Review: Nothing But a Man

Nothing But a Man earns its political heft, paradoxically, by dedicating itself to specifics of the characters’ day-to-day lives.

Nothing But a Man
Photo: Photofest

Although he only made two fiction features, filmmaker Michael Roemer benefited greatly from an early rediscovery in the 1990s, thanks to the fortuitous unearthing of a film he made in 1969, The Plot Against Harry, a wry, dry comedy starring Martin Priest. His other film, 1964’s Nothing But a Man, is often compared by critics to the slicker, middle-America-friendly films that Sidney Poitier was making during the same era. Almost without exception, film about the minority experience in ’60s America were smoothed-over paeans to “the triumph of the human spirit,” starring or co-starring whites whose presence is required as witnesses, arbiters, and the final, thankful beneficiaries of growth and change. Bland but well-meaning, films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and A Patch of Blue, seeking to instruct the white moviegoer by giving them a diagrammatic path to sociopolitical enlightenment, had a funny habit of discounting, even nullifying, the Black experience.

It can’t be overstated just how Nothing But a Man is militantly tone deaf to the Hollywood muzak of race relations. For starters, it’s distinguished by a script (by Roemer and Robert M. Young) that eschews superficial overtures to political relevance. With novelistic richness of detail, the saga of ne’er-do-well Duffy (Ivan Dixon) is not one of a secretly soulful misfit who might make something of himself if not for relentless efforts by The Man to keep him down.

The film certainly illustrates various, unhappy dealings that Duffy has with white locals, in and out of the workplace. But Nothing But a Man stubbornly refuses to help the audience figure out where deeply ingrained Southern American racism ends and Duffy’s obstinate, deeply unhappy self-regard begins. He crosses paths with discrimination and suffers; even white bosses who are kind to him are terrible in their own small way. But the real journey of Roemer’s film is that of Duffy looking into himself and not liking what he sees. Not one bit.

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The courtship between Duffy and Josie (Abbey Lincoln) is one of the most commonly cited aspects of the film’s appeal. They keep smiling during those first few dates. But while smiles are ever-present throughout Nothing But a Man’s first half, they’re never unqualified signifiers of someone’s happiness. Smiles sometimes serve as a genteel alibi for sexual desire. Or, when Duffy is with his blue-collar pals, they may mask envy, verbal sparring, or bitter recriminations that have no other outlet. The film’s first line is “Go to hell, Frankie,” delivered with a smile by Yaphet Kotto to Leonard Parker, the latter wearing a mischievous grin of his own.

When things begin to go wrong, Duffy sometimes smiles because it’s either that or break something. He travels to meet his father, Will (an astonishing Julius Harris), and, now face to face with the possibility that his lot in life is a matter of like-father-like-son genetic coding, the dimensions of his self-loathing increase exponentially. Things get quite a bit worse before Nothing But a Man allows that they might, in time, get better.

The film earns its political heft, paradoxically, by dedicating itself to specifics of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Roemer’s subdued style, a theater of “the real,” similar to Shirley Clarke’s The Connection or Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles, ensures that what Duffy goes through carries a string. It’s not so much the point-to-point journey his character undertakes, how what he sees and experiences changes him, as the fact that—true to film’s title—Duffy is finally, irreducibly a man, and his choices, whether they come from his hopes or his emotional sickness, are his own.

Score: 
 Cast: Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris, Gloria Foster, Martin Priest, Leonard Parker, Yaphet Kotto, Stanley Greene, Helen Lounck  Director: Michael Roemer  Screenwriter: Michael Roemer, Robert M. Young  Distributor: Artists Public Domain/Cinema Conservancy  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1964  Buy: Video

Jaime N. Christley

Jaime N. Christley's writing has also appeared in the Village Voice.

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