PORNHOUND GOES TO THE MOVIES
Sins of Ownership:
Slavery, Sensationalism and the Seventies

The stretch in New York City on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Streets was once known as the “Deuce”. 

It was home to an array of sex shops, peep shows and cinemas known as “grindhouses” which played a succession of lurid, violent, sexually explicit exploitation movies to rapt audiences. On one occasion in 1975 the perverts that lined Times Square made the trip to the Deuce for a new and highly controversial wallow in disreputable sensationalism, one with the backing of Hollywood production values and acting talent: playing was Mandingo.

Mandingo was the first novel in the Falconhurst Saga by Kyle Onsott. 

In the early 1970s, Onsott’s sprawling novels were best-sellers throughout America.  The novels dwelt in detail on the inhumanity and sexual politics / abuse of the American slave trade, centring around the owners of the Falconhurst plantation.  By 1977, Alex Haley’s novel Roots was adapted into a television mini-series and America’s slave-trading history became the material of prime-time respectability, elevated from the soap-operatic wallow that Onsott’s work was summarily dismissed as.  Nevertheless, prior to being given respectability by Roots, slavery melodrama was the domain of the Deuce in director Richard Fleischer’s screen adaptation of Mandingo.  And just as Roots became a landmark in television history, Mandingo was followed by a sequel, Drum, further descending into the tantalizing taboo of slave sexploitation.  But: the history of this American slave sexploitation movie fad began curiously enough in the European art-house.

American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement in the years leading up to the American Civil War.  The novel was first adapted into an earnest historical romantic drama in 1927 but the definitive screen version is the 1969 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an Italian-German co-production directed by Geza Von Radvanyi.  Made on a then enormous budget and with a prestige cast that included Herbert Lom (several years before being immortalized as Inspector Dreyfus, the nemesis and foil to Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau in the hit Pink Panther films) as infamous slaver Simon Legree, Uncle Tom’s Cabin completely jettisoned the heavily Christian ideology of the novel for a rationalist look at unethical, perverse and immoral pressures affecting human behaviour.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin began earnestly, with a prologue amongst modern New York skyscrapers set to the latest jazz.  The jazz provided for a consistent score throughout the movie, interrupted only for negro spiritual songs related to the lives of the black characters the film contrasted to white slavers after the prologue gives way to the adaptation proper.  Although there was an earnest attempt to suggest the birth of then-modern Civil Rights era America in its slavery heritage, given equal attention was the immorality of the slavers.  Bound by a moral need to condemn slavery, it nevertheless delighted in revealing the bestial, sadistic nature of some of its characters.  This balance of authentic recreation and amoral sensationalist indulgence proved of immense interest to exploitation filmmakers.  Thus, after Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi effectively created a new form of sensationalist documentary, the “mondo” movie, in Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2 and Africa Addio, the filmmaking duo turned their attention to a mondo recreating the worst atrocities of the slave era – Farewell Uncle Tom.

When Farewell Uncle Tom played in the US in 1972, it went straight to the Deuce.  Rated X, it was described as “far more sexually explicit and perverted than conventional pornography” (Landis & Clifford, Sleazoid Express 2002, p.166) and after a lengthy condemnation in The New Yorker magazine by noted critic Paulene Kael, the film proved impossible for its distributors, Cannon Pictures, to book elsewhere in the USA. 

Fearing explosions of racial violence even on the grindhouse circuit, the distributors hurriedly shelved it.  Those who saw Farewell Uncle Tom though – or saw the VHS version unexpectedly released in Greece and Australia before n-th generation dubs circulated in the collector’s market – were treated to a rare experience: a hallucinatory trip through racist aberration with astonishing cinematography, post-modern amorality and the abandon of transgressive sexual fantasy. 

