Nothing but a Man: What We Can See in Ourselves

Yet however their bond deepens, Duff and Josie’s resolve to live as they wish will be tested, not just by racism and economic barriers but by the loose ends in Duff’s past life in Birmingham, Alabama. They include a young son, born out of wedlock and now living in a crowded apartment in the care of a woman who is not his mother. (Though Duff at one point says the boy is not his, he checks on his well-being anyway, and Josie considers them father and son.) There is also Duff’s volatile, alcoholic father, Will, who’s abusive and all but indifferent to his own son and to his melancholy, hard-bitten girlfriend, Lee.

Once Duff and Josie marry, Duff must give up section-gang work. Adjusting to a more rooted life is difficult for him. With Josie pregnant, the pressure for work grows, and after his firing from a local sawmill for suspected union organizing, Duff finds a position at a white-owned gas station, where his refusal to kowtow to white customers leads to yet another dismissal. Duff’s shame and self-loathing grow to the point that he takes it out on Josie by shoving her to the floor of their home. The next day, he leaves, promising to send for Josie when he “gets set.” “I don’t think that’ll happen,” she says bitterly. “You’ll be better off without me,” he says. “I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynching. Maybe they don’t use a knife on you. But they got other ways.” Nonetheless, reencountering his father at the end of his tether motivates Duff to return home with his son, whom Josie had been urging him to adopt, and start over. “It’s going to be all right,” he tells Josie. “I feel so free inside.” It’s a measure of the care and thought put into Nothing but a Man by all concerned that nothing about its ending feels forced or unearned.

Before coming to the U.S., and before he and Young both embarked on making socially engaged and intimately observed cinema, Roemer was shaped profoundly by his experiences before and during World War II. “I’m white, German, and a Jew,” he told me in a 1993 interview about the making of his first feature. “I grew up and watched some of the humiliations my father went through under the Nazis and what he had to endure. You didn’t have to be a southern Black man to endure these things.” After Roemer’s well-to-do Berlin family had been stripped of their rights, property, and means of employment before the war, he was sent to England as one of about ten thousand Jewish children rescued by the Kindertransport. Eventually, he graduated from Harvard the same year as Young.

In 1962, Roemer and Young were independent filmmakers making a documentary about a Sicilian slum, Cortile Cascino, for the NBC White Paper television series. The network eventually refused to air the film. At that point, Young—who had spent time in the American South while making the civil rights film Sit-In, also for NBC—suggested to Roemer that they travel there together, to see what stories they could find. In spending time in Black neighborhoods below the Mason-Dixon Line and interviewing their residents, Roemer was able to identify and imagine into existence the elements of Duff Anderson’s story as well as the lives of those around him.

Nothing but a Man was shot over twelve weeks in 1963, on a $230,000 budget, mostly in rural southern New Jersey, around Cape May and Atlantic City, despite its story being set in Alabama. (“To engage in interracial activity of any kind in the South of that time would have been inviting suicide,” Roemer recalled.) A key contribution to the movie’s up-to-the-minute atmosphere was its all-Motown soundtrack, including such hits as “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” by the Miracles, and “You Beat Me to the Punch,” by Mary Wells. (Roemer acquired the rights to the music for $5,000; Motown later released the soundtrack on LP.) The clean, pseudo-documentary texture of Young’s black-and-white cinematography also enhances its street-level realism and, more important, its sense of intimacy, especially between its two magnetic leads.

The Harlem-born Dixon, who made his Broadway debut seven years before Nothing but a Man in William Saroyan’s play The Cave Dwellers, gained greater attention in the 1959 production of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama A Raisin in the Sun as the courtly Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai. His screen career accelerated after Nothing but a Man, with a prominent role in 1965’s A Patch of Blue, alongside his Raisin in the Sun costar Sidney Poitier. That same year, he began the part for which he likely remains best known: Staff Sergeant James Kinchloe in the World War II sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965–70). The series gave Dixon the opportunity to show his skill at deadpan comedy. But even with an expanding curriculum vitae in the 1960s, Dixon rarely had the chance to display the subtle gifts and modulated intensity he’d put forth as Duff Anderson. By the seventies, most of Dixon’s energies had shifted to directing, beginning with the 1972 crime thriller Trouble Man and 1973’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a more acerbic and thus controversial film whose anti-CIA theme was considered radioactive enough for Dixon to seek funding from Black investors to get it made and distributed. The movie has since achieved retroactive stature as a cult classic.

