemy, even sending hired thugs to attack him. Fearful for her son's safety, Marianna decides to sell him to Hammond Maxwell, who's always looking for good studs, but she insists on his taking Blaise along as part of a package deal.

This brings us back to dear old Falconhurst plantation, where "we don't grow cattle, just n*ggers." Hammond makes Drum an overseer in all but name, but insists that the newcomer learn to talk more "n*ggerish" as a matter of deference. Both Drum and Blaise become house servants, but while their main job is to breed more slave "suckers" (is this where Barnum got the idea about them being born every minute?) they're also potential prey for Hammond's horny idiot daughter Sophie (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith). Along for the ride are Hammond's new housemistress Augusta, a white lady hired to keep Sophie in line, and his new bed wench Regine ("Pamela" Grier), who for some reason has had five different masters in the past two years. While Hammond's made clear that he has no sexual interest in white women, Gussie is jealous of Regine's bed privileges, and tries to pair off Regine and Drum. Regine likes this idea and coaches Gussie on how to make herself attractive to Hammond.

Pam Grier offers some advice to the lovelorn: crazy white girls like Cheryl 'Rainbeaux' Smith aren't worth the risk of getting nutted for someone like Yaphet Kotto.

Meanwhile, Drum and Blaise have all they can handle keeping Sophie out of their pants, though Blaise is somewhat less steadfast on this point than Drum. Our hero tries to keep Blaise in line for his own good, since otherwise Hammond "will kill Blaise, or even worse, castrate him!" Blaise resents Drum's officiousness and picks a fight with him. Then, though they try to cover for one another afterward, he more deeply resents the fact that Drum gets just five strokes on the buttocks while Blaise has to take thirty -- approximately, since Hammond seems to get squeamish about it before the end. The fact that Drum gets favorable treatment factors at least as much as his sore butt in Blaise's new ambition to run away. "I got freedom in my heart and I'm gonna grab it," he says, stating later that "Blood is the color of freedom." Any escape plans are aborted, however, when Sophie, in a fit of pique against her father and prospective stepmother, denounces Blaise for enticing her into masturbating him. Hammond shackles Blaise and wants to hang him, but when he catches Sophie flashing and teasing the prisoner he becomes uncertain of whether to kill, castrate or simply sell him.

"Free at last my ass!"

Things come to a boil when local slavedriver Montgomery (Royal Dano) parks a troupe of down-the-river bound slaves in Hammond's barn, where Blaise remains a prisoner. Still fearing that Hammond will castrate his friend, Drum frees Blaise, not suspecting that Blaise will incite Montgomery's charges into a violent uprising and attack on the Hammond mansion, where familiar faces from New Orleans, including Marianna and De Marigny, are visiting. With the whites besieged, but little prospect of the blacks making good any escape, Drum offers to negotiate a cease-fire, and Hammond takes up his offer. What better time could there be for De Marigny to try to settle old scores with Drum and Blaise? Mistaking De Marigny's treachery for Hammond's, Drum joins in the uprising, but soon has second thoughts....

While there was something appropriately unsettling about the intimacy of masters and slaves in Mandingo, Drum too often comes across as comically sleazy. It ups the ante of decadence by introducing homosexual desires that were part of Onstott's original novel, but misses the point somewhat by making the homo-or-bisexual characters outsiders to Falconhurst. Worse, Colicos's villain is impossible to take seriously, making Susan George in Mandingo look like a model of something resembling restraint. The sequel's obsession with castration (or "nutting") -- a subject that miraculously failed to come up in Mandingo -- quickly becomes ridiculous rather than menacing, climaxing in Marianna's coming-out toast at the Hammond party: "I would like to make a toast...to castration...of all men."

In Drum's defense, Carver does a good job of gradually building tension until, as the ads, said, the fuse lit by Mandingo explodes here. Here's where Yaphet Kotto should take a bow, since Blaise is the most catalytic character in the story. His perils often motivate Drum's actions, the title character being pretty passive otherwise, and his desire for freedom and resentment of Drum and the Hammonds alike sparks the climactic uprising. It may have been just so in the novel, but it also looks like a vote of no confidence in Ken Norton's ability to carry the film. He obviously can't compete with Kotto as an actor, but he does convey a fundamental decency despite Drum's disreputable childhood environment. But where Norton lacks passion, Kotto has it to spare. The two make a halfway decent team, and it must have been fun in the initial fight scene for the character actor to have the man who beat Ali sell his punches.

