Nothing But A Man

"I don't know anything at all about Negroes," Michael Roemer says in discussing his film--" except what I know about myself." Roemer and his colleague Robert Young address their film to individuals; it is not a manifesto or an appeal. The hero is a young Negro in the south, trying to be a man, a father to his child, a husband to his wife.

In this film the "Negro Problem" leaps out of the abstract and becomes the problems of knowing what's worth trying for, and when you've lost--your problem and my problem intensified and made cruelly explicit. Duff Anderson can't avoid putting himself to the test because he is always on the line, and he is kept there by the losers.

The white men Duff faces as an unskilled worker in the South subsist, vampire-like, on his dignity. They leave his buddies on the railroad gang little choice but to act our a dirty joke for them down in Shanty-own. They leave his father to fight a bottle in a hotel room, under the care of a younger woman whose love only reinforces his self-contempt.

All this comes across as real only because Duff Anderson (played by Ivan Dixon) is real. He finds the courage to marry a girl (Abbey Lincoln) who will never be indifferent to him, who asks him to accept forgiveness and innocent trust.

This movie was shot like a documentary--in real rooms, real cars, without mood music or discursive photographic comment. But only extremely skilled artists could have projected the tense intimacy between Duff and his wife, or Duff and his father, onto the screen. Young and Roemer didn't satisfy themselves with gestures or homey evocations.

The white men in this picture seem like stereotypes, and Duff's father-in-law like Uncle Tom himself, it's clearly because playing a stereo-type means playing it safe in the South. But this film isn't meant to be an argument or a case history. It is particular; it asks us to be Duff Anderson for 92 minutes. Where D. W. Griffith, for instance, appealed to the fears of a group, this movie appeals to the aspirations of individuals.

James Baldwin has said. "White Americans have never, in all their long history, been able to look on the Negro as a man like themselves." The makers of Nothing But A Man responded to Baldwin's implied challenge, and have made this response the premise rather than the conclusion of a delicate and substantial film.