The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man [Illustrated] 9780253018441, 0253018447

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Nothing But a Man and the Question of Black Film
FILMMAKERS’ STATEMENTS
Michael Roemer
Robert Young
ESSAYS
Demanding Dignity: Nothing But a Man
Nothing But a Man
The Derailed Romance in Nothing But a Man
Can’t Stay, Can’t Go: What Is History to a Cinematic Imagination?
Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man
INTERVIEWS
Historicity and Possibility in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Khalil Muhammad
Cinematic Principles and Practice at Work in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Robert Young
SCREENPLAY
Nothing But a Man
PRESS KIT from Cinema V Distributing (1965)
FILMOGRAPHIES
Michael Roemer
Robert M. Young
Select Bibliography
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspor a

The Politics & Poetics of

Black Film Nothing But a Man

Edited by David C. Wall & Michael T. Martin

Indiana University Pr ess Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of India na Universit y Pr ess Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2015 by Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, A NSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The politics and poetics of black film : Nothing but a man / edited by David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin. pages cm. – (Studies in the cinema of the black diaspora) Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-0-253-01844-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-01850-2 (ebook) – ISBN 978-0-253-01837-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Nothing but a man (Motion picture) 2. Race relations in motion pictures. 3. African Americans in motion pictures. I. Wall, David C., editor. II. Martin, Michael T., editor. PN1997.N5678P85 2015 791.43’72 – dc23 2015017067 1 2 3 4 5  20 19 18 17 16 15

To our Beloved mothers

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Contents

· Acknowledgments ix ·  Introduction: Nothing But a Man and the Question of Black Film  ·   David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin 1 Filmmakers’ Statements

· Michael Roemer 25

· Robert Young 40 Essays

· Demanding Dignity: Nothing But a Man  ·   Bruce Dick and Mark Vogel 55

· Nothing But a Man  ·   Thomas Cripps 72 ·  The Derailed Romance in Nothing But a Man  ·   Karen Bowdre 82

· C  an’t Stay, Can’t Go: What Is History to a Cinematic Imagination?  ·   Terri Francis 101



· Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man  ·   Judith E. Smith 114

Interviews

· Historicity and Possibility in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Khalil Muhammad  ·   Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall 143



· Cinematic Principles and Practice at Work in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Robert Young  ·   Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall 171

Scr eenplay · Nothing But a Man  203

Pr ess Kit



· from Cinema V Distributing (1965) 269



Filmogr aphies



· Michael Roemer 279

· Robert M. Young 281



· Select Bibliography 285



· Contributors 287



· Index  291

Acknowledgments

As is always the case with a project such as this, ther e are many thanks to be made to those without whom it would not have come to fruition. We must acknowledge the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) at Indiana University, Bloomington, which hosted the Cinematic Representations of Racial Conflict in Real Time symposium in the spring of 2010 from which this book, as well as the series Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora of which it is the first volume, derives. Equal thanks must go to Indiana University for their awarding of a New Frontiers grant to the BFC/A without which the symposium itself would not have been possible. As we have gone through the process of putting this volume together, many people have committed their time and energy in countless ways in an effort to ensure the quality and relevance of the contributions herein. This includes those anonymous external reviewers whose supportive comments encouraged us to continue with the project. At Indiana University Press, Robert Sloan and David Miller have given us endless support and advice as they have shepherded the manuscript through to publication. Their patience with the progress of the book (as well as us!) has been exemplary. This is equally true of copy editor Karen Hallman who has unfailingly offered both sage advice and sound direction whenever called upon. Dr. Alexa Sand, Dr. Christopher Scheer, Dr. Rachel Middleman, and Dr. Laura Gelfand offered much constructive and productive criticism of our introduction in its early stages and their sharp eyes and wise counsel are much appreciated. Thanks must go also to Adele Stephenson whose compelling artwork is to be found on the cover. Lastly, our greatest thanks must go to the ix

x

Acknowledgments

filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert Young for their unceasing efforts on behalf of the project. Their personal contributions give unique insight into one of the most significant independent films of the period thus adding immeasurably to the contributions of the other commentators and contributors. It would be a much lesser volume indeed without their work and involvement. They have also been unfailingly kind and supportive in their conversations and support throughout the process and endlessly willing to allow us to use images and materials it would have been otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to acquire. We hope that this book in however small a way will serve as a lasting testament to their work.

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

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Introduction: Nothing But a Man and the Question of Black Film David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin The question of what pr ecisely constitutes black film is a vexing one. Even the way the question is worded can affect how we might frame our considerations and come to our conclusions. “What is black film?” is, after all, a very different question to “what is a black film?” In considering this critically important issue, it might seem odd to turn to the work of two white filmmakers but, in many ways, a “black film” made by whites serves as a peculiarly productive point of departure. In view of that, this volume concentrates on a classic of American independent cinema, Michael Roemer and Robert Young’s Nothing But a Man (1964). It is an extraordinary film that is, at one and the same time, a romantic melodrama, a neorealist expression of the class struggle, a radical examination of racial subjectivity, a celebration of the nuclear family, and a dissertation on black masculinity. It reveals a complicated concatenation of racial and cultural discourses that weave through the film and swirl around its production, dissemination, and consumption. That a category such as “black film” should exist is itself testament to the volatility of those systems of knowledge that structure American discourses of race. From its earliest inception, American film was implicitly and explicitly raced as white. The repertoire of black caricatures, stereotypes, and distortions that cavorted across the landscape of nineteenth-century American culture made an almost seamless transition from stage and page to celluloid. One of the earliest narrative black representations on screen was a twelve-minute version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) made by Edwin S. Porter, and it should come as no surprise that the black characters were all played by white actors in blackface. 1

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

Comic shorts were especially popular and catalogs of available films were replete with titles such as Watermelon Contest, A Nigger in the Woodpile, Prize Fight in Coon Town, and The Gator and the Pickaninny.1 Thus, reflecting and reinforcing the extant vectors of racial representation, early film played a profoundly important role in articulating a normative whiteness to a mass audience. Though it was clearly already a ubiquitous feature of early silent film, the ineluctable linkage between the language of American race and the language of American cinema was only fully forged in D. W. Griffith’s epic Birth of a Nation (1915) where, as James Snead has it, “film form and racism coalesce into myth.”2 In short, as it established itself as a formalized system of economic and artistic production, Hollywood became institutionalized as white. Any black presence was relatively minor and mostly confined to acting in a service capacity within the industry or by performing those roles – servant, mammy, laborer, comic relief, etc. – that cemented a cinematic grammar of blackness designed to validate the extracinematic hierarchy of race for white audiences. One of the consequences of white Hollywood’s refusal to allow black Americans to play any significant part in the nascent film industry was the development of a parallel industry of “race” movies, produced specifically for black cinema-goers and featuring productions with largely all-black casts and frequently “black-themed” stories. Though Birth of a Nation became the cinematic Ur-text to which black film had to respond, African American filmmakers had been working since the earliest days of cinema, producing movies that covered the full spectrum of black social experience. Film companies came and went, sometimes making only a single feature before disappearing, while others, such as the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and the Foster Photoplay Company proved more durable. Oscar Micheaux, one of the most well-known and prolific black filmmakers of the early period, managed to sustain a career – albeit frequently patchy at best – from the silent days through the emergence of sound and into the 1940s. Though the aesthetic quality of race movies was both derided because of, and explained away by, a lack of time, resources, and money, it is worth bearing in mind Clyde Taylor’s argument in respect of contemporary black film that “the triumphs of independent cinema must

Introduction

3

be appreciated within their ‘imperfections,’ even because of them, as they stand opposed to the ‘perfections’ of Hollywood.”3 Not least of these “perfections” imagined by Hollywood was that of an untrammeled and inviolable whiteness. Responding to the paucity and nature of the roles offered to black actors in Hollywood, race movies allowed African American performers to play parts routinely denied them in mainstream cinema. And it needs to be stated that race films were also able to tackle issues that Hollywood would have deemed unacceptable. Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), for instance, was a deliberate response to Birth of a Nation and, through its mix of melodrama and romance, served as a powerful critique of racial prejudice.4 Frank Perigini’s The Scar of Shame (1927) is a similarly compelling examination of the politics of skin color within the African American community. Accepting Marc Ferro’s definition of these wholly independent productions as “the first historical counterfilm in American cinema”5 would seem to offer us a straightforward point of departure for a definition of black film. Yet the history of these movies is complicated by the fact that so many of them were either financed by white companies (sometimes under the guise of black ownership) or produced and directed by whites who simply saw the African American market as a way of making money. There were also those white filmmakers, such as David Starkman and Richard E. Norman, whose commitment to race films was charged (at least in part) with a broader political commitment to antiracism. This raises some complicated issues all of which are key to our understanding of Nothing But a Man. First, it underscores the profound importance of the material conditions of a film’s production and the direct affect they have on both distribution and definition. Second, those material conditions are structured by a set of power relations outside the text that are themselves deeply embedded in broader ideological discourses. Third, it demands that we carefully consider the cultural labor undertaken by the text as it plays its part in the social and cinematic constitution of the spectator/subject. After all, the filmic text is always situated culturally. This is not only an issue of context but of understanding the ways in which those registers of meaning demarcate lines of authority and suasion that structure the visual and discursive economies of race. No image is innocent (notwithstanding the implicit

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

claims of whiteness to the contrary) and cinematic images of blackness carry a powerful charge. Fourth, while the race of those involved in a film’s production does not necessarily determine how that text might be defined, the power relations that exist outside the text have to be acknowledged and so, in that sense, we cannot ignore the race of the filmmakers. Filmmakers are historically situated and culturally constructed just as their films are. This not only emphasizes the significance of race but also points to its febrile unreliability as an all-encompassing category of explanation. Fifth, American film exists within a system of knowledge that is shaped by ideologies of race and cannot be understood outside of its visual grammar. Regardless of the racial subjectivity of the filmmaker, the text might reinforce the dominant structures of race, or engage, contest, and problematize those cinematic and extracinematic codes. It may sometimes do both things simultaneously. In Redefining Black Film, Mark Reid insists on a clear distinction between what he calls “black commercial” film and “black independent” film. He argues that even with a significant black involvement in their production, commercial movies simply do not allow for “a black perspective that acknowledges differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”6 He defines black independent film, by contrast, as that which “focuses on the black community and is written, directed, produced and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Africa.”7 In indicating that a black commercial presence does not sui generis confer a black perspective, Reid seems to highlight the nonutility of any kind of essentialist identity politics. In view of this, then, his definition of independent film seems oddly reductive. Certainly in the context of American cinema, it is hard to conceive of any film – commercial or independent – that could possibly be in its entirety “written, directed, produced and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Africa.” This proscriptive definition would exclude almost every classic of black American film including Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), and, indeed, Spike Lee’s entire oeuvre. It would also suggest that a commercial film such as Lee’s Malcolm X, for example, contained no possibility of “a black perspective that acknowledges differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”

Introduction

5

A definition of black film that unequivocally demands black directors and/or producers would render films such as John Sayles’s Brother from Another Planet (1984) and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) essentially meaningless. Its coherence as a conceptual framework would further collapse in the face of having to then accept an Ernest Dickerson–directed episode of Law and Order, for instance, as an example of black film to sit alongside Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979) or Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). In Black Film as Genre, Thomas Cripps suggests that identity analysis is in effect a zero sum game that would ultimately leave us to “argue forever over who has the right to dance on the head of a pin.”8 And yet he has a similarly reductive definition of black film: “those motion pictures made for theater distribution that have a black producer, director, and writer, or black performers,” though he does concede that on occasion the category must embrace “film produced by white filmmakers whose work attracted the attention, if not always the unconditional praise, of black moviegoers and critics.”9 Mark Reid elsewhere offers a slightly more nuanced definition in distinguishing between “African American film . . . directed, written, or co-written by members of this community” and “black-oriented film” made up of “black-focused films whose directors and screen writers are nonblack.”10 This notion of “black-oriented film” appears to allow us space to imagine a text that thoughtfully attempts to present itself from and through a black perspective regardless of the racial subjectivity of the filmmaker. But reserved as it is only for “nonblack” filmmakers, this categorization remains indebted to racial subjectivity as the determinant factor. In Black Film as Signifying Practice, Gladstone Yearwood points out the “inadequacy of indexical theories as an acceptable means of defining black film” precisely because it would dismiss “a film by a white director such as Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man.”11 He continues, “what is most important about the film is the film itself. The operators (producer, director and writer) are properly part of the pre-text, in that the text is a product of their work and they exist prior to the text. While their contribution to the making of the text is undeniable they – in and of themselves – cannot fully define the film they produce.” Tommy Lott

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

goes further in asserting that, “biological criteria are neither necessary nor sufficient for the application of the concept of black cinema” because of the “ambivalence engendered by having to place biological over cultural criteria in deciding questions of black identity.”12 Rather, Lott is concerned with what he calls the “complexity of meanings” attached to the politics of race and their iterations in film. Black film is not an inviolate form of nature and in considering the multiple ways in which it might be constructed, we must allow for those constantly moving and dynamic iterations to be both critically confirmed and contested. Situated within what Elia Shohat and Robert Stam refer to as an “orchestration of ideological discourses”13 film forms part of an intellectual economy of race that inevitably shapes – and is shaped by – its on-screen significations. It is, then, precisely because of the film’s cultural situatedness that Young and Roemer’s whiteness has to be acknowledged in any discussion or consideration of Nothing But a Man, but it is that same situatedness that also allows the film to constitute a significant contribution to black American cinema notwithstanding the racial identity of the filmmakers themselves. Shot in black and white with no extradiegetic soundtrack and dealing with the harsh realities of black working-class life in the Deep South, Nothing But a Man was, as Robert Young acknowledges in his narrative of the film’s production, heavily influenced by the work of Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rosselini. The film’s neorealist sensibility speaks to its origins in an award-winning documentary called Sit-In that Young made for NBC in 1960. That Nothing should have its origins in documentary is not insignificant, for this too inescapably implicates its constructions of race in wider representational strategies that consistently link blackness with poverty and privation. In the context of American culture, even the most apparently innocent black image is freighted with a history of representation that has ubiquitously offered a pathologized black subject as the object of scopophilic pleasure for the white spectator. In this sense, then, even the most well-meaning progressive and liberal representation can never fully escape the seductive entreaties offered the white gaze by the spectacle of the damaged black body. Similarly, even the most concerted and sincere corrective to stereotypes may fail to acknowledge

