Michael Roemer (1964)

Now being released for the first time in this country, Nothing But a Man is an impressive combination of documentary and drama.  It has, at least in long retrospect, a mythical quality.  That might seem to imply self-conscious and perhaps self-important film-making but neither ‘self-‘ is in evidence here.  The movie is very well written, by the director Michael Roemer and Robert M Young.  The relationship of the protagonist Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) and Josie Dawson (Abbey Lincoln), the girl he marries, is exceptionally convincing at every stage.  The title may sound too resonantly humanistic but it’s fitting.  Roemer, who has made only one other feature film (The Plot Against Harry in 1969), describes the typical experience of a black working man in Alabama in the early 1960s, and the powerful and various forces of racism that he’s up against.  Duff, a rail worker at the start of the story, is both principled and bloody-minded enough to resist these forces and to make life more difficult for himself, and others, as a result.  His energy curdles into anger with Josie and physically violent treatment of her.  You understand why Josie’s patience and quiet understanding makes matters worse when Duff is boiling with fury and frustration.  Abbey Lincoln, best known as a jazz singer, has a calm which is very expressive – and which she makes you believe is something that Josie, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a preacher who’s ‘black on the outside, white on the inside’, has willed.  The different ways in which Duff and Josie express their excitement with each other during their courtship is beautiful.  So is the powerful but unstressed intimacy between them – both physical and emotional – at the start of their marriage.   When Duff loses a subsequent job as a building worker, he takes it out by teasing the couple’s cat in a nasty, scary way, and Josie tells him off.  Perhaps because (needless to say) I found the cat’s treatment upsetting, this seemed by the end of the film to be a strong foreshadowing of how Duff mistreats Josie later on.

Duff has a horror of turning into one of the black men he says he’s seen all his life – doing nothing or drinking themselves to death, as Duff’s own father Will (Julius Harris) does in the course of Nothing But a Man.  Duff is estranged both from Will and from his own son, from an earlier failed marriage.  It could be argued that this set-up gives Duff too conveniently ready-made an opportunity to learn the error of his, and his father’s, ways but the fragile hopefulness of the film’s ending is earned and genuinely moving.  There is a superb sequence in a bar in Birmingham, when Duff first goes to see his father and meets Lee (Gloria Foster), the woman who lives with and looks after Will.  The three of them stand side by side drinking at the bar and Will, through a very few scornfully aggressive words, shows how hopeless his life – and life with him – is.  He gets angry and goes off.  Duff and Lee are left defeated – she in shame, he in embarrassment – but, while Will is out of the picture, they dance.  Roemer then shows the trio back at the bar – in exactly the same positions as before but with something having changed.  During that dance, you feel Lee’s sense of the more hopeful life that might be shared with Duff.   You feel it again near the end of the film, after Will’s funeral, as Lee walks along the cemetery path with Duff until he heads off and Lee retraces her steps along the path.

In the first part of the Birmingham bar sequence, Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’ is playing on the jukebox.   This is the second time it’s been heard and the contrast with the emotional atmosphere of the first time, on Duff and Josie’s first date, is effective.   Nothing But a Man features a Motown soundtrack which is sometimes odd in the explicit aptness of the numbers:  Josie asks Duff to teach her how to box and their playful sparring is accompanied by ‘You Beat Me To the Punch’ by Mary Wells.  This is another marvellous scene:  the sparring is both a kind of foreplay and an anticipation of the violence that will scar the marriage later on.  Mary Wells’s voice is interrupted by a row from the porch of a middle-aged couple in the house opposite – the woman complaining how useless and idle the man is and putting the wind up Duff in the process.

The playing of Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln is incredibly truthful and most of the actors in supporting roles are good too – especially Gloria Foster and Yaphet Kotto (in a small part but he registers strongly).  Stanley Green as Josie’s father is too deliberate, though:  his acting belongs in a different, inferior kind of melodrama.  A sequence at the Reverend Dawson’s church is breathtaking, however:  it has compelling documentary interest yet the members of the congregation, although they appear only briefly, are intensely individual.  The vileness of the racist whites is insistent but not, I think, overdone.   Nothing But a Man depicts a society which has gone in terms of racist structures.  To that extent, it feels like an important historical record – but you’re always aware, watching the film, that not enough has changed in terms of the socio-economic realities of life for many African-Americans and the potential and actual consequences of those realities.  There are great details like the art work on the walls of Duff and Josie’s home – a print of a Van Gogh self-portrait beside paintings by kids in Josie’s class.  It’s amazing to think this film was made – by a white man – at the same time as clumsily worthy Hollywood movies about racial issues.

3 October 2013