The Mandingo's got my baby!

I mentioned in the comments on my recent post on Claudine that I've DVRed a bunch of the movies in the Blck Experience on Film series, and who knows when I'll get around to watching them all. Actually, it goes back further than that as I recorded some fo the movies in the two-night TCM look at slavery with Donald Bogle. It's only that that I've finally gotten around to watching Mandingo.

The Maxwells: widowed father Warren (James Mason) and unmarried son Hammond (Perry King) run the Falconhurst plantation in Louisiana in the 1840s, with a whole bunch of slaves. Dad treats them harshly, while the son seems to think more about having sex with the young women slaves. Dad is getting up there in years to the point that he's worried about having a grandson to conitnue running the plantation (obviously none of the characters would have known the upcoming Civil War would put the kibosh on that), so he'd like to get Hammond married off. The only slight problem is that Hammond has a limp from a childhood horse-riding accident, so he's worried about finding a suitable wife.

Thankfully, there's a cousin in a more distant part of Louisiana, Blanche (Susan George) and her much older brother Charles (Ben Masters). When Charles shows up at Falconhurst one day, that's what gives Warren the idea to marry Hammond to Blanche if she'll have him. The one thing that Perry is definitely going to have to do, however, is not have quite so much sex with the slaves. What Hammond doesn't realize, however, is that Blanche and Charles have a dark secret in their family, and if he finds out there would be hell to pay.

Of course, Hammond is going to find out something is wrong, on their honeymoon in New Orleans. After they consummate their marriage, Hammond concludes that Blanche was not a virgin; one would guess she had a ruptured hymen although the movie couldn't be quite so explicit even in spite of the copious amounts of nudity we've already seen in the movie. Hammond wants to know who the other man was. Also on their honeymoon, Hammond brings along a slave he'd bought recently, the "Mandingo" Mede (boxer Ken Norton), who is of much stronger stock; on the way home from the wedding, he buys the house slave Ellen (Brenda Sykes).

During the honeymoon, Mede gets in a fight with another slave because Mede has been ordered by Hammond to wait someplace where a slave shouldn't be loitering. The all-out fight attracts a large crowd, and one of the other slaveholders challenges Hammond to fight Mede against his slave for large stakes.

Meanwhile, back at Falconhurst, things are deteriorating between Hammond and Blanche. Hammond deals with it by striking up a sexual relationship with Ellen, while Blanche, when she puts two and two together, decides she's going to come up with a way to use Mede to get back at Hammond.

The comments I had read on Mandingo had led me to believe that it was going to be a bit campy. But "campy" isn't a word I'd use to describe it at all. "Lurid" certainly is, as there's a lot of sex as well as a lot of violence. Quite a few of the slave women are seen naked from the waist up when Hammond has sex with them, and there's even one brief full-frontal scene of Hammond. The violence is brutal, and that's puttin it mildly, so there's quite a bit here that might not be to everybody's taste.

And yet what we get here is a fairly interesting story in a technically well-made movie. I liked that Falconhurst looked suitably decaying as if to show that Warren and Hammond were decidedly among the lower class of slave owners The interior scenes looked underlit, with a purposefully shabby set design. This certainly isn't Tara, and it isn't even the phony, too-glossy poverty of studio era southern films like Cabin in the Cotton.

At times it felt like there was a bit too much going on, as there are a lot of plot lines going on: the fighting; Blanche and Hammond; Blanche's relationship to the slaves; and Hammond's relationship to the slaves. James Mason is the nominal star here as he gets top billing, but it seems as though he's often an afterthought in the proceedings.

Mandingo is an interesting movie that's definitely worth a watch, although with the amount of sex and violence surrounding a touchy subject, I can understand why some people would have a less positive opinion of the movie. It's available on DVD and Blu-ray, too.