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 aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)