Nothing was spared here: corks are shoved up slaves’ asses to enforce constipation; a baby is dragged through a feeding trough; nuns talk of little boy slaves like pet poodles; a virgin wench seduces the camera into defiling her; naked children are adorned in body paint.  Excess was piled upon excess but the premise was ingenious: Farewell Uncle Tom told the story of a documentary film crew somehow existing in the mid-1800s and interviewing and documenting the slavers and their slaves.  Farewell Uncle Tom was filmed as if a documentary and the pretext of authenticity allowed the filmmakers an absolute and unconditional freedom in exploring not only the ideology and authenticity behind the slave experience, but the vicarious, sexual enjoyment of the slaver.  There were beautiful, lyrical moments here, dazzlingly surreal compositions and an evocative score by Italian exploitation veteran Riz Ortolani.  But: this is mondo and the voice-over narration blends fact with fiction to create another world, a hyper-real, hallucinatory world where helicopters fly over corn fields and a camera crew can wander freely aboard a slave ship.

Three years after Farewell Uncle Tom was removed from the grindhouse circuit, it embraced Mandingo.  This film had a respected American director (Richard Fleischer), a veteran cast in Perry King, James Mason and Susan George and another plethora of slave decadence: a German widow attends a slave market looking for a well-hung black slave to pleasure with; a plantation owner uses a slave boy as a footstool in order to drain out his rheumatism; a crippled master seeks to boil a slave in oil.  Mandingo made palatable the forbidden transgressions of Farewell Uncle Tom in a way that resonated with the American public beyond the grindhouse circuit. 

Indeed, the initial poster advertising campaign for Mandingo had to be toned down and the more provocative drawings airbrushed out.  Even the editor of the movie’s trailer, Nelson Lyon, said of the film “I couldn’t believe my eyes…a Hollywood movie never went so far!” (Landis & Clifford 2002, pp.95-6). Susan George’s plight as the lascivious white woman untouched by her husband and seeking the attention of a black stud lent the film a subtext of transgressive social desire within George’s mounting, hysterical sense of melodrama; with this film perhaps the actress’ best work since that for Sam Peckinpah in Straw Dogs.  The social perspective of Mandingo, its fascination with the authentic rhythms of the slavery lifestyle and the attention to the ironic position of white women’s sexuality within a Patriarchal slave culture returned in Drum, the second adaptation of Onsott’s Falconhurst Saga.  Directed by Steve Carver and released with the tagline “Mandingo lit the fuse – Drum is the explosion!” Drum starred blaxploitation queen Pam Grier alongside Peckinpah regular Warren Oates and Yaphet Kotto.  Ken Norton, the Afro-American boxer who debuted as the title slave in Mandingo, returns here in another title role as what critics jokingly referred to as “son of Mandingo”, a whorehouse servant and son of a white woman.

Drum explored slave melodrama as if the beginning of a new subgenre in American film.  Although a sequel, it ventured into yet more atrocities, adding demented homosexual slavers and pre-Civil Rights equality concerns into the heady, heavy mix of sex and violence – the avowed purpose of Falconhurst here was “nigger fornicating”. 

Pam (Foxy Brown) Grier was a naked bed wench and Warren Oates seemed to enjoy himself, and both Mandingo and Drum became regular fixtures at the Deuce throughout the remainder of the decade even though the success of television’s Roots ended such exploitation treatments from developing as a sub-genre after Drum.  But Drum, beginning with its documentary-like footage and voice-over narration clearly suggested the influence of Farewell Uncle Tom and in its better moments suggested a sub-genre in the making. 

Again a soap opera, Drum made much of the sexual politics of race in the pre-Civil War South and dwelt more on the social classes benefiting from slavery than did Mandingo.  Sexual perversity, abundant nudity and racial violence ensured that Drum quickly lost whatever historical perspective it may have sought, descending into a melodramatic pot-boiler the Deuce adored, but this time without a real pot boiling.  Mandingo director Richard Fleischer, inspired by the success of Roots, would try another slave flick in 1979, this time the contemporary action film Ashanti! starring Michael Caine, William Holden and Omar Sharif in what was ridiculed by critics worldwide as an abysmal, ludicrous movie.  With Peter Ustinov as an Arab slaver transporting his cargo across the Sahara desert, some nudity and a bizarre paedophilic subplot, Ashanti! was the most peculiar of big-screen action films more so than a slave melodrama in the sense it had come to mean.   

Hence: the failure of Ashanti! ended the short-lived slavery exploitation cycle within American mainstream cinema.  

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