In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) works as a section hand on a railroad gang—which means long hours in the hot sun, doing physical labor that might seem more appropriate as punishment than employment, and an unsettled way of life since the work follows the rails. He lives in cramped conditions with the other Black workers, on a boxcar fitted out with bunks where the men play checkers (using bottle caps for pieces) and cards in their spare time, when they’re not frequenting the segregated bars of the small towns they pass through.
While some of Duff’s co-workers seem to have adapted to the limitations of their lives, Duff is immediately set apart by his quiet dignity and sense of compassion. He finds his way to a Black church, where he meets Josie Dawson (Abbey Lincoln), a schoolteacher and daughter of the minister leading the service. The attraction is immediate despite their coming from different worlds, but her father and stepmother (Stanley Green and Gertrude Jeannette) definitely don’t approve of Duff as son-in-law material.
The initial conflict in Michael Roemer’s debut feature Nothing But a Man is not between the Black and White worlds, since white people set the boundaries of Black lives but the film is not about them. Instead, it’s about two different sectors of the Black world: Josie’s world of the educated, righteous, and genteel, and Duff’s world of the hard-working but uneducated and sometimes crude. In one, people have settled for a limited set of choices that requires that they don’t contest the boundaries set by others, while in the other there’s more freedom but also more danger.
At first it seems that Josie’s parents got it right—Duff is looking for nothing more than a short-term sexual relationship and already has a son he’s doing virtually nothing to raise. While men can get away with promiscuity, women are ostracized for it (to say nothing of the possibility of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy) and such unfair judgments often fall on the women’s families as well, leading to a lifetime of punishment on one side but minimal risk on the other. There’s also the impermanence of Duff’s work, which follows the progress of the railway and doesn’t lend itself to settling in one place.
Duff defends his choice of occupation because the pay is better than anything else a Black man can get but gradually comes to realize that he’d rather have a stable family life than continue drifting through the fringes of the world, and that Josie is worth making some changes for. Not that things get easier once he becomes “respectable”: instead, there’s a new set of challenges and a life that remains bounded by racism.
Nothing But a Man grants dignity to Black lives, something rare in American films of the time. It often has the feel of a poetic documentary or a rural form of neorealism, with opening shots framing the railway workers heroically against the landscape and many beautiful but unfussy shots depicting the small-town world of Josie and her family. Location shooting may have been a necessity due to budget, but it also grounds the film in the lived reality of its characters. Cinematographer Robert M. Young (who also co-wrote the script and served as producer for this film) finds the beauty in these characters and their lives, at a time when that approach was decidedly not the norm in American cinema.
Among its other notable achievements, Nothing But a Man marked the film debut of Ester Rolle, who later played Florida Evans on the 1970s TV shows Maude and Good Times (and has 49 imdb credits as an actor), and Yaphet Kotto, whose 96 imdb credits include roles in Alien (1979), Midnight Run (1988), and Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993-1999). It was also Abby Lincoln’s first dramatic role, after appearing as herself (she was a well-known jazz singer) in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), and Ivan Dixon’s first leading role, after a series of supporting roles in films including Porgy and Bess (1959) and A Raisin in the Sun (1961). Today, Dixon is probably most familiar for his supporting role in the TV series Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1970).
American audiences were slow to appreciate Nothing But a Man, which perhaps hit too close to home in a nation experiencing a reckoning regarding the rights of Black people. For context, it was released one year after the March on Washington and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and in the same year as the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in which the bodies of Civil Rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were discovered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Europeans had fewer issues with the film’s themes: it was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Film Festival and won two other prizes, the San Giorgio Prize and the Award of the City of Venice. Although not a hit upon initial release in the United States, it gained greater appreciation after a 1993 revival and was added to the National Film Registry in 1964. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1209
Technical details: 91min; B&W; screen ratio 1.37:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc)
Extras: 2024 interview with Michael Roemer; 2004 interview (edited 2024) interview between filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young (co-screenwriter and co-producer on Nothing But a Man); 2004 interviews with actors Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and Julius Harris; illustrated booklet with essay by critic Gene Seymour.
Fun Fact: The soundtrack album of Nothing But a Man, featuring popular hits by contemporary artists and groups including Stevie Wonder, The Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, and Mary Wells, was the first soundtrack released by Motown Records.
Parting Thought: Nothing But a Man shows remarkable insight to the mental and emotional world of its lead character but has little interest in the inner lives of any of its female characters. Director/co-screenwriter Michael Roemer has spoken about how he used his experience as a child of the Holocaust (due to restrictions on Jews in Germany, his father became unable to support the family and Roemer was sent to England on a Kindertransport; he later emigrated to the United States). We all know the protagonist has to show change, but that doesn’t mean the other characters have to be entirely static. Why should Roemer’s experiences be able to find expression crossing racial lines but not do the same for gender?
