#46 — Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964)
It’s not as if precarious social topics weren’t tackled in American cinema prior to the nineteen-sixties, but such efforts clearly benefited from both the new, bracing levels of frankness creeping into the filmmaking vernacular and the emergence of a stronger independent voice supported by the still fledgling film festival community. In fact, it was the second staging of the New York Film Festival where Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man had one of its earliest screenings. The film follows a black man named Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) as he tries to make a place for himself in the world. He doesn’t have grand ambitions, wanting little more than a modest life that includes being accorded the same level of respect that any reasonable person might hope for. But this Alabama, and this is the early sixties. The color of his skin impacts his ability to be the man he wants to be, to live the life he desires.

There were other directors who approached this sort of material around the same time, but Roemer brought a concentrated understatement to it that gives Nothing But a Man and enduring authenticity. A sort of ancestor to Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Roemer’s film has an quiet observational quality that forgoes presumption, quite likely a result of the unique approach taken in the creative process. Roemer and his co-screenwriter, Robert E. Johnson, took a tour of the American South, talking to as many black families as they could. As a Jew who was transported out of Nazi Germany on the Kindertransports at the age of eleven, Roemer already felt a deep empathy with the offhand and constant oppression that Southern blacks endured, a feeling that was only compounded when his own Jewishness wasn’t exactly greeted warmly either. That kinship lends a clear intimacy to the finished product, a reservoir of understanding that carries the film.

Dixon is incredibly powerful in the leading role, ably demonstrating the ways that exhausting mental and spiritual abuse can eventually lead to self-perpetuated defeat and misery. The rejection of society is so complete that even a proud, resolute man like Duff can start to see nothing but insurmountable walls before him. With intricate and caring drama, the film shows the gradually slide a person can take into a personal oblivion, which allows for the film to stress the need for perseverance and the value of determination. It blessedly never becomes didactic, hammering home its points in the manner of the Stanley Kramer social dramas that were the dominant liberal Hollywood voice of the era. Instead, it always keeps its arguments implicit, grounded deeply in the experience of the characters onscreen. It is not a lesson, it’s a life. And only through respecting that can the real education–and corresponding change–take place.