Here's an American masterwork !!!

Just saw this really amazing little film called “NOTHING BUT A MAN”! I remember seeing this along time ago in the mid 80’s on one of the Black History Months, but watching it on DVD last night again… just left me speechless. Much thanks to NEW VIDEO for seeking this gem out and giving it a new lease on life on DVD. BRAVO!!!

Here's an American masterwork that captures the temper of black consciousness in the south just prior to the mass upheavals of the early '60s.

Long before Scorsese made "Mean Streets" and "Raging Bull," this director Michael Roemer had made this great film. No other film that I know of dramatizes so profoundly the plight of a man whose basic human pride will not be compromised under any circumstances.

Ivan Dixon as Duff gives one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema and Abbey Lincoln as Josie, the preacher's daughter he tries to settle down with, is just about perfect in control of nuance. These characters are extraordinary "ordinary" people, truly heroic; yet the tragedy that stalks them may or may not be hopeless at this time in history, due to an apparent shift in black consciousness, a general "fed-up-with-it-all" attitude that needs men like Duff to inspire itself.

The entire cast is uniformly excellent and there are too many brilliant scenes to mention here. The film seems cut directly from the fabric of real life in a sort of semi-documentary Rossellini-like style. "Little Fugitive" and "Medium Cool" are the only other pre-70s American films I've seen that feel this real and authentic.

In terms of the subtlety with which racial politics and power relations are exposed through simple gestures and concrete acts rather than rhetoric and melodrama, Martin Ritt's "Sounder" and Paul Schrader's "Blue Collar" are the only films I've seen that come close. Charles Burnett's low-budget independent masterpiece "Killer of Sheep," also comes to mind.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned here with this little GEM, especially by directors like Spike Lee, who I'm sure has seen this movie, and who has made decent films in the past (Do the Right Thing, She's gotta have it), but now wastes his time making laughable, "really hardcore," "I want to transcend puny barriers with overloads of style" cartoons like "Summer of Sam." "Nothing but a Man" is light years away from the two-dimensional nonsense they call "realism" these days.

From the era when American films almost never put black characters at the center of a movie, Nothing but a Man stands like a beacon of intelligence and sympathy. Two Jewish white men, director Michael Roemer and cinematographer Robert M. Young, who wrote the script after traveling through the South and immersing themselves in African American life, shot it in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The film is not condescending or idealizing in its approach; some of the problems of the characters are outside the reality of racism. Aside from its status as a landmark social-issue film, it is good to recognize, 40 years on, what a terrific piece of filmmaking this is, with fine acting (Yaphet Kotto and Gloria Foster are in the cast), lucid dialogue, and a fresh feeling for everyday domestic life.