Introduction

7

a broader system of discourses that privileges whiteness as a structural element of its own existence. However, while it is important to acknowledge these issues it is also critically important to avoid the kind of relativism that sees no categorical distinctions between sets of representations or, indeed, to fall backward into the quagmire of identity politics. The fact that all visual representation is a process of construction such that the broader consequences of race must always be kept in mind, should actually strengthen the impetus to make sense of the qualitative distinctions between responsible efforts to critically engage with the dominant structuring discourses of race and those efforts that seek to revalidate the privileges of whiteness. Clearly there is a distinction to be made, for instance, between the serious attempt to understand history in a documentary series such as Eyes on the Prize (1987) and the egregious misrepresentations of history in a film such as Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) (though neither would match Reid’s definition of black film.) We would argue that Nothing But a Man is very much located with the former. It is an intervention in the politics of race as they existed in the early 1960s and a deliberate attempt to speak to the most urgent and significant issue of its moment. There is no mistaking the liberal politics of the filmmakers or indeed the film itself. That the film’s representation of race is problematized by its own “progressive whiteness” so to speak is evidence of the multivalence of the text. Subsuming a clearly articulated political critique within a domestic narrative allows the film to articulate a politics of race that is implicit in character and action without ever becoming hectoring or didactic. Nothing But a Man attempts to resolve its tensions by emphasizing the expressive and affective fundamentals of narrative and character thus representing the human experience of characters who are black rather than laying a claim to representing the “black experience.” As a number of the pieces in this collection point out, Nothing But a Man is clearly about race and civil rights and yet makes no allusion or reference to the civil rights movement. The volatile context of racial crisis is made profoundly significant by a textual absence that can never be complete. For, though the film does not explicitly situate the characters historically, contemporary audiences would have been acutely aware of

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

the immediate political context for the film’s excoriating indictment of white prejudice. In this way we see that meaning is brought to the cinematic text as well as riven from it and the complex relationship between the racial subject and the material conditions of the film’s production is echoed in the processes of its consumption. Yearwood’s notion of the “pre-text” points us toward the ways in which the text exists independently of its producers. As a consequence of this independence, the meaning of the text is not reliant upon, or determined by, its producers but by a negotiated settlement of meaning established through the film’s signifying codes as they are dialogically encountered by the spectator/ viewer. As Stephen Heath puts it, “meaning is not just constructed ‘in’ the particular film, meanings circulate between social formation, spectator and film; a film is a series of acts of meaning, the spectator is there in a multiplicity of times.”14 As film is “not only the producer of meaning but also the site and recipient of meanings projected back onto it,”15 the spectator’s role in the production of meaning becomes crucial. Not only is the viewer inevitably interpolated through the social vectors of race, but that same viewer may also have no knowledge of the conditions of the film’s production or the racial identity of the film’s producers. That knowledge – as it dialogically encounters the viewer – may then change the entire meaning of the film. What might appear to be a black film in the most obvious and straightforward way might possibly, for that hypothetical spectator, become something very different indeed. We do not make films innocently and neither do we watch them in that way. We are inescapably drawn into an ongoing process of discursive engagement rather than simply the critical assessment of an object entirely external to ourselves. Our relationship to, and membership in, the discourse communities that surround the production, dissemination, and consumption of film mean that we play a crucial role in the constant generation of meaning. We must both assert and accept that a key register of meaning, especially in looking at a text such as Nothing But a Man, is that of race. We need to understand race within the film as spectacular performance but also that we carry with us the weight of history from outside the frame. The complicated and fluid relationship between the audience and the cinematic text plays its part in individuat-

Introduction

9

ing us as social, cultural, and ideological beings for, as Teresa de Lauretis says, “We intersect the text as the text intersects us.”16 While acknowledging the persuasive importance of de Lauretis’s notion of intersectionality, it needs to be underlined that film itself is always making certain categorical claims on us. The classificatory processes that shape the way film is situated in the world mean that, notwithstanding the fluidity of the discrete relationship between viewer and text, we are always bringing ourselves to an object that is making a prior assertion as to its own identity. Indeed, the fundamental structures of Hollywood genre rely on this almost entirely. Defining a film by genre or type is the first critical stage in its marketing and will attach to the movie a whole set of significations designed to shape the spectator’s understanding before a single frame of the film itself has been experienced. Movies do not occupy definitional categories by nature or acts of God but as a consequence of the myriad of social and cultural discourses surrounding them. Designations are choices made and the way a film is marketed will frequently play a profoundly significant role in determining not only where it might be seen and by whom it might be seen but – and perhaps most importantly – how it might be seen. It is neither insignificant nor wholly surprising that Nothing But a Man was marketed for the most part as an independent art film.17 Having had its American premiere18 at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1964, it began a run at New York’s Sutton Theater. Like many independent films of the era, its relatively short theatrical release has been followed by a peripatetic life of three or four decades of film festivals and university film studies courses. But in being designated as an “art film,” Nothing But a Man was encoded with a set of significations designed to legitimize its “difficult” subject matter and ensure that its audience was largely literate, college-educated, middle-class, liberal, and white. Indeed, exactly the kind of audience for whom this film would perform a particular type of cultural labor. The concept of the independent art film is shaped by unorthodox themes, unorthodox structure, a pushing of the boundaries of form, and the presence of political and social issues beyond the scope of mainstream Hollywood film. In this respect, it is perhaps odd to think of Nothing But a Man as an art film. In many ways it

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

is a very traditional realist romantic drama focusing on the crises within a heterosexual relationship that are resolved through the restitution of the family unit. What Gary Morris refers to as the “‘sanctity’ of the linear narrative”19 is left very much intact. Even odder, however, is to consider that, as a consequence of the film industry’s concerns over “whether films about ‘the race issue’ were best sold as prestige problem pictures or as exploitation items,”20 Nothing But a Man was often marketed as an exploitation or “grindhouse” movie. Christopher Seiving suggests that this is in no small part due to the fact that both the art-house and exploitation markets were “better defined and certainly better understood by distributors than was the African American audience.”21 All this notwithstanding, and though utterly traditional in its formal properties, the film is deeply unorthodox in its representation of black characters, as was much independent film of the period from Cassavetes’s Shadows (1958) and Ed Blands’s The Cry of Jazz (1959) to Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1958) and Shirley Clarke’s Cool World (1964). This is not to say that the film’s politics of racial representation are neither complicated nor frequently contradictory, but that it purposely and purposefully avoids descending into the caricature and stereotyping so generally prevalent in mainstream films of the period. Films change dramatically over the years with their definition, reception, status, and meaning contingently dependent on multiple contexts that are themselves constantly shifting. Hollywood films now considered classics such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), Psycho (1960), and even Citizen Kane (1941) were not greeted with the untrammeled universal approbation with which they have been subsequently regarded. Canon formation is a febrile and dynamic process and films once dismissed or entirely forgotten are frequently rediscovered as “classics” for many and various reasons. Indeed, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, thought to be lost until a damaged and incomplete print was discovered in Spain in the 1980s,22 is an instructive example to consider. This volume is part of an increasing body of work in relation to Nothing But a Man that is playing its part in marking the film as a serious and worthwhile object of study within the history and tradition of black cinema. It is evidence of a coalescing of discourses that embeds film within certain historical trajectories that then serve to shape and maintain a canon. There is a

Introduction

11

crucially important, and often symbiotic, relationship between the university and outside organizations and institutions, especially as regards the arts, that frequently merge to act as the arbiters of what should or should not be included in that canon. Scholarship, along with companies such as Criterion and Milestone, plays an important role in making films “serious” and can confer a gravitas perhaps hitherto ungranted. And, as mentioned, the editors’ selection of Nothing But a Man is in itself a deliberate gesture toward, and considered assertion of, the historical and cultural significance of the film. We cannot escape the ideological implications of our own work although, as thoughtful critics, we should be aware enough to acknowledge their presence and to understand our own positioning of the film accordingly. The film’s showing as part of the 2012 golden jubilee celebratory repertoire of the New York Film Festival is yet another way in which the film is being integrated in the various ordering discourses of meaning within the history and tradition of American film. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process but its contingency needs to be constantly invoked (as does the problematizing of terms such as classic and canon) to ensure that we do not naturalize those definitions and demarcations arrived at as a consequence of our own choices and interests. For such a significant film, however, there seems to have been a comparatively small amount of significant critical or scholarly work. It is crucially important to consider the relationship between any text and its historical context and all our contributors do this in various ways. This is especially true for a film such as Nothing But a Man that speaks to such a significant historical moment at, what historian Khalil Muhammad refers to as, a point of “indeterminacy in relation to the future of black citizenship in the country.” As Bob Young explains in both his own narrative of the film’s production and the lengthy interview with Michael Martin and David Wall, though the catalyst for Nothing But a Man was the documentary Sit-In, the feature film was not an historical narrative but a story of personal lives. As has been acknowledged, though the film was released in 1964 there is no direct mention of the tumultuous events that were shaping American society at the time. This is an interesting vision through which to consider the politics of history in a film that seemingly does not even acknowledge its own profoundly

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The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

important historical context. But history is cinematically articulated in multiple ways. For Bob Young and Michael Roemer it was important not that they show a group of people marching on Selma but that they creatively express the ways in which the deeply pernicious consequences of racism are articulated privately, unknowingly, and often unavoidably in the most intimate and private moments. As Bob Young puts it, “From a distance, what is remembered of the nineteen sixties are the killings, the bombings, the assassinations, Bull Connor, Martin Luther King, Jr. etc. Mike and I were interested in going in the opposite direction. To get to the personal, the intimate, and to see that even here the dominant society encroaches on the private life.” Before the phrase became a glib cliché by the middle of the following decade, Nothing But a Man manages to articulate perfectly that the personal is always the political. So many of the possibilities, probabilities, and consequences suggested by Nothing But a Man – whether they came to pass or not – can now more easily be understood and framed by the benefit of historical hindsight. This is true not only for us as viewers, but perhaps even more so for the filmmakers themselves. Michael Roemer’s compelling narrative expresses his sense of the film as a personal story focused on “the private space between a few people.” However, in looking back with fifty years of perspective, Roemer ponders complex questions concerning the nature of selfhood, identity, and representation within the context of a racialized America. Unforgiving in what he sees as the failures of the film, his powerfully honest account centralizes the often problematic involvement of white writers and directors in the creation of black cinema. His concern focuses on the ways in which the politics of race impact the ability of the even the most progressive white efforts to represent a black experience. His critical self-assessment is conducted partly through a fascinating dialogic engagement with Khalil Muhammad’s contribution to this volume. And yet his admission that “I have never been able to finish a piece of work without becoming aware of its limitations” does not detract from the aesthetic and political validity that the film does possess. As he puts it: “If Nothing But a Man, whatever its problems and shortcomings, plays a small part in supporting our necessary but forever challenged existence as individuals it would seem to be on the side of the angels.”

Introduction

13

Bob Young is equally refreshingly candid in the way he talks about the process of getting the film made, the difficulties of production, the racism encountered, the constant threat of violence, and the problems of white filmmakers trying to tell a black story. That experience speaks loudly to key questions such as: What does radical politics look like on the cinema screen? How do representations of race structure our historical understanding of liberation struggles? To what extent is it fair to expect the politics of film to translate into a politics of everyday life? Nothing But a Man is, in many ways, a small and quiet film that has much more obvious corollaries with European cinema than with Hollywood. Bob Young’s acknowledgment of Italian neorealism as a key influence says as much. But its literal and metaphorical focus on the lives, bodies, faces, and material conditions of Duff and Josie’s relationship speaks to the great themes of human existence: life, liberty, love, dignity, and self-determination. For Bruce Dick and Mark Vogel it is the tropes of rootedness and stability that assume greatest significance in their analysis of the emotional lives of Duff and Josie. Their discussion is framed by two iconic events of the civil rights movement in George Wallace’s “Segregation Now” and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speeches. These moments of powerful public oratory are frequently evoked as tidy shorthand iterations of the entire civil rights struggle with their contextual and historical complexities just as frequently elided. For Dick and Vogel, however, they serve as the constitutive extremes for the experience of ordinary individuals struggling “to maintain dignity amid oppression.” They read the film ultimately as a testament to the ways in which individuals enact and articulate the broader struggle through their own dignity and refusal to be defeated. As Bob Young puts it, “It’s a common observation that history tends to deal with ‘important’ characters and significant events. In our film, Josie and Duff are seen as ordinary people. . . . Our focus as storytellers was on the personal situations Duff and Josie were facing in their lives, and in the different ways that, through those situations, the internalized forces of the larger society might be expressed.” Thomas Cripps chooses to fold these themes into his framing of the film as a pastoral narrative. This approach is intriguing in that it inevitably alludes to those significant issues of “urban blight,” “white hazing,”

14

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

and “segregated Alabama” without ever consciously acknowledging the pressing political contexts of the civil rights movement. Like the film itself, Cripps’s essay seems determined to avoid situating the characters within any kind of sociological context, the bane of much black expressive culture especially in terms of critical response from white critics. Cripps defines Nothing But a Man as a black film “not only because the themes are black but because our point of view is from within black circles in segregated Alabama.” He is at the same time abstracting the experience of black Americans into both a deeply embedded western European narrative form as well as a more recent history of black American cinema that had seen the emergence of the urban outlaw hero in films such as Shaft (1971), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971), and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). But, Cripps argues, Duff Cooper stands apart from John Shaft, Sweet Sweetback, and Dan Freeman in a commitment to “the value of being governed by a formula that equates survival and success with sameness, roots and permanence, rather than social mobility.” While this may be an important element of the pastoral hero per se, we might see something more troubling in an implicit idyllic undercurrent to the pastoral discourse that equates the rural with “sameness . . . and permanence.” Is it enough that “if all else fails, [Duff] can still pick other people’s cotton at least to be close to the soil?” The history of the Great Migration would suggest otherwise. In Karen Bowdre’s close textual reading of the film, the personal as political is expressed through the romantic relationship between Duff and Josie around which the rest of the narrative circulates. In her analysis of their romance, she elaborates not only on the ways in which their relationship is troubled and trammeled by broader social forces, but also the uniqueness of the film’s “exceptional and complicated portrayal of an African American romantic relationship.” In this way, her reading of the ways in which Nothing But a Man offers a “decisive break from Hollywood movies about African American life” situates the text in film history as well as social history while confirming the ineluctable linkages between the two. While highlighting the progressive imperatives of the film’s representations of race and class, however, Bowdre also identifies what she sees as the film’s problematic articulation of gender politics. In keeping with her focus on the personal and affective, she reads Josie as

