Mandingo is a 1975 American historical melodrama film that focuses on the Atlantic slave trade in the Antebellum South.

Produced by Dino De Laurentiis for Paramount Pictures, the film was directed by Richard Fleischer.

The film stars Perry King as Hammond, the son of cruel slave owner Warren Maxwell (James Mason).

Hammond marries Blanche (Susan George), his cousin, who becomes jealous that he pays more attention to his black lover Ellen (Brenda Sykes) than to his wife, leading Blanche to force the Mandingo fighting slave Mede (Ken Norton) into a sexual relationship with her.

It was a box office hit,[1] and was followed by a sequel, Drum (1976), which starred Norton as a different character and Warren Oates as Hammond.

In the Deep South of the United States prior to the American Civil War, Falconhurst is a run-down plantation owned by widower Warren Maxwell and largely run by his son, Hammond.

Warren Maxwell pressures him to marry, so Hammond chooses his cousin, Blanche, who is desperate to get out of her house to escape her brother Charles.

Hammond gives Ellen a pair of ruby earrings, which she wears while serving an evening meal.

A great deal of time has passed since Hammond and Blanche's marriage, and Warren Maxwell is eager for a grandchild.

A short time later, Blanche announces she is pregnant, but when the baby is born, it is clear the child is mixed race.

To avoid a scandal, the child, on doctor's orders, is allowed to bleed to death from its umbilical cord.

I hated that ending in the book where the guy boils the slave down and pours the soup over his wife's grave.

[4] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times criticized the film, calling it "racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through in an audience made up largely of children, as I did last Saturday afternoon", giving it a "zero star" rating.

The Chicago Reader writer Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in 1985 that Mandingo is "One of the most neglected and underrated Hollywood films of its era [...] it’s doubtful whether many more insightful and penetrating movies about American slavery exist.

[10][11][12] In 1996, director Quentin Tarantino has cited Mandingo and Showgirls as the only two instances "in the last twenty years [that] a major studio made a full-on, gigantic, big-budget exploitation movie".

Ken Norton, Brenda Sykes, and Lillian Hayman were the only actors from the first film to return for the sequel.

Sommerville, Diane Miller, " 'Now You Are Ready for Mandingo': Sex, Slavery, and Historical Realism," in Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America, ed.

Matthew C. Hulbert and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019): 112-124.