By the time Abbey Lincoln made her movie debut in Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), she was already known in jazz circles as a vocalist with an elemental, serrated singing style akin to Billie Holiday’s. Lincoln, who in the 1960s became an avatar of social activism and Black nationalism, continued her acting career somewhat sporadically after Nothing but a Man, with a Golden Globe–nominated romantic-lead turn with Poitier in For Love of Ivy (1968) and a handful of television credits. After a relative lull in the 1970s and 1980s, Lincoln enjoyed a spectacular late-career renaissance with a series of critically acclaimed albums, beginning with 1990’s The World Is Falling Down and continuing through 2007’s Abbey Sings Abbey. In both her live jazz performances and her relatively few on-camera roles, Lincoln exhibited an intense, leonine energy, tightly—and unusually—contained for her characterization of Josie, whose rangy, seemingly languid graces sheathe a sense of personal autonomy she would love to share with, if not coax from, Duff.

The rest of the casting is just as striking. Much of that is due to the introductions to actors given Roemer and Young by Charles Gordone, then a prominent Black actor and director in New York City, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970 for No Place to Be Somebody. Among Nothing but a Man’s claims to historic significance was providing the first movie roles for both Yaphet Kotto and Julius Harris, whose adept portrayals of complex, embittered men continue to burn through the screen. The luminous Gloria Foster is another of the film’s true glories: her Lee is a multilayered evocation of a sad, ruefully honest woman impervious to illusion. As with many African American actors, Foster’s gifts remained relatively underappreciated, though she found steady work in theater and on television. Her best-known big-screen work was in the first two installments of The Matrix trilogy as the Oracle, the kindly, chain-smoking, clairvoyant computer program. She died while filming the second installment, The Matrix Reloaded, released in 2003.

Ten years before that, Nothing but a Man had gained a second life in a nationwide revival at select art houses. Upon its original premiere, the movie was enthusiastically received at the Venice, London, and New York Film Festivals. But distributors back then were convinced that the film had little chance of commercial success. Roger Ebert, writing about the aforementioned revival, speculated that the film’s “spotty” initial distribution was due to its avoidance of the “easy liberal pieties of its period in an attempt to reassure white audiences.”

Commercial hang-ups also accompanied the passage of Roemer and Young’s second low-budget collaboration, The Plot Against Harry, a hip, deadpan farce about a small-time mobster named Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest, who in Nothing but a Man plays a white mill worker who harasses Duff). Shot in 1969, the film was screened for one week in Seattle in 1971 and then vanished until 1989, when Roemer overheard a technician laughing at the film while it was being transferred to VHS. In 1990, Harry found critical acclaim and a cult reputation in general release. By then, Young was well into his own career directing narrative films, including the strikingly naturalistic ¡Alambrista! and Short Eyes (both 1977).

The revival of Nothing but a Man confirmed its classic status amid a resurgence, at the hinge of the 1990s, of both independent and African American filmmaking. In an interview connected with that revival, I’d asked Dixon why he thought it was that the film then still stood almost alone in its straightforward and complex depiction of African American life and love, even with increasing opportunities for Black directors. “Even among Black directors—and I’m not saying they haven’t done good work—there is more concern with making movies that make money, that titillate, and get people to the box office . . . immédiatement!” he said. “And I think that is a kind of horror of Black American life, that we have accepted that struggle for the dollar instead of struggling for humanity. For honor.” Even today, with still greater opportunities for Black directors, the film stands out for its realism, nuance, and intensity.

As Dixon spoke, I remembered once again first seeing Nothing but a Man. It’s probably how Italian neorealism struck those both in Europe and beyond when it first appeared in the 1940s: a reflecting surface, of sorts, where you saw people and attitudes and events you could reasonably expect to find as soon as you walked out of the theater. Movies change. The jolts of recognition endure.