Kritiken

Long before I'd ever seen Richard Fleischer's Mandingo... I had been led to anticipate a seamy slice of slavesploitation, and there are those who admire the movie as camp, though the reason that it works as such a is also what makes it such horribly compelling drama – it simply does not blink. The performers do not indicate that they are modern and right-thinking men acting in the roles of the bad old days, but seem well and truly mired in the ignorance of the time depicted.

Richard Fleischer's blistering and undeniably lurid 1975 melodrama about a slave-breeding plantation in the Deep South, set in the 1840s, was widely and unjustly ridiculed as camp in this country when it came out. But apart from this film, Herbert J. Biberman's 1969 Slaves, and Charles Burnett's 1996 Nightjohn, it's doubtful whether many more insightful and penetrating movies about American slavery exist.