MANTHINGO

MANDINGO (1975)
dir: Richard Fleischer

MANTHINGO
Crazy #14, November 1975
w: Steve Skeates
a: Alan Kupperberg

If I'm to go through the alphabet and include everything as intended, I knew this moment would come when I would eventually “go there”. Two hours of brutality during the era of slavery, redeeming itself in the last two minutes at the end. It's not as if this were done in the thirties before people knew better (or less better anyway). This was made with respectable actors and released by a respectable studio, and everyone involved continued to do major releases afterwards. The white guilt in me had to say something but I guess I have nothing more to say except that I apologize on behalf of all white people.

Hammond (Perry King), son of slave owner Warren (James Mason) catches slave Agamemnon (Richard Ward) reading and punishes him. Hammond is pressured to marry so he takes the hand of his cousin Blanche (Susan George).

In the background are Jimmie Walker, whose big catchphrase was “Dy-no-mite” on Good Times, thus the “T.N.T.” on his hat. Also shown are The Spirit's sidekick Ebony White and Sammy Davis Jr. I don't know the significance of the Don Martin characters.

At a slave auction, Hammond purchases Mede a/k/a Ganymede (Ken Norton), a Mandingo, a top shelf slave. When he consummates his marriage, he is disappointed she is not a virgin. Dancing is substituted for sex throughout this parody.

Hammond later buys Ellen (Brenda Sykes) for a sex slave on his way home. Double standards applied back then. He arrives home with his...um... purchases and head slave Lucrezia Borgia (Lillian Heyman) gets them settled. They prepare Mede for a fight later and Hammond has his way with Ellen.

Brenda Sykes had been on the sitcom Ozzie's Girls. The Theresa Graves reference is just a racist joke.

Blanche is bored in her marriage and seduces Mede under the threat that if he doesn't get with her, she'll tell everyone he raped her. Later, when she gives birth to a black child, it is obvious she has been fooling around. Here it is replaced with telltale jewelry.

I'm not sure who is talking to Fred Astaire.

Hammond's punishment for their indiscretion is to poison Blanche and force Mede to boil himself at gunpoint. Agamemnon gets hold of the gun and shoots both Hammond and Warren.

Dr. Kildare is the doctor, but I can't figure out the reason for Henry Kissinger to be there.