When it first came out, many critics loathed
Mandingo. They said it was a pulp potboiler, a racist exploitation film, softcore porn, immoral. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and
called it "a piece of manure" and "racist trash". It did just fine at the box office in 1975, the year it was released, but its reputation as laughably and/or offensively awful stayed with it, keeping it out of circulation for a long time. It's only been generally available on
DVD
for a couple of years now.
In 1976, Andrew Britton wrong
a long and careful vindication of the film, but his essay was not widely read. Britton noted how many of the reviewers didn't seem to have paid much attention to the film itself, given how many simple errors about the plot and character relationships filled their reviews. More famously (if academic press books by film scholars can qualify as "famous"), Britton's teacher and colleague Robin Wood devoted a
chapter of
Sexual Politics and Narrative Film
to
Mandingo, which is where I first heard about the movie.
After watching
Mandingo, I wanted to see if anybody had written about it more recently, especially within the film blogosphere, and that's when I discovered some real gems. I can't say I loved the film in the way some people have, but I certainly think the original critics who hated it missed the mark completely. It's a remarkable corrective to and comment on such things as
Gone with the Wind, and some moments reminded me strongly of Gillo Pontecorvo's
Burn!, particularly in the way both movies complicate the viewer's sympathies for the white protagonist.
But my purpose here is simply to point you toward some excellent online writings about the film:
"The Eyes We Cannot Shut: Richard Fleischer's Mandingo" by Robert Keser:Without sentimentality or official pieties, Fleisch
At the end of the his life, Robin Wood was, according to various biographical notes accompanying his later essays, working on a book about Michael Haneke's films. I don't know how far along that book was at the time of Wood's death last month, but knowing that he had written some essays about Haneke's work through the years, I fired up the ol' Google to see what of Wood's writings on Haneke were available online. Quite a few, it turns out, and they're very much worth reading:
Those all come from issues of
CineAction that are available
via Findarticles.com, and you'll discover plenty of other essays by Wood therein (sometimes bylined with his full name, Robert Paul Wood, by Findarticles) as well as other CineAction essays on Haneke, especially from the
Summer 2006 issue.
For more on both men, Film Studies for Free is the best single place to check, with posts on
Wood and
Haneke.
I've seen all but one of the Haneke films available on DVD in the U.S., and thus all of his major feature films except his latest,
The White Ribbon. The one I have not seen is the American version of
Funny Games, mostly because the
original is my least favorite Haneke, and Wood
gets close to my feelings about it, calling it a "minor work", lamenting how it has tainted people's perceptions of Haneke, and pointing out the nonsense in the statements Haneke has (repeatedly) made about punishing his audience for sitting through the film.
As for Wood, you can ignore his bizarre statements about Kafka at the beginning of the excellent "Beyond Compromise" essay -- when not writing about film, Wood was sometimes embarrassingly obtuse, but his sensitivity to film was astounding. His essays and books are particularly valuable when he writes about what he sees as successful and meaningful in particular films, and that is especially so of Haneke, a director who can be very difficult to appreciate -- read Wood on
The Seventh Continent or
Code Unknown (my own favorite among Haneke's films). Let's hope that someone is putting together a collection of Wood's uncollected essays and/or that, before his death, Wood was able to finish the manuscript of his book on Haneke. Either would be a treasure; both would be bliss.
The news of film critic Robin Wood's death came as a real shock to me because, in preparation for teaching an intro to film class next term, I've been spending a lot of time with his writings recently. One of my projects, only vaguely justified by the class, has been to view or re-view all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Wood was one of the most important writers on Hitchcock. Indeed, his Hitchcock's Films Revisited
has been the book I've spent the most time with during my journey with Sir Alfred because it is richly provocative and unpredictable, and helped me reassess some films, such as Marnie, that I would otherwise have felt were minor.
Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book. After the original Hitchcock's Films
was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in England, politically uncommitted, with little knowledge of or respect for certain trends in film theory. In the 1970s, he divorced, came out as gay, re-evaluated some of his stances on film theory, developed strong leftist political convictions, and moved to Canada. These seismic shifts in his life inevitably affected his view of Hitchcock's films, and he chronicles those changes in the autobiographical sections of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, which includes the entire text of the original book and adds hundreds of pages of later material. Even if I were not as interested in Hitchcock's work as I am, I would find Hitchcock's Films Revisited valuable as a model for the intersections of autobiography and criticism. It forces readers to assess their own ways of evaluating and interpreting films by showing the ways Wood himself had done so over the years and, as importantly, the experiences that led him to choose particular techniques of evaluation and interpretation when he did.
There have been numerous eulogies for Wood written in the past few days. The Auteur's Notebook has a roundup. David Bordwell's blog post is typically thoughtful and well-written. Film Studies for Free links to eulogies as well as works by or about Wood. All worth reading.
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I watched Mandingo in the wake of the racism shitstorm last year, after doing some digging and finding the sort of essays you quote from (the exact same ones in a couple of cases). I thought they were bang on, to the extent that the misreading of it as exploitation seems significant. Like you, I wouldn't say I *loved* it, but it's far from the cheap, crass exploitation flick many seem to take it as.