If Mandingo lacked the analytic rigor and apocalyptic scale of atrocity of Goodbye Uncle Tom, then Drum lacks much of whatever moral seriousness Mandingo itself had. As entertainment, however, Drum could easily be somebody's guilty pleasure. It has a super Seventies lineup and the singular sight of Oates and Grier in bed together. It has instant camp in the form of John Colicos ("On your feet, you piece of merde!" is a typical utterance) and Cheryl Smith's wild, shameless performance. And it has just the sort of slave-rebellion climax, reminiscent of or anticipating window-breaking zombie attacks of besieged buildings, that I said a truly crowd-pleasing slavesploitation film should have. Drum is dumb, but it can be endearingly so for audiences in the right mood.

As with Mandingo, robatsea2009 has uploaded a trailer for Drum to YouTube


This review is part of a weeklong blogathon appreciation of Yaphet Kotto organized by the Lost Video Archive. Visit The Goodkind's site to find out more about Kotto's distinguished diversity of work from the Sixties to the present day.

MANDINGO (1975)

When Kyle Onstott published his sleeper novel Mandingo in 1957, Hollywood's idea of an expose of American slavery was Raoul Walsh's Band of Angels, adapted from a Robert Penn Warren novel. In that film, we're meant to sympathize with a slave played by Yvonne de Carlo, who if not as Lily-white as in her Munsters years is caucasian enough for us to be outraged when the "one drop of blood" rule reduces her to servile status. While the film was probably Sidney's Poitier's most prominent appearance to that time, it wasn't exactly a milestone for race relations -- nor was it likely to start riots in theaters. Mandingo was on another level entirely, as this review details. Its popularity led to numerous sequels by the already-elderly Onstott and his collaborators, but Hollywood waited until the Seventies to adapt it, and then under the impetus of an Italian, the late Dino de Laurentiis. The book had gone over big in Europe (and was recommended to a French publisher by no less an authority than the novelist Richard Wright), and had been considered for adaptation by Mondo meisters Jacopetti & Prosperi before they decided to go their own way in the dark epic Goodbye Uncle Tom. American slavery was a natural subject for a world fascinated by the Civil Rights movement and told by leftist propaganda that racial inequality belied U.S. claims to moral high ground in the Cold War. While Goodbye Uncle Tom was repudiated by New York critics in 1971, the blaxploitation explosion already under way by that year and a widespread critical attitude among Americans must have made the time seem ripe to both de Laurentiis and his associates at Paramount Pictures for a Mandingo film. The public responded, inspiring a sequel based on Onstott's own follow-up novel, but the critics howled again, treating Richard Fleischer's film as an atrocity and slavery as if it were a forbidden subject for film.

Mandingo is pretty atrocious. It isn't as relentlessly appalling and horrific as Goodbye Uncle Tom, but while Jacopetti & Prosperi combined exploitation impulses with an analytic thesis designed to explain the motivations and weaknesses of contemporary black protest, Fleischer's film is simply trashier, reducing the crime and tragedy of American slavery to the stuff of soap opera, making it personal rather than political and asking us ultimately consider a master as much a victim of the system as a slave.

Satire. Get it?

Our setting is the Falconhurst plantation, where Mr. Maxwell (James Mason) reigns over a clan of slaves and his own son and heir, Hammond (Perry King). Maxwell is concerned with breeding. His slave girls need a good stud to give him another generation of human chattel, while Ham has reached the age when he ought to be giving Maxwell a grandson. Ham seems happy bedding the slave women, particularly Ellen (Brenda Sykes), towards whom he feels growing compassion as well as lust. Nevertheless, he must go a-courtin' Miss Blanche (Susan George) while shopping around for a sound Mandingo male for human breeding.

Blanche proves a disappointment, not being a virgin, but Ham seems to have made a better choice in Mede (heavyweight contender Ken Norton), a mighty Mandingo for whom he outbids a randy Dutch widow. Mede is short for Ganymede, pointing toward at least one direction the movie, at least, refused to go. As a kid, seeing the original advertising but ignoring the reviews, I assumed that Norton was the title character. In any event, before Mede proves himself a lover he proves himself a lucrative fighter, earning Ham's respect in the process. After one brutal fight Mede openly questions the point of such violence. When old man Maxwell asks whether Ham will allow Mede to talk that way, Ham decides that he will.

"I don't buy a pig in ze poke!" Whether a woman would be permitted to make such a hands-on inspection of the goods for sale at a slave market (Ken Norton) is strongly debatable.

I assume Mede's bath in hot brine (the Romans supposedly toughened their fighters that way) is straight from the novel, but do you suppose Richard Fleischer recognized this reversal of the cartoon cliche of the savages cooking white folks in a pot? More power to him if he did.

Martial arts in Mede's time were decidedly more mixed than they are today. Perhaps I should have had my friend Wendigo meet with this bit of bloodsucking.

