Synopsis
Mandingo (1975) is Richard Fleischer's brutal plantation drama, and you can watch online on iFILM a film few period pieces dare to resemble. It strips the antebellum South of its magnolia gloss and sets everything on a crumbling Louisiana estate called Falconhurst in 1840.
Ailing owner Warren Maxwell, played by James Mason, leans on his son Hammond to marry and father an heir. Hammond weds his cousin Blanche (Susan George), then comes home from the honeymoon with a slave kept for sex, and buys his father a powerful Mandingo named Mede to train as a bare-knuckle fighter for high-stakes bets. Ownership, jealousy and violence knot together until there is no clean way out for anyone.
Boxer Ken Norton gives Mede a raw physical weight, and Fleischer refuses to grant viewers a safe distance from the cruelty on screen. Long dismissed as lurid trash, the film has since been reclaimed as a punishing, honest piece of work. Go in braced. Stream Mandingo (1975) online on iFILM.
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