Director: Michael Roemer | USA | Fiction | 1964 | 95 mins
Film source: Cinedigm
Sponsors: Kate and Bill Schubart
Perhaps the best movie ever made about the African-American experience during the Civil Rights era, Nothing But a Man remains just as powerful and relevant today, 50 years after its release. Starring Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson, a fiercely proud workingman who refuses to bow to the racism of the Jim Crow South, and jazz singer Abbey Lincoln (in her film debut), as a shy schoolteacher whose quiet dignity makes Duff reconsider his drifter’s lifestyle, Nothing But a Man eschews the grandiose moralizing of other “message” films of the period to tell a simple and universal story of perseverance in the face of prejudice. Eloquently directed by Michael Roemer (who had experienced a different form of prejudice as a Jewish youth in Nazi-era Germany) and co-written and lensed by Robert M. Young (who would go on to direct the definitive illegal immigration drama ¡Alambrista!), Nothing But a Man is a true landmark of independent filmmaking.