Mandingo (1975)

The son of an owner of a rundown plantation, Perry King, purchases Ken Norton to be a prize fighter. Highlighting the very worst of slavery in the United States, it is a violent, exploitive soap opera of a film, but it is also an uncompromisingly, honest one. Women and those held in bondage have almost no agency in the Antebellum South and the intersectionality of those two establishes a hierarchy even among the oppressed. Regardless of situation they are almost always punished severely if they try to use the little power they have. King is initially presented as a sensible, almost sympathetic figure, with a harsh and ragged James Mason for his father, but the deep rooted layers of cruelty are slowly pulled back one by one until his true brutality shines during the vicious climax.