Introduction

15

emblematic of a gendered discourse in which the female characters are individuated only through their sexual and emotional relationships with men, rather than through any “explicitly articulated set of politics or political discourse.” Thus, for women, the personal is always and inevitably emphasized over the political. In similarly considering the “personal” as a constitutive feature of Nothing But a Man‘s narrative, Terri Francis emphasizes the relationship between ideology and aesthetics and the ways in which the visual and cinematic structure of the film is designed to collapse any “dichotomy between the personal and the historical.” In seeing the personal/political via forms of visual and cinematic representation in which “the face is the landscape and the world writ small,” Francis alludes to a broader point concerning the relationship between cinema and history: that a film can speak to and of its history, but in its very intimacy it can speak simultaneously to struggles extant at any point in history. It goes beyond the particularities of its own historical moment and reaches out and beyond to other moments and other histories. As she explains, this is made possible, in part, by virtue of the fact that there is a certain anonymity or lack of definition to the geographical landscape in the film just as there is to the political landscape. As she puts it, “its sketch of time contains all the emotion and possibility that belongs to us at any time in history.” The sense of timelessness that Terri Francis sees as built into the film’s “minimalist realism” reflects and refracts that sense of indeterminacy that Khalil Muhammad sees pervading the film. Muhammad’s historical contextualization of the film is an invaluable complement to those discussions that focus on politics and aesthetics. He manages to speak not only to the film’s immediate national context but touches on the development of revolutionary ideas emerging from decolonization struggles across the world as they shaped American civil rights thinking and strategies. In positing “indeterminacy” as a constitutive feature of Nothing But a Man, Muhammad underlines the critical importance of the film’s historical moment in his argument that the film offers multiple possibilities – not all of which are positive, it must be said – for the evolution of the civil rights struggle. Among much else, Muhammad’s consideration of what is outside the frame manages to remind us of the crucial importance of the black church to the struggle. Expressing a

16

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

concern that the film elides the presence and importance of the black church, Muhammad actually draws us back to the primary concern of the filmmakers, which was to examine the relationship between the political and the personal. For Judith Smith, the political struggle that formed the extracinematic context for Nothing But a Man is critically central to our understanding of the film. In examining the film’s “uncertain path to production and exhibition,” she problematizes those issues related to not only race, but also gender and class. Her extremely detailed assessment of the film’s origins and development pays particular attention to the personal history of Young and Roemer’s working relationship and the layers of complexity that their whiteness and Jewishness brought to the film. In highlighting the racial tensions that existed on set, Smith demonstrates that a history of the film, as much as the film itself, allows us “a rare opportunity to listen in on public conversations about race and labor, political economy and gender.” Smith emphasizes the ways in which the film posits male-female relationships as the critical point of resistance to white racism and oppression. In her assertion that “black female agency is shown as central to the project of sustaining the resisting black family,” she has a somewhat different take on Muhammad’s criticisms that one of the film’s deepest flaws is its elision of the power and agency of black women within the struggle for civil rights. Her similarly detailed analysis of the film’s reception indicates again the situatedness of the film within multiple communities of discourses and the ways in which the diversity of response mirrors the cross-racial constituencies, collaborations, and conflicts that seem to prefigure her conclusion that “Nothing But a Man’s persisting appeal results not from timelessness but rather from multiple points of identification in a story created by a historically contingent and productive cross-racial collaboration.” The diversity of approach and reading exhibited here is evidence not only of the general multivalence of the cinematic text, but also the peculiarly rich arena for discussion provided by Nothing But a Man as a narrative. The film’s appeal went far beyond the cinema, and the story was at one point being considered as the basis of both an opera and a television series.23 Most notable perhaps was Jim Thompson’s novelization published in 1970, a full six years after the movie had been released.

Introduction

17

The celebrated crime novelist’s hard-boiled realism fit perfectly with the film’s own neorealist sensibility and spoke to the broader themes of alienation, resistance, and self-determination evident in Thompson’s own work. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of academic analysis and interest is mirrored in various popular critical responses to the film over the last fifty years, especially when viewed from the three critical moments in the life of Nothing But a Man: its original release in 1964; its cinematic rerelease in 1993; and its fortieth anniversary release on DVD in 2004. Film reviews always and inevitably give brief snapshots of the particular racial, cultural, and social contexts from which they emerge and certainly those of Nothing But a Man reveal how conversations around race were articulated at those distinct historical moments. At the same time, and unsurprisingly, they clearly also reveal a consistent concern with issues of race and representation that transcend their historical specificities. Indeed, race impinges on the critical responses in the most immediate and obvious way. A symptomatic example is to compare two reviews from when the film was first released. While Judith Crist’s review in the New York Herald Tribune echoed much of the white, mainstream press in its celebration of Nothing But a Man’s supposedly universal themes through which “permeated” the “sound of recorded truth,”24 for Hoyt Fuller, writing in the Negro Digest, the film was fundamentally untruthful in its willingness to “let the White South off the hook.”25 Interestingly, the reviews from 1993 and 2004 tend to speak of the film as having been rediscovered, reemerging, or being given new life.26 Even more interestingly, the trope of loss and rediscovery is still being invoked in some of the latest responses as Nothing approaches its fourth critical moment, that of the fiftieth anniversary of its release. Writing on the British Film Institute website on the occasion of the film’s release in the United Kingdom in the fall of 2013, Geoff Andrew calls it “a forgotten classic” that, because of its “forthright but never sensationalist depiction of poverty, injustice and bigotry,” “retains the ability to provoke shock and anger.” However, Andrew’s talk of the film’s “years of neglect” seems misplaced, especially considering its trajectory after 1993.27 At this point when Nothing But a Man is being screened increasingly frequently for new audiences and new generations, it is important to acknowledge that the critical engagement with the film laid out in

18

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film

this introduction and collection is by no means offered as definitive in any way, but rather it is intended as part of the broader conversation contained within this volume and beyond it. This collection is part of an effort to institutionalize or centralize film with the black experience at its core. The discussion over what constitutes black film is central to that effort. Part of the impetus for the series Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora is to address the critical neglect from which black and diasporic film has traditionally suffered. While there have been enormous strides forward in scholarly engagement with black cinema over the last twenty years or so, it is still very much underrepresented as a subject of study. But ubiquitous within the field is a discussion of meaning and definition. This profoundly complex and important issue speaks not only to the politics of racial representation in film but also to the broader cultural and historical registers of the American experience. In making an argument for Nothing But a Man‘s status as, and relationship to, black film, there is an awareness that there are potentially limitless different ways of considering it and many of which would take issue with some (if not all) of the arguments and discussions laid out here. As Martin Flanagan says, “film narratives are never semantically closed whether their continuation is undertaken by ‘authors,’ studios or fans”28 or, indeed, academics or film critics. As we have tried to argue, the meaning and definition of the text is generated as a consequence of that text’s imbrication within a potentially limitless set of communities and discourses. It is important therefore to consider that this category of black film is always open to contestation and redefinition. However, we can make one or two reasonable assertions. First, if we accept that at the very least black film must have a black perspective, then it must be agreed, again at the very least, that Nothing But a Man attempts to tell a story from a black perspective. That it might fail, as Khalil Muhammad argues, as a consequence of its reaching the limitations of its own discourse of white liberalism is an argument to be engaged. Second, notwithstanding the problematic assertions of arguments rooted in a politics of identity, it would seem to defy comprehension to imagine something we call black film without any significant black presence in front of or behind the camera. How we might then go on to define significant is an equally important and compelling issue of contention.

Introduction

19

Without any of them dealing explicitly with the question of how black film is or might be defined, all the essays included here attempt in their variety of ways to address key issues of the problems of representations of race and speak to issues and concerns that thread throughout the history of black cinema. Not least of these are the broad questions of how blackness functions as a discourse within a knowledge system that is structured to privilege the discourse of whiteness and, then, how do filmmakers attempt to represent and engage critically with those discourses? These questions problematize the politics of racial representation by demonstrating their inescapability while simultaneously opening up a space in which we can productively deal with white iterations of blackness and vice versa. In its commitment to the politics of civil rights Nothing But a Man is situated at this critical intersection of the discourses of race, gender, and class. The film must be considered in relation to what Michael Rogin refers to as “the surplus symbolic value of blacks, the power to make African Americans represent something besides themselves.”29 It struggles to subvert and undermine the dominant history of racial representation but at the same time, albeit perhaps unknowingly, cannot entirely escape its own complicity in that very history. But by crossing the boundaries of representation, and disrupting the visual and aesthetic grammar of race, Nothing But a Man parses a small domestic drama into a profoundly significant commentary on the nature of the civil rights struggle in postwar America as well as an examination of the structures of racial subjectivity. Its importance as both a cinematic and historical document is made clearly apparent in the materials collected here and, in the process, they play their part in securing the place of Nothing But a Man in the history of black cinema.30 Notes 1. See Thomas Cripps, “The Unformed Image,” in Slow Fade to Black: The Negro American in Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 2. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (London: Routledge, 1994), 39.

3. Clyde Taylor, “The Future of Black Film: The Debate Continues,” in Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, ed. Michael T. Martin, 457 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

20 4. See J. Ronald Green, “Micheaux vs. Griffith,” in Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 5. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 152. 6. Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2. 7. Ibid. 8. Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 3. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Mark A. Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 1. 11. Gladstone Yearwood, Black Film as Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), 83. 12. Tommy Lott, “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith, 83 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); ibid., 91. 13. Elia Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 180. 14. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982), 107. 15. Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin at the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 21. 16. Teresa DeLauritis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 44. 17. As Bob Young explains in his narrative of the film’s production, this

The Politics and Poetics of Black Film was very much against the wishes of the filmmakers. 18. The world premiere of Nothing But a Man took place at the 1964 Venice Film Festival. 19. Gary Morris, “American Independent Narrative Cinema of the ’60s: A Brief Survey (Courtesy of the 1992 Torino Film Festival,” Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2000, www.brightlightsfilm.com/27 /sixtiescinema1.php. 20. Kevin Heffernan, “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968),” Cinema Journal 41, no. 3 (2002): 59–77, quote on 62. 21. Christopher Sieving, Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 31. 22. Patrick McGilligan describes how a print of Within Our Gates was discovered by Thomas Cripps in 1979 at the Cineteca Nacional in Madrid. However, it was not until 1989 that the film was acquired by the Library of Congress, with a fully restored print of the film finally being made available in 1995. See Patrick McGilligan, The Great and Only Oscar Micheaux: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 347. 23. Authors’ conversation with Michael Roemer, July 2013. 24. Judith Crist, “The Little Movie That Makes It Big,” New York Herald Tribune, December 28, 1964. 25. Hoyt Fuller, “Nothing But a Man Reconsidered,” Negro Digest, May 1965, 49. 26. See, for example, Christopher Sieving, “Alabama Song: Nothing But a Man,“ PopMatters, October 13, 2004, http:// www.popmatters.com/review/nothing -but-a-man-dvd; Hal Hinson, Review of Nothing But a Man, Washington Post, July

Introduction 10, 1993; Shiela Rule, “30 Years Later, A Sensitive Film of Black Family Life Reemerges,” New York Times, March 16, 1993; Vicki Vasilopolous, “New Life for a 1964 Film,” New York Times, November 14, 2004. 27. Geoff Andrew, “A Forgotten Classic: Nothing But a Man,“ BFI Film Forever, April 22, 2014, http://www.bfi.org.uk /news-opinion/news-bfi/features /forgotten-classic-nothing-man. 28. Flanagan, Bakhtin at the Movies, 51.

21 29. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 14. 30. The editors wish to point out that throughout the text whenever authors quote characters in the film, the dialog is taken from the final theatrical release version of Nothing But a Man available on DVD. The original screenplay included in this volume occasionally differs from the theatrical release.

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Filmmakers’ Statements

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Michael Roemer

These comments about Nothing But a Man r eflect how it looks to me fifty years after we made it. If I had not come to see the film differently from the way it seemed at the time we shot it, I could not have gone on to make other films without repeating myself. Rendering our reality today seems possible only if we continually challenge our own assumptions. But I hope nothing I say here puts me out of touch with those who have been moved by it. * * * Robert Young and I became friends as undergraduates and stayed in touch after graduation but didn’t actually work together until we were in our thirties. Though he was in documentaries and I in fiction, we shared a similar perspective and were not persuaded by most American movies at that time. In 1962 we shot a documentary about a generational slum in Palermo that we felt was the best film either of us had made. When NBC, who had sponsored it, pulled it off the air as unfit for the American living room, we left the network. We were determined to continue working together, and Bob suggested that the young African Americans he had met on his 1960 NBC White Paper documentary “Sit-In” would make a good feature film on a subject close to his heart. I wouldn’t have gone on what seemed a very uncertain project with anyone except Bob, and off we went in my old car. Armed with a letter of introduction from the NA ACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), we traveled through the Deep South on what seemed an underground railroad in reverse – passed from town to town 25

26

Filmmakers’ Statements

and house to house by the young men and women working with SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and COR E (Congress of Racial Equality). Since two white men with New York license plates consistently stayed on the black side of the railroad tracks, we were often trailed by the local sheriff. We happened to find ourselves in Oxford, Mississippi, on the day the effort to integrate the university exploded into violence, but we fortunately thought the town was peaceful and left before dark. If we had known what was about to happen, we-­young and not risk averse – would have stayed, to no one’s benefit. Two journalists were killed in the riot and cars with Northern license plates were vandalized and overturned. Bob was convinced that my years as a writer would complement his own experience in documentary filming, but as we spent weeks traveling through the Southern states, meeting many brave and truly impressive people, I became concerned that though we were finding wonderful settings and backgrounds, we had no foreground – no story. Bob, whose native confidence and optimism offset my deep-seated pessimism, would say: “I know you’ll come up with something,” but I wasn’t at all sure. Then, one morning in a Mississippi motel, it struck me that “The Last Frontier,” a screenplay I had written two years earlier, had a central story about a young couple and the man’s enraged alcoholic father that could be adapted to what we had seen and learned of black life. I believe this happened shortly after our stay with James Bevel and Diane Nash, and encountering them may have helped me make the connection. Throughout my life, I had been haunted by difference, not only as a Jewish child in Germany but in an English boarding school during World War II, and among my fellow students at an American college. I was one of the few children I knew with divorced parents; my father had left my mother when I was three and when he died, at fifty-four, I – like Duff at the funeral parlor – knew only the barest facts about him. Though everyone in my family held him responsible for his own circumstances and actions, by the time I wrote “The Last Frontier,” I saw that he had been the victim of circumstances – economic and psychological – over which he had no control. The parallel to the history and situation of some African American men seemed clear.

