Quentin Tarantino on the “most artistic” studio movie ever made
Quentin Tarantino is able to flex his profound knowledge of the history of cinema on his Video Archives podcast with Roger Avery. As we well know, Tarantino has just about the most widespread, almost encyclopaedic, knowledge of film of any contemporary director.
In Video Archives, Tarantino and Avery discuss a favourite film of theirs or one from the annals of Hollywood that may have gone under the radar of contemporary cinema audiences. Recently, Tarantino and Avery discussed the work of director Richard Fleischer.
“Roger and myself are big fans of Richard Fleischer, who is really one of those Hollywood directors where journeyman and artist meet, alright,” Tarantino said during the podcast. “Sometimes it’s terrific polished journeyman work, and sometimes, in the case of Mandingo, it’s just true decadent art.”
Fleischer’s career began at the height of the Golden Age of Hollywood and went right through the American New Wave. Explaining how Fleischer got his “journeyman” tag, Tarantino continued, “He’s an assignment guy, he was Gerald Anne’s guy forever and ever, and then he became Dino De Laurentiis’ guy.”
The American director is best known for his big-budget films like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Barabbas and Fantastic Voyage. He was also known to try out many different styles and genres of cinema throughout his career, working in period drama and even fantasy with Conan the Destroyer.
Something about Fleischer stood out for Tarantino and separated him from other big-budget Hollywood filmmakers. “But the thing about it is that naturally me and Roger like him because as opposed to a lot of these fellows out there, like Tom Gries, Fleischer obviously had a flair for lurid material,” Tarantino said. “He had a flair for punchy shit.”
Tarantino gave his biggest praise for Fleischer’s controversial period film Mandingo. “We haven’t even talked about any specific scenes in Mandingo, which I think is just one of the most artistic and lurid movies made by a studio ever — of all time,” Tarantino excitedly said.
Mandingo is Fleisher’s 1975 historical melodrama that centres on the slave trade in the Deep South of America. The film was controversial upon release, and its title refers to the Mandinka people, who had often been taken as slaves for fighting purposes. That’s likely where Tarantino got the inspiration for the violent “mandingo fighting” sequence in Django Unchained.
Elsewhere, Tarantino once made the claim that Mandingo is one of the only two instances “in the last 20 years where a major studio made a full-on, gigantic, big-budget exploitation movie” and compared it to Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 erotic pulp fiction satire Showgirls.
Check out the film’s trailer below.
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