Word: mandingos
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Richard Lester, who collaborated with Fraser on The Three Musketeers. The chore has fallen instead to Richard Fleischer, who possibly took on this benign project as penance for giving the world Mandingo. Fleischer has staged the film's many chase scenes and sword fights in his characteristically witless manner, but at least he keeps the narrative rolling noisily along. He also makes the most of his mishmash of a cast. Rex Harrison (as the Duke of Norfolk) and Oliver Reed (as Miles Hendon) are endearing good guys; George C. Scott's dry impersonation of a vagabond king...
...Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard published a magnificent volume...devoted to the thesis that Maya and Nahuatl languages were derived from the Mandingo of Negro Africa. Some three thousand Maya-Mexican and African words were presented as evidence...
...best, serious reservations about the series, and many panned it outright. The Chicago Sun-Times' William Granger, complaining of "puerile" writing and "caricatures," described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions...
Most of the suspense in Mandingo is generated by the unconscionable amount of time it requires for the blonde mistress of Falconhurst to invite into her bed the handsome black slave (Ken Norton) her husband purchased to improve the breeding stock down in the quarters. Until this moment we cannot be certain that the movie is going to employ every cliche of antebellum melodrama. The possibility that the perfection of its tastelessness will be marred through oversight or the impulse to provide novelty through omission is an irritant. There is great relief when, at last, our heroine (Susan George) succeeds...
...Mandingo's makers had permitted themselves even a moment of genuine feeling, a single honest insight into the historical conditions they pretend to examine, they might have destroyed the distance their hack mentalities place between film and audience. As it is, derision finally gives way to numbness. There is not the slightest danger that this animated comic book can do anyone, of any race, any harm-unless Mel Brooks is looking to the Old South for his next subject...