Roemer

27

Bob brought his political awareness and ideals to our film, but I had grown up deeply suspicious of all politics and, indeed, of power not only in individuals but, more particularly, in groups. What I contributed, beyond the existing screenplay and some limited experience with directing actors, was a childhood subjected to virulent antisemitism. I was forever an outsider, invisible to others when not actually provoking them with my difference. Of course, many people see themselves this way, with their lives a ceaseless disputation between a sense of inadequacy and their often successful but sometimes costly effort to live up to majority expectations. Bob – with his background in anthropology and the natural sciences – was as persuaded of sameness as I was a doubtful of it, though perhaps he had simply found a different way of redeeming his own sense of difference. At any rate, some of the strengths and the limitations of Nothing But a Man can be traced to its origins. It is clearly a middle-class film made by middle-class men, and unsurprisingly its appeal has been largely to the white middle class and the emerging black middle class. At the time of its first revival in 1994, the film had a brief showing at the Apollo Theater, but hardly anyone from the neighborhood came to see it. * * * During the production, the inevitable tensions that arise during a difficult low-budget shoot were complicated by race. There were, at the time, almost no African American film technicians – Bill Grier was the only black filmmaker I then knew – and so the crew was white with the exception of our production assistant, while the large cast was almost entirely black. Moreover, an inexperienced foreign-born white director was telling black actors what their motives and feelings were and how to shade their expression. My own gravest error sprang from the misconception that Ivan Dixon (Duff) was “on our team,” and that I could call on him for help when there were problems and tensions-­particularly from the influx of New York day players, who were understandably angry about our poor working conditions. On two occasions when I turned to Ivan for help and then expressed disappointment that he couldn’t cross the line between

28

Filmmakers’ Statements

black and white, I put him in an impossible bind. Because of the close connection of the story to my own experience, I had a deeply personal identification with the central figure and failed to recognize the line of demarcation that the “racialization” of the original story entailed. From my subjective vantage point, the film was as much his as ours. Moreover, as a member of a white minority in Europe and with my limited experience with African American men, it did not occur to me that I might be seen as part of a power structure, though my role of director would have reinforced this perception. The second time I imposed on Ivan almost ended the film, and it was our black production assistant who quite literally saved it. During the crisis I finally learned my lesson. When I turned to Abbey for help, she said: “Mike, when the chips are down, you are white and I am black.” * * * Almost the moment we finished our work in the cutting room – where, as a member of the editors’ union, I could function as Luke Bennett’s assistant – I found myself overwhelmed by a sense of failure. The completed film suddenly seemed manipulative instead of looking as true as it had while we were shooting. I felt that an unconscious need to be liked and approved had compromised the work. I believe that – appearances and reviewers to the contrary – ­we had not done anything courageous, but had succeeded in pleasing the liberal art theater audience. I was troubled, moreover, by my very skill at manipulating their feelings. From the age of seventeen on, I had watched American films intensively, worked on them once I got out of college, and read Variety carefully for years. Though I was not nearly conscious of it at the time, I knew what audiences wanted and had become adept at affecting them. No doubt my camouflaged manipulative skills had been forged in Berlin. They had helped me survive, and when I turned to filmmaking, they came usefully to hand without my being aware of them. But by the time our film was finished, I found myself no longer willing to survive by hiding and indirection. Psychologically, I had arrived at the point where Duff is at the end of the story. * * *

Roemer

29

Though manipulating the material and the performances, and calculating their effect, was largely unconscious, it wasn’t altogether innocent. While we were casting, James Earl Jones came by to say that if he were to take the part of Duff he would have to play him angry from the start. I might have told him, legitimately, that the African American men we had met in the South had transmuted their anger, fully aware it would destroy them. Instead, I remember telling him that though his reading was true to the facts, our audience would need to see where the anger was coming from: we had to get them on Duff’s side, and seeing him angry from the start would lose them. I remember as well that when we added a third generation – Duff’s son – to the core family of the original story and realized that Duff might pick him up at the end, I said: “That’ll get to everybody!” Some cunning was clearly at work. I further remember a moment of triumph when we looked at the first cut. The industry had a saying that if you have a good – that is, effective – ending, the audience will forgive you a great deal, and leave emotionally satisfied. When I saw the ending in place, I knew we had a working movie. While we were shooting the last scene, Ivan – who asked for very few line changes – did not want to say: “Baby, I feel so free inside.” Since we don’t see his face when he speaks, I could tell him, and mean it, that we would decide on using or dropping the line in the cutting room. To my great regret, it remained in the film. I find it painfully embarrassing, though I’ve met people – all, I believe, white – who said it was their favorite line. Ivan and Abbey are not only more beautiful than most of us, but the figures they play are more beautiful on the inside – ­clean, clear, and uncontradicted, not riven by the doubts and inner conflicts that trouble so many. Like the heroes and heroines of popular stories, Duff and Josie reflect the way we would like to see ourselves, reacting to every situation in a way we understand perfectly. We can always identify with them; in today’s entertainment lingo, they are one hundred percent “relatable.” The script was brave enough to let Duff push his pregnant wife to the floor and perceptive enough to show where the violence originated. But it never has him do any real wrong; neither Josie nor he make a single bad move. They do exactly what we would like to see ourselves doing under

30

Filmmakers’ Statements

the circumstances. Duff is a popular hero who happens to be black. If he had been white, Paul Newman might have played him. * * * Since Bob could shoot and I had some experience working with actors, he became the cameraman and I the director. But I never said “print” without turning to him to make sure he felt as I did about the take. Without his and the actors’ confidence in the work there was no way I could have done it. I have been criticized for the tight control I exercise over actors – not only on Nothing But a Man but on all my films. In part, no doubt, this has its source in anxiety, but on the first film it seemed justified by needing to turn a few experienced performers and a large group of nonprofessionals into an ensemble. There was at the time barely any work for African American actors, and our cast included men and women who made their living as dry cleaners, bartenders, social workers, and high school teachers – some of whom had always wanted to act, and others who looked and sounded right and were willing to join us. The person who made it possible for me with my limited experience to direct actors was a man of the German theater at the boarding school where I spent the Second World War. He stoked the boiler, did the heavy work in the garden, and directed our plays. I had the good fortune of witnessing how – with infinite patience and persistence – he managed to get performances from children who were not the least bit interested in acting. Refusing to settle for anything less than the best we could do, he succeeded in making an ensemble out of our motley crew. His casting was uncanny, with girls frequently in the parts of men, and the performances he got from us were persuasive; during one production, we were startled to see adults in the audience weeping. It was this man who showed me a way of working. The slow, painstaking process he had used prompted me to spend three weeks with Julius Harris, often three or four hours a day, working on key moments in the script before we did his screen test. When Charles Gordone – whose name was unaccountably and inexcusably left out of the credits – introduced us to him, Julius was a male nurse – a deeply empathetic human being, who had seen a great deal of suffering and fully understood the part of Duff’s father. I remember several occasions when his work on the set astounded the

Roemer

31

other actors. Without being aware of the discipline involved, he had turned himself into a method actor. Since I am not a professional director and have never directed anything I didn’t write, I invariably have a very specific picture of the way scenes should play. This is both useful and a limitation. It can certainly be hard on performers, who may well feel their own contributions are limited. But neither Ivan nor Abbey complained at the time, and Julius didn’t feel hemmed in. They seemed completely comfortable with our approach and interpretations. With respect to Ivan’s comment that I used actors like puppets, I see myself as a puppet as well, both while I am writing and directing – enthralled to a story that allows me little freedom or choice. The process of writing is not, for me, an act of the will, but rather a process of discovering, over an extended period of time, what must happen. Everything seems conditioned – in part by my own limitations. At the outset of a project, I have no idea what will happen, but at the end it inevitably turns out to have been wholly determined by factors not subject to my will or preferences. Once the script is written, I try – as it were, “obediently” – to carry out the task of shooting it. I may well seem like a dictator on the set, but believe I have myself taken dictation. Of course every dictator could make this excuse. I am well aware that this flies in the face of our fundamental American creed that each of us is free and empowered to make our own destiny – a creed that is clearly contradicted by our movies and by the stories that run on television twenty-four hours a day. Every one of them is over before it begins, with the actors speaking predetermined lines and doing what the script calls on them to do. We think of them as entertainments, but we may be addicted to them in part because they suggest the very opposite of what we believe. They may be real to us, albeit in a realm separate from everyday reality, just as those who believe in the sacred think of it as a realm that is separate from our physical existence. Significantly, both involve a surrender of the free will we subscribe to – or must subscribe to. Film can beguile us into believing that it renders the world as it is. While the surfaces of Southern black life in our film look persuasive, what we really believe and lend ourselves to is the inner experience of

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Filmmakers’ Statements

Duff and Josie. Some surfaces are clearly erroneous. It seems surprising – and significant – that no one has ever questioned why the whites have Southern accents but the blacks don’t. We knew that getting nonactors to master an unfamiliar accent would have absorbed all their energy and attention and focused their work on the surface. I never even asked them to try. Moreover, though humor has been a constant of black life-­ and two Jews should have recognized the parallel with Jewish life – it is almost totally absent in the film. Bob came up with the one humorous moment while I, for deeply personal reasons, was preoccupied with the injuries and insults suffered by the figures and with the way they handle their anger. * * * After all these years of reading comments about the film, I found the observations of Khalil Mohammad among the most interesting and pertinent. His observations about the indeterminacy of the film seem altogether valid, though they may apply to most fiction. In stories, facts matter largely to the extent that they substantiate or undermine the personal narrative, since both those who tell them and their audiences are focused on the experience and feelings of the central figure or figures, which become their own. Facts are the scrim that allows us access to their interior – though this in no way justifies exploiting them or using them manipulatively. At its core, Nothing But a Man is a personal story – initially my own, with all the limitations implicit in its origin – that we grafted onto a black Southern community. As Khalil says, race and class were “hitched” onto two individuals who effectively resemble all of us or, rather, resemble how we would like to see ourselves. What further persuades us of their existence on the screen is the particularity of Ivan and Abbey, as well as the film’s documentary surfaces, most significantly the black skin of our actors that Bob lit with such care and tenderness. Under the surface, at the structural level, a coincidence between my own experience and that of a representative black man may contribute to such validity as the story has. White liberal audiences have responded positively to its hopeful humanism, since it wipes out fundamental differences and makes all of us alike. That feeling was common to white civil rights workers and

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sympathizers and certainly imbued Bob and me. But it is easy to see why robbing Duff of his blackness, his particular otherness, is not just unrealistic but offensive to some – much as turning the Holocaust into one more instance of human inhumanity is offensive to Jews. It looks like one more depersonalization. There is a reason for the focus on the personal in stories. Our socialization in childhood and adolescence makes us critically aware of others, the group, and the community. Yet every belief system, including the most rigidly theocratic, insists on the individual, who is expected to police him or herself. A measure of individual freedom – ­our vaunted freedom of the will – must be inculcated in us from early on, and fictions very likely continue to be an integral part of our lives because they appear to confirm it even though they actually undermine it. As individuals, we may ourselves be little more than a necessary social construct we believe in because we have been told from childhood on that we are separate and exercise control over ourselves. Our biology supports the assumption that we are separate beings, but where you and I – or within and without – begin and terminate seems highly uncertain. Like religious faith, stories serve in large part to substantiate each one of us by focusing attention on the solitary traveler – the mythic hero who must slay monsters alone, the private eye who cannot go to the police – the very loner who, at critical moments, we are all expected to be, both in our public and private lives. Nothing But a Man is focused on Duff and happens largely in the supposedly private space between a few people, with a close-up camera bearing out the focus of the story on the personal and intimate. Such groups as appear serve largely to isolate Duff and Josie, to substantiate them – and us – as separate beings. We identify with them because, deep down, most of us feel we are outsiders. Legitimately, for the community needs for us to be separate or we can’t be held individually responsible. Without being aware of it, we are kept in an unresolvable double bind – we must be both an integral part of the whole and apart from it, at once integrated and alone. The indeterminacy Khalil sees as a salient characteristic of Nothing But a Man is a mark of the inner realm that is the reallocation of most fictions, irrespective of their realist or nonrealist surfaces.

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Like the individual who embodies it, the inner realm may well originate in a communal mandate. During its formative phase, it is clearly a response to the outer world. But since it seems to originate many of our actions and reactions – we might call them our behavior – we think of it as the domain of the will. This suggests that there is a point – though only courts of law identify it unmistakably – when the self acquires autonomy. When Duff pushes Josie to the floor, the inner realm is translated into an action in the physical world. But to say he has chosen to do it is to ignore the ruthless exploitative system – one that has been in place for centuries – that is acting through him. Of course, believing he has a choice is understandable, for unless we can think of ourselves as making choices and decisions, our own sense of self is fatally undermined. The almost total absence of community to which Khalil points is striking and makes the film an invalid rendering of Southern blacks in the 1960s. The story skillfully justifies Duff’s isolation by his membership in the section gang, though the very first scenes establish that he is an outsider even here. But Josie has lived in her community all her life, yet appears to have no like-minded friends – a highly unlikely situation. Growing up in fascist Germany, where entire communities were infected with a lynch mentality, I was mistrustful of group thinking and feeling. It was difficult for me to believe that when push comes to shove, a group or community will not be subject to destructive impulses. Way down deep, I put my trust in individuals, for it was the outsiders, or misfits, who often turned out to be antifascists, joined the resistance, and stood up for the persecuted. Moreover, movements are finally made up of individuals who, for various reasons and at different moments in their own development, have made common cause with it. From that perspective, Nothing But a Man legitimately transposes what was a communal effort, or movement, into the turning or “conversion” of an individual. At the end, Duff heads back to join like-minded others, of whom we have glimpsed just a few. As Khalil points out, however, at the very moment he becomes engaged with others, presumably to act in political concert with them, the screen goes dark. In their solitary or alienated state Duff and Josie more accurately reflect the Northern, urban – and often enough – white experience of deracinated outsiders than Southern black life.

