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NOTHING BUT A MAN

Michael Roemer United States, 1964
Episodic in structure and told in smartly economical fashion (marvel at the way Roemer coolly dispatches wedding and funeral scenes in three brusquely unsentimental shots each), Nothing But a Man is undeniably gritty in tone, but compassionate and attuned to the complexities of everyday life. There is plenty of earthy humour in the interactions between Duff and his co-workers... and a crackling chemistry between Dixon and Lincoln which lifts the film into a gorgeously sensual realm.
September 26, 2013
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The Boston Phoenix
Shot and portrayed with the same restraint that its protagonist (Ivan Dixon) uses when confronting Alabama crackers, Roemer's film is an understated heartbreaker whose age and authentic period tang make it resonate like a piece of history... Nothing but a Man thrives when its actors are in close quarters, making the inexorable descent into family-decimating rage and desperation all the more personal and affecting.
January 8, 2013
Front antecedent SALT OF THE EARTH, NOTHING BUT A MAN has the rare distinction of treating racial discrimination, gender equality, and labor rights as irreducibly linked. Most bracingly, NOTHING BUT A MAN possesses such an abiding and deep sense of righteousness that it never wastes our time by presenting compromise or gradualism as morally-defensible options.
December 21, 2012
The resolutions of these intimate and emotional films [Middle of Nowhere and Nothing But a Man] may be different, but both are testaments to characters who are nothing but humans struggling to live—and we witness it, in close-up, in their faces.
December 1, 2012
ONE OF THE GREAT American independent films and one of the great films about how racism defines African American masculinity, Nothing But a Man (1964) is as convincing and emotionally agonizing as it was when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival in 1964... What is most powerful about the script and Dixon's tight-lipped performance is that it makes us aware that Duff's rage cuts two ways. His fury is directed both at the racist power structure and at himself for being less than a man.
November 9, 2012
Nothing But a Man 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 something like Shirley Clarke's The Connection or Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, ensures that what Duffy goes through really carries a string.
November 9, 2012
Duff projects a tense, hard-edged pragmatism, figuring a way to tolerate the uneasy, uneven truces between man and woman, middle and working class, white and black, without selling his essential self. Nothing but a Man—the title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.
November 7, 2012
The ending—an emotional embrace that nearly rivals Pickpocket's climactic clench—wouldn't be nearly as moving without the restraint, and it's that determination to portray the era's inequality without excessive melodramatics that makes the film more than a time capsule.
November 5, 2012
The subtly burnished, calmly monumental images put the action in a virtual 3-D relief that lends the magnificent cast (mainly of black actors) an intense physical presence, and the soundtrack captures the life-worn grain of their voices with a frank intimacy that pulls viewers up close to the action.
October 1, 2012
A sincere, intelligent, and effectively acted independent feature from 1964... Directed by the able Michael Roemer (who made The Plot Against Harry five years later) from a script written in collaboration with Robert Young, who served as cinematographer...
June 3, 1993