While the elder Maxwell is a parody of degenerate, unenlightened backcountry aristocracy, Ham appears to approach the culture's own ideal of a benevolent, paternalist master, treating Ellen and Mede almost like human beings while his father regards them as no more than breeding stock. Ironically, it's his possessive, patriarchal attitude toward Blanche, his white wife, that embitters him toward his blacks. Blanche herself is jealous of Ellen and pitches her down a flight of stairs, inducing a miscarriage of Ham's child. To further avenge herself, she orders Mede to her bedchamber and seduces him. When she gives birth to a black baby the doctor commits infanticide and Ham poisons Blanche. He grabs a gun and goes after Mede, knocking aside Ellen's pleas for mercy and Mede's own insistence that he meant no disrespect. Ham kills the daylights out of Mede, shooting him twice, dumping him in a giant cauldron of boiling water and punching holes in the man with a pitchfork. A long-suffering slave named Mem (for Agamemnon) grabs the gun and threatens Ham, but when old man Maxwell shows up and orders the "loony black bastard" to drop the weapon, Mem shoots him instead. As Mem runs away and Ham contemplates his father's corpse, Muddy Waters reprises the film's theme song, "I was born in this time/And I'll never be free," the placement suggesting that Ham, now the master, is in his own way as unfree as his slaves in a slave society. Sure he is....

There's a kind of Michael Corleone quality to Ham Maxwell, a minimal likability succumbing to the pathologies of unjust power while going superficially unpunished for monstrous deeds. We don't know what kind of master he'll actually be (though I suppose Drum will tell us) but you can believe that he's lost what little soul he had. Unfortunately, Ham is something of a grotesque from the start, limping about symbolically as he does, and Perry King distinguishes himself only by being less embarrassing than most of his castmates, and by doing a full-frontal scene early on. As his father, James Mason is a ranting cartoon character, while Susan George is hysterical (however you spin it) as the tantrum-throwing Blanche. Both have hopeless dialogue, but neither helps matters trying to out-ham Ham. Ken Norton, the man who broke Muhammad Ali's jaw, has a naive naturalism but can't do much with Mede's character. Does he feel guilt for helping capture a runaway who ends up hanged? Does he really despise slaves like Mem who talk a good game of resistance in the slave quarters and criticize him for fighting for the master's pleasure but bow and scrape in a white man's presence? We don't know Mede (apparently a much more articulate character in the novel) enough to know.

Fleischer directs the film with slick efficiency and just enough epic sweep (Richard H. Kline's cinematography is aptly atmospheric) but he can't raise the material above the exploitation level. Without the interpretative framework of Goodbye Uncle Tom or the moral focus of a consistent black point of view, too much of Mandingo seems designed simply for titillation or shock. One curious thing about the film is that, for all the sex and violence, some of the most disquieting scenes are still those infamous bits when Mason attempts to ease his rheumatism by resting his bare feet on a slave boy's back, on the premise that foot-to-flesh contact will drain away his ailment. Somehow that sums up the debasement of slavery more than the film's more violent abuses of power. It's physical intimacy without titillation, and it suggests that the moral truth of slavery can be told without the blood and sleaze.

Not that there's anything wrong with blood and sleaze, but American slavery is probably a topic that ought to be approached with more moral seriousness than Mandingo ultimately musters. The film's real problem may be that it tries. A more completely exploitative, audience-gratifying blaxploitation film, something that wrapped with a violent, victorious uprising, might be less objectionable because it could not be taken as seriously, as might be a more morally rigorous, physically reticent account of the peculiar institution. Goodbye Uncle Tom is a more successful film, even if some find it more disturbing or disgusting, because its analytical ambition, its daring time-travel gimmick and Riz Ortolani's stunning score make it a work of genuine diabolic artistry. Mandingo is too often merely tawdry.

I get the impression sometimes that "slavesploitation" is one branch of exploitation that many otherwise adventurous viewers are reluctant to explore. I suppose the reason may be that people realize that the subject matter has too much contemporary resonance to be treated lightly or crassly. Some folks probably feel the same way about the Ilsa (or Night Porter inspired Nazi prison films from the same era as Mandingo. Art ought to be able to overcome all such qualms, but I can understand people's reticence on certain issues. Nevertheless, I'm pressing on this week because I owe the Lost Video Archive a review of Drum and particular attention to blogathon honoree Yaphet Kotto's performance in it alongside such Seventies titans as Warren Oates and Pam Grier. I actually have a few other slavesploitation items from other collections to make things more interesting down the line. For now, however, I'll say that despite its many faults Mandingo is probably essential viewing for students of pop cinema from that most disturbing decade.

For some the trailer may be more than enough. robatsea2009 uploaded it to YouTube.