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Over the years, one of the aspects of the film to which audiences and commentators have returned, is the central role of the family. Contrary to Khalil’s assertion, I don’t believe there is anything in the story to suggest that, “the family can triumph over any adversity.” I would have had to ignore the utter wreck of my own family, and its source in the long history of structural antisemitism, to argue that if “the family unit is loyal to itself it can survive anything.” Indeed, we attempted to make as clear as possible that the system can reach right into the home and destroy whatever private space may exist between woman and man or parent and child. The black families in Nothing But a Man clearly didn’t break themselves, and Josie isn’t pushed to the floor by an individual who should have known better. We were, however, persuaded that an intact family can serve as a beginning, and that the partnership between aware, committed individuals is a source of strength. Though I don’t think the film suggests that the “black family . . . becomes a site for liberation in and of itself,” it suggests that it can be a key support. The issue of religion is critical, and Khalil’s point that we ignored the foundational role of the black church in the liberation struggle seems altogether valid. The church was, in fact, evident all around us. I well remember the imposing presence of Martin Luther King Sr. as he came up behind us at the convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to ask what we white boys were doing at their meeting. For two days, we listened, deeply impressed and moved, to King, Abernathy, Walker, and other major figures of the SCLC. Our film failed to honor religion as an effective mode of resistance and, instead, used it rather glibly, to serve our narrative. The preachers and their congregation augment the outsider status of the central figures and so connect them to each other. Though Josie’s identity as the daughter of a Baptist minister, who acts as the go-between of the black community and the white power structure, isn’t a falsehood, it serves largely to isolate her. I remember that once the preacher in the revival scene got going, all I had to do was insert Abbey into a row of women. I didn’t have to say a word. Abbey’s pained face among the fervent faces around her said it all. Her isolation within her family and her unlikely isolation within the community engendered her need for resistance and prompted her instantaneous response to Duff as

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a fellow outsider. For the most part, this doesn’t correspond to anything we observed. Moreover, the portrayal of Josie’s father disregards what James Baldwin identified as the significant historical role of the too easily disdained “Toms.” Though the film is an attempt to show racism and exploitation as it impacts on the personal lives and experiences of Duff and Josie, I have never told an explicitly political story, and Nothing But a Man is political only in the general human sense. The only “political” request made of us in the South – during the few days we spent with Bob Moses, Diane Nash, and James Bevel – was not to have the central male figure leave the South. They had seen the most energized men in their communities go north. I’m sure that this influenced our end, though I cannot now imagine the story with a different ending. With regard to the political effectiveness of fiction – while I can’t help agreeing with Shaw that A Doll’s House has done more to improve the world than any of Shakespeare’s plays – I share the perspective of Bertolt Brecht that an openly stated rather than implicit, political position is not the province of art. All a traditional storyteller – and once you tell a story you are “traditional” – can hope for is that he or she may be on the side of the angels. Few storytellers expect their fictions to produce an action, and when a story does, it makes me uncomfortable, for that is precisely what dictatorships expect of fiction. I am uncomfortable as well with the American conviction that the past can be left behind. I believe, rather, that subjugation and grave injuries leave scars that can take generations to expunge. We were certainly aware that the destruction of the black family was deliberate throughout slavery and has been carried forward, less consciously, through black unemployment among men in the North. I suspect that if this were not so, the film would have long lost its currency. All stories inevitably are past. That is where their power resides. As the events unfold, they instantaneously become the past for everything that follows. If you don’t believe in the power of the past, you’re better off not telling stories, for all of them are over before they begin. * * *

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We didn’t understand at the time that the qualities that made Nothing But a Man modestly successful could turn us into commercial filmmakers. But others knew it, and we were almost immediately offered studio projects. I, for my part, turned them down not just because they were not interesting but because the industry scared me. I was convinced it would kill me. My fear of it was almost physical, but the real threat was existential. I, and whatever I was good at, couldn’t have survived. Looking back, I think my fear was realistic. Our immediate difficulty was surviving financially, since the film didn’t return its investment for twenty-five years. We took whatever paid work we could get, spent the greater part of a year on a script that touched on the Holocaust before abandoning it, and made one more independent film, The Plot against Harry. When it was finished – it wasn’t released until twenty years later – Bob felt that, for the best of reasons, he needed to be on his own, and the extraordinary period of our collaboration came to an end. By then, each of us had learned what we could from the other and needed to develop in ourselves the very faculties and abilities so evident in the other. * * * I realize that since Nothing But a Man has been meaningful to many, my comments may seem churlish. But I have never been able to finish a piece of work without becoming aware of its limitations, and I believe that until I see them clearly I won’t be able to exceed them. As a consequence, I’ve never been a viable publicist for my films or screenplays, though I’ll defend them when the criticism seems unjustified. Looking back at the film, and despite these reservations, there are things about it that continue to seem valid. First and foremost, Bob’s work and commitment behind the camera and in every other area; the performances of Ivan, Abbey, Julius, Gloria, and the many other actors and nonactors. Neither the young woman in “The Last Frontier” nor Josie in our script were more than an idealized version of my wife, with just enough of an independent social reality to seem credible. Whatever authenticity and texture Josie has on the screen is Abbey’s own. Not a few men have told me how much they like her. No wonder. She

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meets Duff’s needs perfectly and when she leads, she does so with the utmost emotional tact. I should mention that before we met Abbey I might well have given the part to the wrong actress, a beautiful young woman whom we screen-tested several times before I finally recognized I was wrong – as Bob and Bob Rubin had told me all along. I still feel comfortable with the low-key style of the direction, which was in large part made possible by Bob Rubin’s use of personal microphones – widely used on documentaries and television news, but not before in fiction. I have always asked actors not to project but to speak without emphasis and at the same level they would in life. When Bob Rubin, who was recording them, said, “Mike, they’re not moving the needle!” I’d ask whether they were audible, and if he said “yes,” I’d say “fine.” Here as elsewhere on the production, our lack of “professionalism” made the film possible. An industry soundman would have walked off the set, fearing his career might be in jeopardy, while we had nothing to lose by taking risks. I believe the nonemphatic performances and the understated writing make the performances credible half a century after they were filmed. It might be fair to say that even though the movie fits into a time-bound genre, the acting is largely without a style. Rather, it renders behavior in a certain situation at a certain moment in time. Bob has said he wouldn’t hesitate to make another film about black life, whereas I have turned down scripts dealing with African American subjects. After The Plot against Harry was released, I was predictably sent scripts about Jews and couldn’t do them either. While Bob is open to many stories, Nothing But a Man was the only story about black life I could have told with conviction. Both for me and perhaps for others, making the film was only possible at that moment in time. Of course, I was aware of the civil rights movement, but needed – at our first rehearsal – to tell Ivan and Abbey that I was in this for my own sake, not theirs. Abbey, whom I had just met, gave me a big hug and said, “That’s great!” I realize that the film continues to be useful, and am grateful that circumstances; Bob’s initiative, confidence, and commitment; the faith of Irwin Young; the work of the actors and crew; and our patient families allowed us to make it. Even fifty years later, the ceaseless emphasis on freedom and individual identity in our society suggests they are in grave

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doubt. What is happening all around us can easily reduce us to nothing, and today an ever-growing number of people have good reason to doubt that they exist, or that their existence makes any difference. If Nothing But a Man, whatever its problems and shortcomings, plays a small part in supporting our necessary but forever challenged existence as individuals it would seem to be on the side of the angels.

Robert Young

Forty-eight years had passed since Mike Roemer and I made Nothing But a Man, so I attended the symposium at Indiana University dedicated both to it and The Spook Who Sat by the Door with great interest and anticipation. This was my first invitation to participate in a formal discussion about the film, and it was highly satisfying to see renewed critical attention after all this time. A most interesting and illuminating experience, the symposium demonstrated that a piece of work no longer belongs to its creators once it’s out in the world. Of course, that is the way it should be. The discussions and comments were relevant and thoughtful and reflected the myriad of personal experiences and insights of the speakers. Nothing But a Man was first exhibited at the Venice Film Festival in the fall of 1964 (where it received two major awards) and in New York City at the New York Film Festival later that fall. Its enthusiastic reception at the festivals led to an agreement with a New York distributor and its theatrical release on Christmas Eve at the Sutton theater in New York City. It was widely reviewed and publicized yet, while most of the reviews were favorable, it had a limited theatrical release. Black audiences were not truly welcome in many theaters across the country at this time, particularly theaters in the South where the film had little distribution. At its exhibition at the Sutton, Mike Roemer and I were appalled that it was being promoted as an art film. The advertisements used the Greek masks for comedy and tragedy rather than photos of the two black actors, Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, who were the stars of the film, but our complaints had no effect. The distribution and exhibition was completely 40

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1. Duff and Josie. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

out of our hands, and our opinions were rejected as being neither commercial nor feasible for getting a large audience. For the record, Nothing But a Man was not a financial success for the investors and its creators. The investors were friends, and most investments were less than $1,000. The only industry investor was my brother, Irwin Young, who became one of the producers and the largest investor in the film. Du Art Film Laboratories, his company, invested more than $60,000 in services and later extended credit to help us finish the film in its postproduction. The film cost $230,000 to make. Though Mike and I raised $190,000 we were left with a personal debt of $40,000, which took us several years to pay off. We each took only $5,000 from the budget for our work during the two years it took us to write and make the film. I’m not saying this with any regret, and we never felt sorry for ourselves. On the contrary, what we learned and experienced enriched us, particularly our relations with our very talented actors. Things don’t just happen. They come out of conditions that spawn them and 1962 was a critical time in the world. The Cold War was at its

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height and the United States was experiencing increasing racial confrontation and ferment. Under these circumstances, why would two white, middle-class filmmakers, who had never made a narrative feature film, and who had not grown up in the South, make one set in the South about a black man and a black woman? And if they did manage to create a story, what would it be about? How and where would they find and develop it? And if they did manage to create a story, how would they get the money to make it? In order to answer these questions, I need to relate some of our personal history and the circumstances that propelled us into making the film. Mike Roemer was born in Berlin, Germany, and as a teenager in the late 1930s his family sent him on a Children’s Transport train to England, where he went to school during the war years, thus escaping the destruction of most of European Jewry. Later, he attended Harvard College, where we met and became friends. I was born in New York City into a Jewish family. When I was five years old, my family moved to Long Island, and I was raised in a middle-class, predominantly Christian community. Though my family, like Mike’s, was not religious, as a young man, I was confused about my identity. I wondered what about being a Jew made me different from my Christian friends, and why couldn’t I play with Mary Howard, the girl I liked who lived across the street? Questions like that increased my sensitivity to what I perceived to be injustice. Beyond my own experience of difference, I have strong childhood memories of black men working in chain gangs, guarded by men carrying guns, and the signs on water fountains and bathrooms in the South that said “No Colored.” Those images were powerful and stayed with me. Later, when I went to MIT as a freshman in 1941, I was aware that I was there under a quota system that was intended to limit the number of Jewish students. At the time, I understood and accepted that those were the facts of life. Unlike Mike Roemer’s, my parents were both born in the United States. My mother was a homemaker while my father had been a cameraman and a film editor before founding Du Art Film Laboratories in New York City. Having graduated from high school when I was fifteen, I went straight on to MIT because my father wanted me to be an engineer and help him in his business. But MIT was not for me, and after a year and

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a half of study, I joined the navy and served in the Pacific for two years during World War II as a photographer’s mate. In New Guinea, I had my first encounters with people of color and people who were from a very different culture than mine. I personally found the experience liberating. But at the same time, I found that my friendship with the indigenous people I brought into our camp led to conflicts with my navy shipmates. These experiences in the Pacific not only sensitized me to issues of race and social difference, but they also opened my mind to new possibilities, and after the war, I went to Harvard College with the idea that I would eventually make films and live a life of adventure. Now fast forward to 1960, when I was invited to join NBC’s major public affairs program, NBC White Paper. The show made four films each year, narrated by Chet Huntley, and I made four of the first eight films. Having been invited to join the White Paper group with the understanding that I would be involved in deciding what films I would make, we agreed that I would make a film about the changes and upheavals that were taking place in the South. I headed to Fayette County, Tennessee, a place where black people were trying to vote for the first time in what had always been a strictly white Democratic primary election. Close to Memphis and bordering Mississippi, Fayette County is in the deep heart of the Old South. As was routine across the South in the early 1960s, the whites of Fayette County engaged in wholesale efforts to deprive black citizens of their democratic and constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. Banks refused to lend money to black farmers who registered to vote; sharecroppers who tried to vote were evicted from their cabins and land; there were drive-by shootings intended to intimidate and prohibit black people who wanted to vote; poll taxes that had never been collected were now suddenly being called due. The situation was ugly and full of potential violence. When I arrived, I introduced myself to the sheriff, telling him that I had come to make a public affairs film for NBC about the historic events that were taking place. A big, burly man, he leaned back in his chair with his feet up on the desk and his gun at his side. After hearing me announce why I was there, he responded, “You’re a New York liberal Jew, ain’t you?” I had to agree. His deputy smirked and stared at me. He also was leaning

