Nothing but a Man (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Robert Young, Michael Roemer, and Robert Rubin; directed by Michael Roemer; screenplay by Michael Roemer and Robert Young; cinematography by Robert Young; edited by Luke Bennett; starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris, Gloria Foster, Martin Priest, Leonard Parker, Yaphet Kotto, Stanley Greene, Helen Lounck, Helene Arrindell, Walter Wilson, Milton Williams, Melvin Stewart, Rev. Marshal Tompkin, Alfred Puryear, Charles McRae, Ed Rowan, Jim Wright, Tim Ligon, William Jordan, Gil Rogers, Richard Webber, Sylvia Ray, Esther Rolle, and Evelyn Davis. Blu-ray or DVD, B&W, 91 min., 1964. A Criterion Collection release.

In a video extra for the Criterion Collection’s new release of Nothing but a Man, a story of Black life in the Deep South, director Michael Roemer says that Ivan Dixon, who plays the leading role, was initially skeptical about the project. After reading the script, co-written by Roemer and cinematographer Robert Young, the actor asked his agent, “How can two white guys tell this story?” To which the agent replied, “They’re probably Jews.” Chuckling at the recollection, Roemer calls this an “astute” remark. In the Sixties, there was “a tremendous sense of identification” between Blacks and Jews, he recalls. “In my own experience, and my father’s experience as a Jew in Germany, feeling under that kind of pressure, economic [and] social, I felt a very strong identification [with Black people] as a minority.” The pressure caused him to ask himself an awful question: “What is there about me that people might despise?”

You can’t grasp the impact of Nothing but a Man without remembering that it hails from a time when the evils of Jim Crow racism were ubiquitous in the American South and commonplace in many Northern states. Yet winds of change were rising in that critical year: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, the 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes, Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, Malcolm X founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and hundreds of activists traveled to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer voter-registration campaign. Black people inspired and energized these hopeful developments, but white allies were very much in the mix. A large proportion of the Freedom Summer activists were white and about half of them were Jewish, as were roughly half of the civil-rights lawyers in Southern states during the Sixties, an era when members of two traditionally oppressed minorities formed an imperfect but vital alliance.

In this historical context, it makes sense that Nothing but a Man would be directed, written, and produced by Jewish filmmakers. Roemer was a German émigré who had turned seventeen on the boat to the United States, and Young (later known as Robert M. Young to avoid confusion with the Hollywood actor) made public-affairs programs for television. They had worked together on a 1962 documentary about a poverty-stricken Sicilian slum, commissioned by NBC, where Young was on the staff. The network then refused to air it, fearing that American viewers would find it “too strong and real,” in Roemer’s words. (Other accounts say the network was upset with a sequence the filmmakers had staged instead of filming while it happened.) Deciding to make a film that couldn’t be snatched away from them, they took a cue from Young’s recent work on a TV documentary about sit-ins. Armed with a tiny budget and a letter of recommendation from the NAACP, they headed south in search of a compelling subject, staying in one Black household after another until their money ran out.

When a suitable topic proved elusive, Roemer realized that a story he had written about his own family could be readily adapted to a Southern environment. In the Thirties, he says in a video introduction on the Criterion disc, German Jews “weren’t allowed to sit on park benches; they weren’t allowed to go to the movies.” The idea that Jews brought “contamination” was “very much the way white people thought about Black people in the Deep South…and Bob and I felt the North wasn’t that much better.” He and Young wrote the screenplay in six weeks, and financing came through despite resistance from producers who wondered why it didn’t include King or show civil-rights marches. Filming in the Deep South with a racially mixed cast would have been dangerous, so they shot picture in southern New Jersey, which is below the Mason-Dixon Line (!) and has a large Black population. It also contains architecture that would be right at home in Alabama, where the story takes place.

The narrative is modest and archetypal. Duff Anderson works as a railroad laborer. One night he wanders into a revivalist church service and strikes up a conversation with Josie Dawson, the shy and intelligent daughter of a conservative preacher who takes against Duff the first time Josie brings him home. Their romance flourishes anyway, and when Josie learns that Duff has a four-year-old son cared for by an apathetic foster mother, she wishes he’d reclaim the child for himself. Duff marries Josie, takes small-time jobs with white employers, and loses them when he talks back to racists. The film’s last portion shows growing stresses in their marriage, Duff’s final encounter with his alcoholic father and long-suffering stepmother, and the prospect of a stable and loving future for the couple.

The immediacy and authenticity of Nothing but a Man arise from the complementary gifts of the filmmakers: Roemer wanted to make fiction films with the power and plausibility of the documentaries he loved, and Young was a nonfiction specialist who would later make fine narrative features. Roemer’s concern with fundamental human values and Young’s greater involvement with political issues were another productive balance. In his video introduction, Roemer remarks on the contrast between Young, who was born in America and was keenly aware of its flaws, and himself, born in Europe and continually delighted with his adopted country. “There was a difference there,” he says, “a tension, but a very healthy one.” Nothing but a Man puts that tension to splendid use.

