Synopsis
Nothing But a Man has the violence, passion, tenderness of a Negro man and a girl in a smoldering southern town!
A proud black man and his school-teacher wife face discriminatory challenges in 1960s America.
Nothing But a Man
Cast
Ivan Dixon Abbey Lincoln Julius Harris Gloria Foster Martin Priest Leonard Parker Yaphet Kotto Stanley Greene Helen Lounck Helene Arrindell Walter Wilson Milton Williams Mel Stewart Marshal Tompkin Alfred Puryear Ed Rowan Tom Ligon William Jordan Dorothy Hall Gertrude Jeannette Gil Rogers Eugene Wood Jim Wright Arland Schubert Peter Carew Bill Riola Jay Brooks Robert Berger Jary Banks Show All…
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Alternative Titles
보잘 것 없는 남자, 只是个男人, 낫씽 벗 어 맨
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Premiere
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Italy
Venice Film Festival
Theatrical limited
27 Dec 1964
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USA
19 Mar 1965
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USA
Theatrical
08 Mar 2023
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France
Releases by Country
France
08 Mar 2023
- Theatrical
Italy
28 Aug 1964
- Premiere Venice Film Festival
USA
27 Dec 1964
- Theatrical limited
19 Mar 1965
- Theatrical limited
Popular reviews
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An remarkable and profoundly human tale that almost anyone can identify with. Initially drawing from his own experiences as a Jew in Nazi Germany, filmmaker Michael Roemer translated many of his own anxieties and concerns into those of the film's protagonist, Duff Anderson, a black man working as a railroad worker in the 1960s and struggling to maintain his dignity in a little town near Birmingham that is afflicted by bigotry and discrimination. As if that weren't enough, he must also come to terms with his troubled relationship with his own father, a drunk who abandoned and rejected him.
While the plot contains nothing we haven't seen before on film, the film succeeds where others in the genre have failed…
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I’m sure many viewers over the years have been surprised by the fact that Nothing But a Man not only wasn’t made by an African American but it was actually co-written, co-produced, and directed by a German-born Jewish filmmaker (Michael Roemer) who had little prior experience of the American South. But given how sincere, sensitive, yet unsentimental the film is in depicting black life in America during the early sixties, it almost makes sense. It's safe to say that Roemer's status as a relative outsider, one who was in a position to be as objective as possible, had something to do with how things turned out. Unlike most such films, it neither portrays its black characters as…
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"They may not use a knife, but they have other ways."
Movies about racism to this day rely on cliché conflicts and physically violent clashes often to communicate nothing more than "racism exists and it is bad" (or in the case of pablum like THE HELP, "racism existed and it was bad until good white people stopped the bad white people from being so gosh darn racist."). What NOTHING BUT A MAN reminds us is that the violence of institutionalized discrimination runs deeper than verbal altercations and physical attacks. The regular daily indignities suffered by men like Duff (Ivan Dixon showing a restraint not typical to performances of this era) as they attempt to earn a living, fall in love,…
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Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) is a mere laborer on the railroad section gang in early 1960’s Alabama. But he’s a remarkable man, we think, on the merits of his jolly, good-natured, courteous nature that disallows disingenuous elements to get him down. At least he remains that way in our eyes until we see his stubborn side. He will court the virtuous preacher’s daughter, Josie (Abbey Lincoln), even when he is warned he is not accomplished enough to uphold a commitment to truly take care of her. What comes to head, in the black & white neorealist drama Nothing But a Man, is a man falling apart at the seams after a series of troubles. He tries to form solidarity between his…
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☆"I ain't fit to live with no mo'."☆
One of the all-time underseen gems of American cinema, precisely because it's not one of those easy-going and reassuring movies for White audiences, Nothing But a Man is Michael Roemer's Venice Film Festival-winning triumph of a realistic and sensitive portrait of Black life. Featuring a knockout performance by Ivan Dixon -- and a soundtrack filled with Motown icons -- this independent drama is a masterwork of neorealist film, naturalistic yet gripping in its boldness.
Dixon plays railroad worker Duff Anderson, laying down track outside Birmingham, Alabama with his Black colleagues. The pay is pretty good, but the work is hard. Joining Frankie (Leonard Parker), Jocko (Yaphet Kotto), and other co-workers one night,…
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An exacting study of faces and behaviors, struggling to be human in a dehumanizingly racist world. The Black faces are front-and-center; there are actual racial stakes to such fastidious concentration, the opposite of John Huston's arbitrary anti-negative-space compositions. Here, we are witnessing a story firmly centered on the people—who give a face to the complex political, social, economic, and gender tensions that the film maturely and intelligently negotiates in a never-negligible background.
The world is not pat, nor does it come from an arbitrarily abstract place inside Michael Roemer's or Robert Young's heads; instead, we are concerned with interiors, a Motown song is always playing, lively church congregations, quietly unaffected dancing. The alcoholic father looks at his son like a…
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Michael Roemer’s groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the height of the civil rights movement, Nothing but a Man reveals the toll of systemic racism through its honest portrait of a southern Black railroad worker (Ivan Dixon) confronting the daily challenges of discrimination and economic precarity, as he attempts to settle down with his new wife (jazz great Abbey Lincoln) and track down his father (Julius Harris). Admired by Malcolm X and now recognized as a landmark of American cinema, this tender film grounds its social critique in characters of unforgettable complexity and truth.
Our edition arrives on February 20, 2024. To learn more or pre-order, visit Criterion.com.
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kind of incredible that berlin-born jewish director michael roemer wrote and directed this. the film isn't interested in making a statement, though, or even giving us a hero to sympathize. i think that's maybe too easy to ask for with a movie about a black family in 1960s america -- and the audible gasps at a *certain scene* proved that.
35mm. MoMA.
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Director Michael Roemer drew on his experiences in Nazi Germany to create this naked and neo-realist portrait of Black men and the struggle of creating a home in the American deep south. His outsider perspective seems to help him avoid the pitfalls of didacticism or white appeasement. He succeeds by showing process; simply laying out the systems in play that leave many Black men frustrated and broken. When love finally blooms and thrives inside this sharp machinery, it feels miraculous.
The entire cast is on point. Ivan Dixon's eyes reflect the struggle to maintain family relationships under white supremacy, even when all of his peers are in doubt. Abbey Lincoln, (the jazz singer who provided of the most colorful and… -
The title is simplistic enough in telling us what the film wants to achieve. Not 'trouble', not 'boy' but a man like anyone else. In a turbulent political period for America the front line battle for racial equality has been well documented, yet for the majority, the men and women unseen by the cameras, the daily grind of acceptance from others continued.
Which is exactly what we are shown here. A regular guy living a regular life, shown within the context of his own world, the small details that make up the larger picture for us all. What turns this into such a refreshingly honest look at being black in the 60s is the lack of patronisation or white guilt…
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If there is just one 1960s African American message drama that is completely necessary to watch it's Nothing But a Man. That's because Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young's film is interested, first and foremost, in the internal lives of its characters and not just the external forces of bigotry. We see Duff (Ivan Dixon) court Josie (Abbey Lincoln) and how his black coworkers react to it, long before we ever see them go on their first date. When the preacher's daughter accepts it's after enough interactions have shown that he'd be worth talking to. And as they drive up to the overlook and kiss for the first time in his car there's something just outside of our view that…
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