Word: mandingos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mandingo (by Jack Kirkland; based on Kyle Onstott's novel) makes mere plot seem an anachronism, it has so much erupting at such lurid levels, so much more belching forth when nothing more seems possible. Except for its blatant treatment of sex, Mandingo would itself seem an anachronism, written in 1832 as well as taking place then. The scene is an Alabama plantation, with Franchot Tone as an aging, tippling, crotchety slave breeder and seller. Among his slaves are drunkards, onetime bedmates, "rheumatiz boys," and three Mandingos (so named for their ancestral African tribe), who to preserve their pure...
Conceivably, over this orgy of miscegenation, incest, torture and carnage can be draped some kind of indictment or protest. But in invading the Alabama of Mandingo, the Kirkland who portrayed the Georgia of Tobacco Road seems, steadily and shamelessly, to purvey sensationalism. The result may not be boring, but it is everywhere bad and, in more than one place, backfiringly ludicrous...