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back in his chair against the wall. A wanted poster above him had a picture of the chief justice of the Supreme Court and stated in large letters “Impeach Earl Warren for Dangerous Alien Sedition.” Notwithstanding that both the sheriff and his deputy could have been selected by Central Casting, this was not a movie – at least, not yet. In the end, I spent several weeks in Fayette County. In addition to attending the first NA ACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] meeting that took place, I interviewed countless black residents who told me about both their hopes and their fears. They also warned me not to eat in restaurants for fear of having arsenic put in my food. I was shepherded around town, lying on the floor of a car. It became obvious that there was no way that I could take a film crew into that environment without endangering not only them but also the people we filmed. This was a big disappointment, for I was determined to tell a story that would capture what was happening in the South. After much thought, I suggested that we tell the story of the sit-in movement, using Nashville as a model, and that is what we did. The completed documentary was called, simply, Sit-In. During the making of Sit-In, I met many people who inspired me by their courage in bearing witness to the intolerable conditions they faced, and after the film had been shown, I wanted to continue making films about the struggles that were taking place in the South. My boss at NBC, however, said that we had made our film about race and that was it. That, at least for the time being, ended my opportunity to document what was happening in the South. What brought it all back into focus for me was the Angolan uprising of 1961. Many people were killed, both black and white, and refugees from Angola poured into the newly liberated Congo. As thousands of Portuguese soldiers arrived to quell the uprising, a full-scale war ensued. While Portuguese sources claimed that white plantation owners were being slaughtered by rebel soldiers, African refugees, fleeing the country, said they were being brutalized by the Portuguese administration, forced to work under miserable slave-like conditions on tea plantations and in mines, and were routinely subjected to brutal punishments and even executions. I saw this tragedy as an extension of worldwide racism and economic exploitation and related it to what was happening in the United States. I

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thought that if I couldn’t report what was taking place in the American South, perhaps I could pursue a similar story of the struggle for freedom and social justice in Angola. I talked NBC into letting me go to Africa to try to tell the story of what was happening over there, just as I tried to tell the story of Fayette County. I managed to sneak into Angola and walked four hundred miles with a band of rebels behind the Portuguese lines. The resulting film, Angola: Journey to a War, was shown on NBC and earned the 1961 [George] Polk Award for Radio and Television Reporting, just as Sit-In had done in 1960. The Polk Awards were important not so much because they recognized the work, but more because they helped persuade NBC White Paper to approve my next project, a story about endemic poverty in Sicily. And it was in Sicily that the seed for Nothing But a Man was planted. Danilo Dolci’s Report from Palermo was a remarkable book about the lives of the very poor who lived in a slum known as the “Well of Death.” As soon as I read it, I knew that I had to go there and make a film about those people. I told my boss at NBC that I wanted to make a documentary that would be situational and experiential and that would allow the audience more freedom to discover for themselves the meaning of what they were seeing, rather than depending on the authoritative voice of a narrator. Though he gave me his permission, as later events demonstrated, he didn’t understand (or perhaps I didn’t communicate properly) what I intended to do. However, with the project under way, I asked my good friend Michael Roemer to come with me to Sicily. We shared a similar aesthetic and political sensibility and having wanted very much to work together, we thought that this might provide a great opportunity. Mike and I spent an intense month filming in the slum quarter that Danilo Dolci had written about in his book and then returned to New York to edit and complete our film. During the editing, we frequently disagreed and argued with my boss at NBC White Paper about the structure of the film. We prevailed in the battles, but as it turned out we lost the war. Mike and I had shot and structured the film in a situational manner, allowing the audience to observe the behavior and actions of the characters. This positioned the audience to empathize with the characters and make up their own minds about the meaning of what they saw, rather than being told what to think. The film left its viewers not only moved, but also on occasion disturbed and asking important questions

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about the role of the government and the church and how this situation could be allowed to exist in a modern European society. This was quite deliberate. Both Mike and I tried to avoid making straight statements since they might be reductive. We didn’t want to tell the audience anything, but rather have them discover the larger social issues and ask questions about them through their insights into the concrete acts they witnessed. I learned from my experiences in a news organization that encouraging or allowing the audience the freedom to decide meaning for themselves conflicts with the need to manage the news and the audience’s response. While completing our film, during the mixing of the sound and picture and just three days before our national air date, NBC decided to cancel the showing. They stopped the mix and the company police took possession of all of the elements of the film. We were told that our film was too powerful for the American public. Because there were no statements in the film, our boss and his colleagues were left with such uneasy questions as: What is this film saying? Is it subversive? What is it saying by implication about the church and the government? No one was allowed to see the film. This led to a series of arguments that we couldn’t win, and Mike and I were fired. This was a devastating outcome for both of us. We felt that we had made a beautiful and meaningful film, and it was taken away. We vowed that we would never again make a film that others could destroy. We were now blacklisted by all of the networks because NBC had fired us, and no one could see the film that we had made. We were devastated. What could we do, but make another film? We decided we would make a film that no one could censor or take away from us. It would have to be a fictional film, because documentaries were controlled by the Public Affairs departments at all of the networks, and they certainly wouldn’t show a film made by us. So, what story could we tell? It had to be a story that we were passionate about and that related to the injustice we felt that had been done to us. I knew that Mike felt as I did about the black Americans who were standing up in the South for their democratic rights and for justice in spite of great personal danger and sacrifice. We identified with that struggle. This would be the arena where we could make a film about the basic rights of all human beings and where we could sublimate our own feelings about racism, intolerance, and social justice into a story that was bigger than ourselves. Neither of us had ever made a fictional feature

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film, but that wasn’t going to stop us. We managed to raise $15,000 from family and friends and headed south in Mike’s old car (the very same one, incidentally, that Duff drives in our movie) using the contacts that I had made while making Sit-In. We were passed from one black family to the next from Columbus, South Carolina, all the way down to New Orleans. We were listening, observing, asking questions, and writing as we went. It was a kind of underground railroad but heading south instead of north. As we traveled through the South, we began to slowly understand a lot about the fabric of black life. We learned much from how Southern blacks responded to us upon first meeting and much more as we were able to earn their trust. We visited cabins where the cotton came right up to the porch. We saw very few black men with decent jobs or working in positions of authority. We learned that fathers didn’t want their daughters to work in a white home, lest they be abused. If families could afford it, daughters were the ones sent to college. Perhaps a daughter could become a teacher? A son couldn’t get a decent job, anyway. The larger white society did not want black men in positions of authority. For a son, there would only be menial labor in the fields or work as a yard boy. While we traveled in the South, we were aware of the events that were featured on television and written about in the press. It was a time of great social conflict. James Meredith was enrolled in Ole Miss, but it took federal marshals and troops to enforce his legal right of attendance. Sheriff Bull Connor used police dogs and water hoses in Birmingham. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed. Governor Wallace tried to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. Four little girls were killed in a church bombing in Birmingham. Mike and I were aware of what was happening in the South, but we wanted to focus on what was not in the press or on TV. We wanted to tell about the lives of people we encountered, about people who were not in the news. We wanted to deal with the systemic pressure and cruelty of a system engrained into the lives of the people we encountered. We wanted to express the striving for freedom that ran like an underground current and was finally breaking through the hardened layers of fear and repression. We wanted to express this in the intimacy of a relation between a man and a woman who are in love and want to have a family. It’s a common observation that history tends to deal with important characters and significant events. In our film, Josie and Duff are ordinary

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2. Workers at the lumber mill. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

people. They are not associated with the important events of the time, yet they are people who express in their everyday behavior the currents of their time. Our focus as storytellers was on the personal situations Duff and Josie were facing in their lives, and in the different ways that, through those situations, the internalized forces of the larger society might be expressed. When Josie is pregnant and Duff can’t get a job, he becomes furious when she suggests that she could earn money by doing housework in a white home. His feelings of weakness, frustration, and vulnerability turn his anger against her. It can’t go in any other direction. He is acutely aware of the vulnerability of a black woman in a white home as a reality that has existed for generations. Duff knows that the black workers in the factory are afraid to speak up and understands all too well why they are scared and passive. Duff’s own father and the black workers in the factory are products of the system; their behavior has been informed by living in this system that has black exploitation as its very raison d’être. As individuals they know the rules and what behavior is expected of them. In a world filled

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3. Josie pushed down to the floor by Duff. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

with the literal and physical signs of discrimination and apartheid, the system doesn’t always have to be expressed or made visible in order to be enforced. Everyone already knows his or her place within the hierarchy. The behavior we see in our characters reflects the social forces that we don’t see. The relationship between Duff and Josie is fictional. But even if it weren’t, it would be too insignificant for historical preservation. The assumptions underlying their relationship are the basic forces of life in the South at that time. To me, when Duff knocks Josie down and leaves, that is as significant an event as the bombing of a church or the hosing and arresting of protestors. In that small space and in those small actions, the powerful forces of society are at work. Our narrative introduces the audience to a series of situations that will position them as witnesses to Duff and Josie’s behavior, thereby offering insights into not only character and motivation, but the greater social forces with which they contend. At the same time Nothing But a Man wants the audience to become empathetically involved in the

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4. Duff and Lee with Duff’s dying father. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

characters’ behavior. A prime example of this is Duff’s relationship with his father. Duff’s father illustrates an alternate fate for Duff. He warns his son not to get involved with the woman he loves because it will make him vulnerable and tells him that his mother used to lay for her boss. He advises his son to stay light on his feet and keep moving in order to survive, so whites can’t get to him. Submission to the pressures leads to the destruction of a man’s psyche. In the end, when Duff’s father dies, the sadness and emptiness of their relationship is further revealed when the funeral director asks Duff, “How old was he?” Duff answers “I don’t know. Around forty-six.” “And his profession?” “He worked around.” In taking the audience into situations and allowing them to have their own insights and feelings, rather than making straightforward declarative statements, our film bears a strong resemblance to the Italian neorealist films that influenced me when I was a young filmmaker. Like Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) our focus is on the dispossessed,

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the marginal, those struggling to maintain their lives in the face of poverty and oppression. In doing so, we tried to orchestrate the facts: not indicating, not telling, not playing results, using indirection and peripheral vision, trusting the audience, and staying in the moment. This was our aesthetic in the making of Nothing But a Man. Like Google Earth, as one recedes from a place, the smaller features are lost and only the larger features can still be seen. From a distance, what is remembered of the 1960s are the killings, the bombings, the assassinations, Bull Connor, Martin Luther King Jr., and so on. Mike and I were interested in going in the opposite direction. We wanted to get to the personal, the intimate, and to show that even here the dominant society encroaches on the private life. Josie’s love for Duff proves to be a trap. Loving her makes him vulnerable. And destroyed characters, like his neighbor Barney, are reminders of what happens if a person succumbs and internalizes the oppressive social system in which he lives. His manhood is destroyed. Nothing But a Man tells the story of a man who cannot and will not sacrifice or diminish his sense of self, which is almost impossible in a racist society. Duff asserts himself by claiming his child and coming home to the woman he loves. He will persist in his behavior, no matter what the cost. And the cost could be high, perhaps even fatal. But at this moment, he has reclaimed and affirmed himself and his soul is free. That is why Duff whispers to Josie when he returns to her with his child “I feel so free inside.” And he is. And our hope for the future is that the Duffs of the world will prevail. Note Robert Young’s statement first appeared in the special Close-Up section on Nothing

But a Man that appeared in Black Camera 3, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 91–100.

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John Henry said to his captain “A man, he ain’t nothing but a man, Before I’d let that steam drill beat me down, Oh, I’d die with the hammer in my hand.” “John Henry, Steel Dr iving Man”

Demanding Dignity: Nothing But a Man Bruce Dick and Mark Vogel In his January 1963 inaugur al addr ess as gover nor of Alabama, George C. Wallace proclaimed, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”1 Within days of Wallace’s declaration, disturbances broke out in towns and cities across the state, including Birmingham, where, according to an earlier newspaper report, authorities had used “the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus” to ensure racial separation.2 By April, Birmingham police had arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent ministers for staging sit-ins against discrimination. Riots by local racists broke out and federal troops were sent in to restore order. In spite of military assistance, recalcitrant whites managed to dynamite the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. When it was all over, four black youth lay dead – one was eleven years old. Released in 1964, Nothing But a Man is set in a rural town near Birmingham during this time of explosive racial tension. The film stars Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson, a young, independent-minded black man searching for dignity in an oppressive environment. White bigots enter Duff’s world at leisure, demanding that he live by the demeaning strictures of Jim Crow. But while the threat of violence serves as an ominous backdrop, at the story’s center is the fragile relationship between Duff and Josie (played by Abbey Lincoln). Duff’s daily concerns, including his search for meaningful employment and his newfound desire to connect with his alcoholic father, help shape and define his destiny. 55

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This focus on the daily lives of “average” African Americans at the height of the civil rights movement makes Nothing But a Man a unique and important film. Folklorist William E. Lightfoot suggests the “film is clearly inspired by the John Henry legend’s universal theme of an ordinary man behaving heroically against seemingly unbeatable odds.”3 Robert Young, who cowrote the script with Michael Roemer, the film’s director, speaks to this universality in a recent interview: “We wanted to get away from the issues and what people were listening to on the radio. We felt that the most important thing that we could do would not be to talk about Duff’s situation from the civil rights point of view, but to make a film that would take everyone into the fabric of the life of a black man – and subsequently the black woman he marries, and their eventual family. So that anyone viewing the film could understand and empathize with this character, could feel with him, yet come up against what he had come up against.”4 The evolution of Nothing But a Man stands as a testament to how far Young and Roemer were willing to go to make their film. In 1961, two years before the picture’s release, Young and Roemer shot a controversial documentary, Cortile Cascino, depicting families struggling against poverty in Sicily. The film includes stark images of dying babies, deplorable living conditions, and rampant crime in the street. Three days before the documentary’s scheduled release on NBC White Paper, the film was shelved. NBC argued that the film contained images too graphic for the American public. The cancellation both enraged and humiliated the filmmakers, who between them already had won prestigious Polk Awards and other honors for earlier work. The failed project and the pressure to compromise their principles also strengthened the bond between the two men. According to Young, this adversity gave them “character.” In the same interview, he observes, “When we lost the Sicily battle, we lost the most precious work we had ever done-­a film that had come from the deepest place within. To reclaim ourselves, to redeem ourselves, we needed to stand up as men. We took those feelings and said, ‘Look, we’re going to make something nobody can take away from us. We’re going to make something that is ours.’” That “something” became Nothing But a Man.

