I was only a child when this came out but I'm wondering--were they any protests or complaints about this movie? It's pretty graphic and sick. I would expect the NAACP to come down hard on this and its sequel "Drum". Yeah yeah--I know all this stuff did happen back then and I'm sure none of the actors were forced into it but u gotta wonder.
shareDear preppy-3,
The only people who had the problem with this film were many major movie critics such as Leonard Maltin to the late Gene Siskel and to the late Roger Ebert (just to name a few). Virtually every review I read on this film was negative. This is only part of my help to you.
Actually the NAACP was for the film, since it showed what reality was. In addition to that, the NAACP even gave Norman Wexler the Image Award of '75 for his screenwriting.
It is interesting how many critics will praise movies like American International Pictures Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) as well as Spielberg's 1985 The Color Purple. All of these films portray how blacks (particularly black males) act like animals. Yet, Mandingo points out how blacks were treated like animals. I guess many critics did not want to see the truth of this (Mandingo), but it was okay that black man were mean-spirited and volatile (Coffy and The Color Purple) for example.
There was quote in an biography I purchased almost 10 years ago on producer Dino DeLaurentiis (my favorite film producer) where a big shot of Paramount Pictures Bob Evans claimed that even though Delaurentiis is "creative" in this business, he is also "dangerous". It never mentioned the film or films that Evans was referring to, but you can have my inclination is was Mandingo and not Serpico ('73) or Death Wish ('74).
The truth is that Mandingo is a shocker that showed reality. Something that is not likely to be shown or talked about. I hope I helped Preppy-3.
Always yours,
Joseph
Thank you Joseph. Everything u said makes sense.
shareIt's an excellent well-made movie. Most of my black friends don't feel much about it either way. It portrays the awful truth about our country's past without glorifying it and the slave characters are the only decent people in the entire story. Mostly Ellen and Mede.
shareI saw it in the theater when it first came out. The NAACP wasn't against them because it's considered historical fiction. It was a different world back then. There were a lot of American slave type movies out during the 70's. Black actors had to take roles like slaves, servants, pimps and prostitutes because those were the only roles available. What actually happened in real life was way worse than the movies. Slave women were stabbed in their wombs killing mother and baby. Slaves' heads were tied to horses and popped off in front their families.
shareDo you suppose the movie is correct in portraying slave purchases ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars? It's hard to imagine people paying that kind of money just to viciously abuse their investment.
"...if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!" Roy Batty
you have to realize white Americans were very evil and calculating in this holocaust. they had to kill slaves in front of other slaves to make them afraid to rebel. since they were considered property it was no big deal to kill them. millions of slaves were transported so they weren't scarce. The slave trade was very profitable and is the basis of all the wealth in this country. If you adjust for inflation a lot of them became billionaires.
share"since they were considered property it was no big deal to kill them"
It would be a big deal to me! It would be like buying a John Deere tractor then smashing it into a wall.
International slave trade to America was prohibited by the early 1800s; slaves weren't scarce because they successfully reproduced themselves here, unlike other slave populations such as those in the West Indies.
Assuming that (rebellious) slaves were killed to deter rebellion in others...did it work? There was no mass slave uprising here, so I suppose it did. But then you must ask yourself, why keep killing slaves when the population is under control?
"...if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!" Roy Batty
Possibly because, as tallpall says, the slave owners were very evil? It just seems to me, and what I got from the movie, is that the institution of slavery itself was so sick that it caused a great sickness in its facilitators.
Don't forget that, something people don't really talk about much except maybe Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live ... amazingly, Youtube doesn't seem to have the whole clip from that bit I guess because it was so controversial so this is all I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O563cZCfVMs ... but blacks were bred back in the day to, well, not rebel. Nobody likes to hear that and it doesn't apply today but to try to sweep that one under the rug, okay, but it doesn't keep it from having been true. If you can go by the movie, and I don't imagine it wasn't true, they were raised so as not to come by any learning. It surprises me, though, that there weren't more uprisings.
Possibly...I think the great sickness was borne of a cognitive dissonance, which itself was borne from people insisting consciously that slaves were not people while knowing that of course they were people.
I think in America especially, where the institution of slavery was always under fire by various quarters, this dissonance arose, at least among those who were aware of the arguments of the abolitionists. Your average belle probably had no idea and lived happily assuming that black slaves existed only to serve! The slave owners presumably had to contend with a greater ethical and moral struggle - that struggle may have manifested itself by owners lashing out (sorry, pun not intended) at what they saw as the source of that struggle: the slaves themselves.
But that couldn't possible account for every slave owner. I'm sure there were plenty of owners who balanced the economics involved and put the question out of their minds; others who weighed the issue and set their slaves free; still others who were simply born sadistic and secretly delighted at having others under their power and took advantage of the situation to dole out as much abuse as possible - think Delphine Lalurie.
I watched your clip - I found it pretty funny, her bit, I mean. I don't think it's funny that people are still sensitive about slavery...there's a fine line between not forgetting the past in order to protect your future and letting healing happen. This is one of the great sicknesses of our time, this horrible lingering legacy :(
"...if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!" Roy Batty
I saw it in a theater in Atlanta and I would say the audience was at least half black. I don't remember there having been a lot of reaction, or maybe I was just so involved in the movie I didn't notice.
When the audience left the theater, I don't recall the blacks as being anything but quiet and respectful, much the way those with whom I worked seemed very subdued upon Obama's election. I don't know what it is, but I think for the most part you're not going to get an intelligent, hard-working black populace to cut loose with emotion around whites for the most part. I am not talking about riots, of course, although maybe that's where the emotion finally gets expressed. I did read about Mandingo in Wikipedia before coming here and it said that the NAACP was not opposed to the movie because of its tough but realistic portrayal of the way things were.