Blu-ray Review: Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man on the Criterion Collection

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.

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.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a new digital 4K master, the Criterion Collection’s transfer looks magnificent. The image detail is startling, with a sharpness and depth to the picture that enhances the emotional charge of the many close-ups employed throughout the film. Meanwhile, black levels are superb, grain is tight and even, and the high contrast lends nighttime shots and the darkly lit dance club scene an impressive clarity. The mono audio features crisp dialogue and the various Motown songs populating the soundtrack sound robust.

Extras

In a newly recorded interview, Michael Roemer discusses getting his start in documentary filmmaking and his collaborations with writer and cinematographer Robert M. Young. Roemer is modest and charming as he goes on to talk about how his experiences as a Jew drew him to the Jim Crow South, and how that aided him in directing Black actors in a story about the racial biases that Black people endure. Roemer appears again in a 2004 conversation with Young in which the two are very open about their friendship and approach to filmmaking. Rounding things out is a featurette including interviews with Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and Julius Harris, all of whom express their admiration for Roemer and talk about how their own experiences colored their performances, and a booklet including a tough and personal essay by critic Gene Seymour about the complicated dimensions of the film’s characters.

Overall

Michael Roemer’s film, a thorny and thrillingly alive reaction to the civil rights movement, gets a home video release that confirms its classic status.