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For subject matter, the filmmakers turned to the ongoing racial problem in the American South, a topic Young had explored earlier in SitIn (1960), a documentary illustrating the complex emotions surrounding the integration of public facilities in Nashville, Tennessee. Using Roemer’s semi-autobiographical screenplay about a man searching for his estranged father to structure their drama, the two men ventured through the Deep South to gather material for their script. Beginning in Columbia, South Carolina, at the home of a minister whose daughter Young had met while filming Sit-In, the filmmakers drove through territory unseen by most whites – talking and eating with blacks, and even staying in their homes. They saw firsthand not only the difficulties for black men in the workforce, but they also witnessed black men and women in love, as functioning members of a nurturing and healthy black community. “It wasn’t just about what was happening in the news,” Young argued in his interview. “We wanted to make a film that exposed the basic kind of social structure and human relations that really did exist in the South, and that still do exist in some places.” Four months after their journey began, Young and Roemer had the framework for a film that would capture both the strengths and frailties of black Americans in the segregated South of the 1960s. In Nothing But a Man, Duff is a Korean War veteran who has returned home to rural Alabama after discovering that conditions for African Americans in the North are no better than they are in the Deep South. Duff is seen in the opening sequence of scenes with his all-male friends, working as a section hand laying ties on the railroad. The strenuous labor offers a steady $80-a-week paycheck, as well as social stability, but both come at the expense of the community. Working for the railroad means constant travel and the unlikelihood of putting down roots. The railroad section hands are on the outside of civilized communities, looking in, far removed from their birthplaces, their families, and any children they might have fostered. The conflict between making attachments and living in a community versus living alone without significant attachments continues throughout the film. Later in the film: Duff’s derelict father tells him: “Ya gotta stay light on your feet or you won’t make it.” Yet, from the beginning, the sense of freedom provided by the

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transient railroad life is not satisfying for Duff. His military experiences in Korea and Japan have provided glimpses of a better life with respect and dignity. This inability to settle for something less, and his staunch individualism, is seen whenever Duff interacts with others. In an early scene, when Duff and his male “family” visit a seedy juke joint, the contrasting outlooks of Duff and his fellow workers become evident. Duff is not as coarse as others on the crew are. When Frankie, an outspoken crew member, verbally abuses the local prostitute at the bar, it is Duff who helps her maintain dignity. He tells Frankie, “Quit ridin’ her,” and buys her a beer. Then Duff, alone, leaves the juke joint. As he walks the dark streets, the popular music from the jukebox fades, and the strains of gospel singing from a nearby church emerge. Duff is drawn to this church revival, where he sees “righteous” members of the community singing and praying. As Duff witnesses the inspired congregation from the church door, the sharp contrast with the harsh bar scene suggests the gulf between these worlds. When Duff is introduced to Josie Dawson, who is preparing food for the worshippers, he quickly learns Josie is a college-educated teacher with an extended family, who lives in a community of church members who know her well. Josie talks freely about her minister father and her life in the town; in contrast, all talk of Duff’s family and his past is fragmented and hidden. When Josie asks, “Your folks live there [in Birmingham]?” Duff replies starkly, “No. My mother’s dead.” Their differences are further reinforced when Duff tells Josie that he “never had much use for hell-howlers.” The contrast in how Josie and Duff are viewed by the outside world is also made evident in this scene. She has a profession, an education, a respectable family, and a place in the community. His freewheeling, working-class existence differs from Josie’s middle-class, professional life set within the conventions of family and community. To the white community in this small town, Duff, as an unattached “outsider” male with a job, is a potential troublemaker. Knowing how others might see his independent status, Duff bluntly confronts Josie: “Look, I don’t know what you been told ’bout section gangs, but how ’bout seein’ me sometime?” Although their first encounter is brief and inconclusive, as if these

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disparate worlds could never come together, a connection between the less sophisticated Duff and a more educated Josie has occurred. They agree to meet again. As the scene fades, Josie moves toward the church service; Duff remains on the outside, in the darkness. The contrast of Duff’s long-term romantic goals and those of his coworkers is made starkly evident in the next scene in the bunk car when the men talk about Duff’s new acquaintance. The section crew reacts as if the only reason to be with a woman is to have quick sex. One says, “Man, why ’you messin’ around with a gal like that? You won’t get no place.” Another quickly responds, “Just get her drunk.” A third worker says, “Hell, they’re all the same.” The oldest crewmember, Pop, revealing that he has been married and has a sixteen-year-old daughter, joins the chorus of skepticism, claiming, “All a colored woman wants is your money.” The crew sees any attempt to “settle” into a family life as largely a futile enterprise. The conversation in the bunk car is juxtaposed with a view of Josie’s living arrangements in her father’s home. Dressed in a tie at the dining room table, Reverend Dawson is reading the newspaper. Later, during the meal, Josie’s stepmother talks bluntly about Josie’s tentative relationship with Duff. She states, “Well, there’s just one thing you can be looking for in a man like that.” Her father reinforces this point of view, suggesting the relationship has no future. At this stage, the relationship seems to have little chance of growing. If Duff and Josie wish to bridge the gulf between their worlds, they will have to do so without the help of others. When the film returns to the roadhouse juke joint and the smokehung floor, a “different” Josie is enjoying herself with Duff. Clearly, despite her staid appearance, Josie is a complex character, able to thrive in diverse environments. Recognizing her many sides, Duff comments on her dancing: “That’s pretty good for a preacher’s daughter.” He then asks in his outspoken fashion, “So what you doin’ with a cat like me in a joint like this?” Josie responds to his question by saying, “Most of the men I know – they’re kind of sad.” Something at the core of the black men Josie has met has been wounded or destroyed; she knows from firsthand experience how black men trying to function in a segregated world with few economic opportunities can be hurt in the process. She has seen how

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oppression affects all aspects of their lives, including romantic relationships. For Duff and Josie, this brief exchange foreshadows an ominous future. When the scene shifts to an ongoing conversation in his borrowed car, Duff explains the benefits of his “cutoff” life on the section crew. The job “[keeps] me out of trouble . . . I don’t get on so well most places.” When Josie states that she would like to continue to see him, he says, “Well, either we’re gonna hit the hay or get married. Now, you don’t want to hit the hay, and I don’t want to get married.” Duff’s harsh response only reaffirms the gulf between their worlds. Josie responds by commenting on his “primitive ways.” As Duff and Josie struggle to make sense of their newfound attraction, two young white men approach the car. They shine flashlights in the car and comment on the lack of overt signs of sexuality – as if that is all they could expect from a black couple. They exhibit their ownership over the couple by shining the flashlight deliberately across Josie’s breasts. After the men drive off screeching and hollering, Duff says about whites, “Don’t sound human, do they?” The scene with the two young white men reinforces that any relationship between Duff and Josie must take into consideration a white world that undermines their sense of dignity. Duff and Josie do not have the option of simply falling in rapturous love, oblivious to the viewpoints of others. Knowing the history of black-white relationships in this town is essential to understanding these characters. On the way home, Josie reveals a history of violence perpetuated by the white community, including a lynching of a black man only eight years before. Josie notes quietly that her father was aware of who was responsible for the murder, but he did nothing about it. In this scene, the contrast between father and daughter is reinforced. Though she loves her father, Josie does not approve of his failure to confront the evils of the community – or to even admit these evils are still alive and well. She cannot accept that her father is simply content if the evils remain relatively hidden from public discussion. For Josie, Duff’s willingness to talk about black-white relations suggests a willingness to honestly confront evils. Nothing in this scene suggests that Josie and Duff can stop the racism in this town. Both aim for a less ambitious goal – simply being allowed to maintain dignity amid oppression.

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When Duff and Josie part after their first date, their future together is uncertain. The scenes up to this point reveal the gulfs between this independent and thoughtful black man and the intelligent and beautiful preacher’s daughter Duff falls for. They also vividly show the dangers. The white racism Duff and Josie experience in this less-than-ideal town is a backdrop that helps the narrative unfold. In this community, where young white men openly harass black couples at night, where potential violence is more than a memory of a recent lynching, the threat posed by the white community seems to make any attempt to construct a healthy relationship nearly impossible. Yet, at this point, Duff has made no commitment to settling in a community. He still freely travels from town to town with black crew members who choose to settle nowhere. The view of the unencumbered black man as uncultivated is reinforced in the next brief scene as the section crew is shown hunting rabbits in the tall grass, killing them with large clubs. The men are not portrayed as brute killers here, but rather as resourceful and adept survivors who have learned how to use available resources. The ability of these men – who live outside the confines of towns and cities – to make do, contrasts with the previous church social scene where food was abundant and carefully supervised by women. The rabbit-hunting scene suggests these men live outside the community of comfort. Despite the differences of Duff’s and Josie’s lifestyles, Duff quickly moves to keep his budding relationship growing. Visiting Josie at work, he explains that having been in the military and having experienced Asian culture, he briefly escaped the clutches of systematic racism. Duff states that he almost “didn’t come back.” He reveals that he has also lived in the North, although he tells Josie that “it ain’t that good up there neither.” In this same visit, Duff sees firsthand the difference in attitudes between himself (the unencumbered traveler), and the reverend, who has spent his life cultivating a community under the cloud of oppressive racism. Inside Josie’s home, Duff watches Josie’s father interacting with the white superintendent of schools. While the superintendent conveys the impression that blacks and whites live in equality, Duff senses the compromises that both Reverend Dawson and Josie have been forced to make under the direction of white leaders. Duff, at this point, does not

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feel that coerced compromise need ever occur. When the superintendent leaves, Dawson tells Duff, “I think if you tried livin’ in a town like this, instead of running free and easy, you’d soon change your tune.” After Duff disagrees, Reverend Dawson says, “And since we’re talking, my wife and I don’t want you hanging around our daughter.” Walking out to the porch, Duff tells Josie, “Hell, I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I been thinking.” Despite this adversity, Duff leaves the Dawson home determined to deal with his young, illegitimate son, who lives in nearby Birmingham. Though Duff has not seen his son in several years, his growing relationship with Josie has reinforced his desire to deal with his past. The love story grows when Josie arranges to accompany Duff on the bus to Birmingham. When Duff visits his son and sees the squalor his child is living in, he feels guilty, and the audience knows that his guilt hurts. His son, distant and emotionally withdrawn, obviously does not know him. The boy has been left with a stranger, his mother having abandoned him and moved to Detroit. Observing his son, Duff sees him growing up unwanted, neglected, without a mother or father, and recognizes that he too has grown up in a similar environment. Ironically, as Duff confronts his failures as a father, he is reintroduced to his own father, who is played with emotional intensity by Julius Harris. His father is an alcoholic who is abusive to his girlfriend, Lee (Gloria Foster). Though his father is clearly dependent upon Lee, he is disdainful when Duff suggests he may marry Josie. “Is she good in the hay?” he asks. “No point marryin’ her just to find out.” In this scene, Duff sees the “history’’ etched into his father’s persona: his father has been mangled, literally, by his work and wounded inside by a grasping white power structure. His father tells him, “You ain’t got a chance without dough. They take it all away from you.” Maintaining pride and self-confidence, Duff realizes, will be difficult as the litany of events takes its toll. His father tells him more than Duff wishes to know: “Your mother used to lay for her boss, boy. Did you know that? . . . I’m tellin’ you, boy, keep away from marriage.” Like Josie’s father, Duff’s father – left arm hanging limp, his spirit consumed in alcohol, and broken – is only “half a man.” Duff’s father concludes the exchange by shouting, “Okay, boy, beat it.” Duff

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leaves, knowing he will get no help from his father. He is left on his own to salvage a life. Duff’s visit helps him measure himself against these two father figures. Seeing his own son makes Duff’s role as a bad father even more self-evident. Duff’s encounters with his son and father convince him to ask Josie to marry him. When he returns, he asks her upfront, without the benefit of small talk. “Look, baby, I don’t know ’bout you, but it’s the right thing for me. I just know it is. So, what d’you say?” Josie accepts by saying she wants a “small scene.” Though Josie’s acceptance is heartening to Duff, his news is not embraced by his fellow workers. Their reaction to his dream of marrying and settling down is shocking. They react like adolescents: “Musta knocked her up.” They ask incredulously, “What’re you gonna get out of it, huh?” Earlier, Duff would not have known how to respond. But having seen his own father and the future of his son, Duff has an answer for them: ‘‘A whole lot like a home.” But their conception of home life is paltry, and the scene fades with one of the men asking, “You’re gonna sit at home the rest of your life?” This mundane vision of married life as a crippling attachment is not easy to shake. In Duff and Josie’s first home, the rooms are rundown, full of discarded furniture, and have dilapidated ceilings. Outside the window, they view a woman toiling over laundry, surrounded by three children and her husband, who is stretched out on the porch steps. Duff and Josie are framed inside the window, its broken shards of glass a suggestion of what may be the future of their own family. Noting the neighbors’ kids playing in the junk-filled yard, Duff says to Josie, “Guess you want a house full of pickaninnies, too, huh?” When Josie asks about his boy, Duff is defensive and unsure. Although he has made the first steps, Duff has no illusions about the potential difficulties of creating a healthy, productive family. He knows that simply getting married will not ensure happiness and economic success. If what he sees of his neighbors’ plight is indicative of their future, their marriage may lead to poverty and frustration. Yet, Duff embraces Josie’s vision of a nurturing marriage. He has a powerful ally in Josie, who smiles at the obstacles, already planning how to remake their dilapidated home. She has a vision for what their marriage can produce. We are less sure of Duff’s staying power.