Excellent acting is crucial to a film rooted in the speech, gestures, and behaviors of everyday people with ordinary lives, and the performances here look as real today as when the movie premiered. The main role went to Dixon after Sidney Poitier turned it down, and it’s hard to imagine how even the great Poitier could have done better by it. Already an experienced stage and TV actor and later a prolific director, Dixon projects contradictory qualities without a hint of actorly display, making Duff quiet yet assertive, soft-spoken yet tough as nails, loving yet prone to anger. Lincoln, a popular singer and prominent civil-rights activist, gives Josie an unforced emotional depth that would be impressive from any actor, much less one in her second screen appearance. (Her first was in Frank Tashlin’s 1956 farce The Girl Can’t Help It, and a Criterion extra shows her in a still from that rock ‘n’ rolling picture, wearing a slinky Marilyn Monroe gown in which Josie wouldn’t be caught dead.) Duff’s ailing, irresponsible father, Will, is played with skill and conviction by first-time actor Julius Harris, a nurse and former prizefighter who went on to a long list of comedies, dramas, and Blaxploitation movies.

Actors in smaller roles include Gloria Foster as Will’s unhappy wife, Stanley Greene as Josie’s judgmental father, Yaphet Kotto and Alfred Puryear as co-workers on the railroad gang, and Martin Priest as a troublesome white man at a mill where Duff briefly works. The casting is spot on. It’s interesting to learn that Roemer wanted Dixon to shave off his moustache so his expressive face would be open and exposed, then backed off when Dixon explained how important a Black man’s moustache could be. On the flip side, although Roemer thought Lincoln might insist on keeping her Afro, a valued marker of her emphatically Black identity, she knew it wouldn’t suit Josie and readily sacrificed it. Roemer and Young usually keep the camera close to the actors, heightening the story’s intimacy while opposing an underrecognized Hollywood practice. “American films did not show Black faces in close-up,” Roemer observes in a Criterion extra, “but we deliberately shot a lot of the film in close-up....I even think there was an embargo on seeing Black people kissing....We didn’t feel that way. I didn’t even think about it.” The movie’s Black bona fides get additional oomph from the thumping music of Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, and other Sixties faves.

Although cooperation and compromise were integral to the production, it’s stamped with Roemer’s distinctive artistry. “I don’t like emphasis,” he says in a Criterion video. “Everything I do is nonemphatic. You may feel the tension all the way through, but the tension is subdued.” I’ll add that his personal manner is as engaging and unemphatic as his directorial style, as I’ve found every time I’ve spoken with him, and as viewers of the Criterion extras will see and hear for themselves. He also has a refreshingly self-critical outlook. He wouldn’t make another film about Black people, he says, because “I don’t have anything more to identify with. Bob is a humanist who feels all human experience is accessible, but I’m a director from inside,” comfortable only with material he can feel as well as visualize. He also resists dramatic effects that come too easily. After creating a richly emotional moment near the end of Nothing but a Man, he remembers thinking, “We’ve got them, we’ve got the audience. And I don’t like that at all. I don’t want to ‘get’ the audience…. I felt [the film] was very well done but a little bit manipulative, and I didn’t like that. I have reservations about it and I think it’s okay to say them.” Good for him.

In a first-rate essay for the Criterion edition, critic Gene Seymour recalls his first viewing of Nothing but a Man, likening it to Italian neorealist films that present “a reflecting surface…where you [see] people and attitudes and events you could reasonably expect to find as soon as you walked out of the theater.” I felt the same way when I encountered it in the middle Sixties, but it was not a commercial hit—in fact, Roemer says, hardly anyone liked it until it was invited to the Venice Film Festival, which gave it the art-cinema equivalent of “a Good Housekeeping stamp.” Other hurdles arose when the American distributors balked at putting Black faces in the promotional materials and resisted booking it in theaters where Black moviegoers might show up and “scare away” white audiences. Such backwardness seems outrageous now, but in the Sixties it was a “prevailing attitude,” in Roemer’s words. Since then, the stock of Nothing but a Man has risen steadily.

Young was very active in subsequent years, with undervalued gems like Alambrista! (1977), Short Eyes (1977), One-Trick Pony (1980), and The Ballad of Gregario Cortez (1982) among his credits. Surprisingly, though, Roemer has completed only a handful of other features—the sensitive documentary Dying (1976), the overlong melodrama Vengeance Is Mine (1984), and the delicious comedy The Plot Against Harry (1989). “I was always writing screenplays,” he says on the Criterion disc, “and they met my existential need, but I couldn’t raise money for them, which is the only reason I didn’t make films. I would have loved to keep making them.” For both directors, Nothing but a Man is the picture that guarantees their lasting place in film history.

The steadily evolving nature of Black-white alliances underwent big changes with the advent of the Black Power and Black Panther movements in the later Sixties, and Black militants were understandably suspicious when white artists explored Black experiences in their works. Nothing but a Man passed at least one important test, though, described by Harris in a Criterion extra about the actors in the film. “I met Malcolm X in the street,” Harris says, “and he came up to me and introduced himself…and he told me he loved Nothing but a Man. I thanked him.” That’s quite an endorsement, and Harris adds that “every Black person I have met who has seen it has dug it, and they still do to this day. I guess it has become a classic.” It certainly has.

David Sterritt is a Cineaste contributing writer and author of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 4