Reception
Upon its release in 1975, critical response was mixed although box office was strong. Roger Ebert despised the film and gave it a "zero star" rating. Richard Schickel of TIME found the film boring and cliché-ridden.The movie critic Robin Wood was enthusiastic about the film, calling it “the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood”. Quentin Tarantino has cited Mandingo as one of only two instances "in the last twenty years a major studio made a full-on, gigantic, big-budget exploitation movie", comparing it to Showgirls. In Leonard Maltin's annual publication Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide the film is ranked as a "BOMB" and dismissed with the word "Stinko!". Some prominent critics hail the film, including the New York Times columnist Dave Kehr, who called it "a thinly veiled Holocaust film that spares none of its protagonists", further describing it as "Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system."
Read more about this topic: Mandingo (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)