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In the workplace (that facet of Southern culture most rigidly controlled by whites), Duff faces difficulties that threaten his newfound happiness. In his first days on the job, when Duff refuses to smile at a white man’s condescending humor, his stance is the beginning of his troubles. A black coworker tells Duff, “You want to get along, act the nigger.” Duff answers, “Like hell,” and says, “You know, if you fellows stuck together ’stead of letting them walk all over you, they might not try it.” Another worker responds with pessimism: “They been doing it all my life.” Though Duff will eventually be fired from this job, he is no in-your-face radical of a civil rights movement. Yet, as Desson Howe suggests, “[Duff’s] powerful self-restraint speaks volumes to these [white] men [who confront him and try to put him in his place]; they recognize a spirit that won’t be broken. Without realizing it, Duff is heralding the coming decade of black power and self-determination. He’s also learning about himself.”5 Though the loving sense of play between Josie and Duff sets an intimate tone, their love is tested constantly. The film suggests that even love, that most essential emotion, is affected by the economic and social racism in their community. In a childlike and sensuous outdoor scene soon after their wedding, Josie and Duff seem secure in future planning. As they playfully shadowbox on their lawn, the good time and music is interrupted when their neighbor’s wife – the same woman seen earlier washing laundry­-berates her husband for being worthless. Knowing all too well how his neighbor could be beaten into depression sobers Duff, who fears he could end up in similar straits. He says to Josie: “It sure scares you, a guy like that – sittin’ out on his porch, doin’ nothing. I seen hundreds of them all my life.” These scenes provide an edge that tempers their heartfelt love. Despite his difficulties with work-related racism, Duff is bolstered by his newfound love. Duff and Josie’s quiet intimacy in their modest home contrasts with the “bad town’’ outside, where potentially violent racism is a daily reality. Though nothing is easy for this young couple, they are not defeated by this adversity. Nurtured by his new family life, Duff invites his friends – the railroad section hands – over for dinner. Duff tells the men about his new in-town coworkers: “Those guys are scared. Guess

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they’ve never known nothin’ but takin’ it.” He sees a world where steady workers can support their families without harassment. He does not seek friendship with his white coworkers or equal status. What he seeks is more basic: respect and dignity. This dinner scene demonstrates how far Duff has moved from the lifestyle and values of the section hands. He has taken on responsibility for another and, in the process, has gained support and love. He has moved from a rootless railroad existence to the complexity of family life. When the men prepare to leave, Frankie (who has belittled Duff the most about his new relationship) says, “You got a good thing, man.” Duff knows well that threats against success remain. His role models – ­including his father – have shown him how strong men can be devoured by adversity. When Josie talks to Duff about having babies, she sees the fear in his eyes. Although Duff is unsure he can maintain dignity within the confines of small-town life, Josie, the optimist and rock of strength, pushes for more. Josie confronts him with the same words Duff speaks when he asks her to marry him: “Don’t look so scared.” With confidence they will survive, Josie says, “We’ll be all right.” Despite the gains Duff makes by marrying Josie, he has more ground to cover. When Josie inquires once again about his boy, Duff is irritated, for he knows he has failed as a father. But Josie’s optimism and determination control the scene, and Duff tells her, “Baby, we’re going to put a whole lot of little kids into this world. Hell, we’ll swamp ’em.” If Duff and Josie could live removed from the world, their love would surely grow each day. But the outside world threatens the relationship daily. When Duff loses his job because he will not bow to his supervisor’s humiliating coercion, Duff takes his frustration out on Josie. When she responds sympathetically, he brushes her off, telling her: “I don’t like bein’ mothered . . . Jesus, baby, leave me alone, will ya?” In another moment of foreshadowing, Duff tries to tell Josie of his fears: “I’m telling you, baby, maybe we better get out of here.” His frustrations threaten to undermine their newfound stability. Yet, now, Duff is no longer alone, and his wife counters his rising tide of hysteria, refusing to let him go. On this occasion, Duff and Josie are able to laugh their way out of the despair. At this moment, his love (with or without a job) is enough. Duff

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laughs, vowing to fight on. With bravado he says that he will stay; he will not give the whites the privilege of seeing him leave town. Despite the strength Duff and Josie give each other, the bleakness of Duff’s choices close around him. Having left the comparative freedom of the railroad, he must live within the brutal rules of the racist small town. The next scenes show Duff looking in vain for work at the restaurant, at the other mill, at the grocer’s. He continues to apply for nearly any available employment. He even considers the slave-like conditions of picking cotton. On his job hunt, he meets a former coworker, who explains that his fellow black workers at the sawmill were at fault for not sticking by Duff because they were not used to “seein’ anyone stand up.” Duff’s quiet restraint and his determination to withstand humiliation mark him as a mentor for those who have sacrificed dignity to maintain their jobs. Duff, however, has no desire to be the leader of a movement. As Duff’s job possibilities grow bleaker, his frustration and fear grow. When he must ask Josie for money to fix the car in front of women in the beauty parlor, he is embarrassed that he cannot be the husband he wants to be. It does not help that Josie understands the difficulties faced by black men seeking work. The fact that black women find it easier to maintain employment does not bolster Duff’s self-esteem. Josie explains to Duff: “It’s not as hard on a girl. They’re not afraid of us.” When Josie offers to support the family, Duff responds bitterly. “Sure baby,” he answers sarcastically. “Fact, I don’t ever have to work no more. When that baby comes, I can just stay home and send you back to school.” As reviewer Chris Norton notes, Duff’s attempts to deal with futility are the controlling force in the film. “Duff equates his masculinity with being able to work and support his family. Without work, he feels he is nothing, not even a man. His frustration arises out of his inability to hold a job in a white-controlled environment and still assert his right as an equal human being.”6 Knowing that other black men have long been denied economic opportunity does not help Duff adjust to his frustration. He has seen the world, and he cannot passively accept the chains of the past. The image of his neighbor, beaten and depressed on his porch, haunts Duff. Living with his futility leaves Duff with his self-esteem shattered. As a result, he

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lashes out at the one person trying to keep him strong. He says to Josie, “Stop being so damn understanding.” With self-esteem intimately connected with work and the ability to support a family, failure at work affected all aspects of family life. Robert Young states, “We were looking for the absolute center of what you need to be a man. . . . You can’t be a man if you can’t look the other guy in the eye . . . and you can’t live as a family man if your wife is the only one footing the bill.” Young explains the irony of the film: “So love traps him; love traps the black man. Sometimes fathers leave because they don’t think they have the capacity to live up to being a father.” Fighting white racists is difficult enough, but Duff must also deal with his father-in-law and the black community. Rather than supporting Duff, their words and actions suggest to Duff that dignity and respect may not be attainable. Reverend Dawson openly tells Duff to “make ’em think you’re going along and get what you want.” But Duff is not an actor. He tells his father-in-law, “It ain’t in me.” When Dawson persists, insinuating that Duff’s lack of social skills may be the real problem, Duff lashes out: “Well, at least [Josie] ain’t married to no white man’s nigger. . . . You just half a man!” Duff can only exist as a whole man; his worst fear is that his efforts may leave him as damaged as his father-in-law and his own father are. The reverend knows there is truth in Duff’s assertion and walks out of Duff and Josie’s home, head bowed. Both men know that in a small town, white domination and the threat of violence can control a black man’s public persona. Hatred for the oppressor can be damaging, even if the hatred is justified. Duff asks Josie, “How come you don’t hate their guts?” Josie replies: “I guess I’m not afraid of them . . . just of getting hurt. They can’t touch me inside.” But Duff knows too well how thoughts and fears are connected to white oppression. He responds, “You ain’t never really been a nigger, have you?” Duff has a limit to which he will stoop, and he knows that his inability to find steady work is destroying his marriage. At this point, it is far from clear whether the conflicts faced by Duff will be resolved. As viewers, we are not sure whether the racism and lack of opportunity will destroy the marriage and leave Duff rootless once again, or whether Duff will find the inner strength to accept the love offered by Josie.

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The next scenes suggest that Duff’s overwhelming difficulties will only produce violence and chaos. When his father-in-law helps Duff land a job at a gas station, Duff is determined to quietly do his work. But trouble follows Duff, and when he engages in a verbal scuffle with a white man, the man returns with reinforcements to harass him and ultimately threaten the station owner. “You keep him workin’ here and this place won’t be around.” That night, Duff, in his frustration at being fired, pushes Josie violently to the floor. He tells her, “You’ll be better off without me. I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynchin.’ Maybe they don’t use a knife on you, but they got other ways.” When he storms out of the house, bound for Birmingham, it is unclear whether he will ever return. In Birmingham, Duff unearths more of his past, and in the process confronts his own possible future. Duff arrives in Birmingham just in time to see his father’s last pathetic moments. On the way to the hospital, Duff is lost in thought – perhaps over his son, perhaps over his father and how he, Duff, is becoming like him. Later, as Duff and Lee make funeral arrangements, the undertaker asks the most fundamental questions about Duff’s father’s age and place of birth. Duff cannot provide any answers, nor can he identify his father’s profession. Duff responds, “Well, he worked around.” When asked if there are other family members, Duff responds, “No, just me.” His father’s rootless and hedonistic life has left but a thin connection between father and son. After the funeral, attended only by Duff and Lee, Duff has found new determination. He tells Lee that he will return to Josie and even pick cotton if he has to. He will endure what he must endure. He has not conquered the outside problems, but he has reached an understanding. He has also found strength to face other unfinished problems. When Lee says that Duff’s father was not much of a father, Duff answers, “Who is?” Refusing to relive his father’s aimless lifestyle, he drives directly to his son’s caretaker and picks him up. He will work to create a family, to be what his father was not. Together, he and his son return to Josie, where they have a tearful reunion. Looking to the future, Duff says to Josie with determination, ‘‘Ain’t gonna be easy, but it’s gonna be all right.” The film ends with Duff telling Josie, “Baby, I feel so free inside.” He has found

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a new freedom more permanent than the absence of commitment he experienced on the section gang. He has traded in one kind of freedom for another. In his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the March on Washington in August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” Nothing But a Man was released late in 1964, a year and a half after the March on Washington. In conducting the research for Nothing But a Man, Young and Roemer had seen firsthand the truth of Dr. King’s statement. To realize the significance of the film, one must see Nothing But a Man as one of the first full-length civil rights films, released in small movie theaters in the midst of the maelstrom. But the fact that no overt references to the burgeoning civil rights movement appeared in the movie was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers. Both Young and Roemer were well informed about the burgeoning movement, the confrontations, and the potential for violence. Young had already made Sit-In and Angola, which documented the guerilla war in Angola in the early 1960s. Young and Roemer were not evading the legal and political realities of the civil rights struggle. In fact, the very racial tensions depicted in the film forced the filmmakers to shoot most of Nothing But a Man in the Northeast rather than the South. Young and Roemer were searching to convey what other forums could not show – how racism and lack of economic opportunity affected all aspects of black lives. They knew that simply showing the humanity of the black community was revolutionary for the times. They sought to show a complex black community where, as Judith Crist noted in 1965, “no one is a hero, a villain or a cause but every one is human.”7 They wanted to show how love and dedication could exist despite the harshness of adversity. Thus, as Hal Hinson declared in the Washington Post after the film’s rerelease in 1993, “[The] movie isn’t about racism or prejudice per se. Though it deals with such issues as the shortage of jobs for blacks and the roots of poverty, its focus is not political or sociological. Nothing But a Man is a compassionate film about human problems that’s

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careful to anchor its story not in rhetoric but in the lives of real people. . . . It’s an early portrait of black pride, presented long before showing pride in being black was accepted.”8 Significant also is the fact that the movie’s action takes place largely in a small town world and not in urban centers of power. Thomas Cripps notes that rural and small-town heroes in film and literature face a different world than the powerful black urban outlaws that first appeared nearly a decade after Nothing But a Man was released. In the years after the heyday of the civil rights movement, filmmakers began to move away from the pastoral rural and small-town protagonists like Duff. As Cripps suggests, “[To] be on the side of the pastoral hero was somehow to acquiesce in his plight.”9 Yet, the very anonymous independence achieved by later urban outlaws hides the daily struggles of those forced to live intimately with their oppressors. The small victories achieved by rural and small-town protagonists who know that ultimate success will elude them is a different, less obvious, form of heroism. Cripps explains that “[unlike] the outlaw picaresque hero, the pastoral hero succeeds by keeping faith with himself, by remaining the same rather – than changing, and by acquiring self-knowledge that eventually reinforces his preference for the small victory of survival with dignity.”10 When Duff moves from running to staying, from living outside the community to joining the community, he joins others struggling to find ways to survive with dignity. The depth and complexity of this struggle are shown from the moment Duff stumbles upon the nighttime church service. He is torn between worlds. Cripps notes that in the brightness of the revival, the “opposing life styles at last confront each other: black male celibacy versus the warm circle of black institutional life in which respectable women have a place.”11 For much of the movie, it is uncertain which lifestyle will help him best find self-respect and which will provide a future. The fact that the love story in Nothing But a Man transcends any overt political message reflects the desire of the filmmakers to show the daily struggles of black Americans. Donald Bogle, writing in his 1988 encyclopedia, Blacks in American Film and Television, declares that no other American film has yet treated the black male/female relationship with as much sensitivity.”12 In 1963, simply portraying the common humanity of these inherently decent characters was revolutionary. As Joseph Gelmes suggests, Nothing But a Man showed “images of a viable, whole commu-

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nity existing and thriving amidst the pervasive racism of the time. . . . The very fact [the protagonists] remain nonviolent, they don’t explode in ferocious violence, shows they are powerful survivors interested more in dignity than in ultimate justice.”13 Because white Americans, as a whole, knew so little of the daily struggles of black characters, Gelmis suggests, “this vivid look at one African-American community is as fascinating as a documentary as it is moving as a drama.’’14 Confronted with the realities Duff faces, the viewer leaves the film knowing, as Sylvester Leaks notes, that no one “with the will to fight the system, will survive the ordeal of being black in America. One cannot run, or hide, or compromise. One must face it. One must fight it. Duff chose to be nothing but a man.”15 The filmmakers’ refusal to simplify the difficulties or to give the protagonists superhuman abilities make Nothing But a Man an extraordinary film. Notes 1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 175–176. 2. Ibid., 175. 3. William E. Lightfoot, review of John Henry: A Bio-Bibliography, by Brett Williams, Western Folklore 4 (1984), 273. 4. Robert M. Young, interview with Bruce A. Dick and Mark Vogel, Boone, NC, July 22, 2003. Unless identified otherwise, all quotes from Robert Young are taken from this interview. 5. Desson Howe, “Nothing But a Man,” Washington Post, July 9, 1993. http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style /longterm/movies/videos/nothingbut amannrhowe_a0afd8.htm. 6. Chris Norton, “Nothing But a Man” section of “Black Independent Cinema and the Influence of Neo-Realism: Futility, Struggle, and Hope in the Face of Reality,” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture 5 (1997): 3, http://www

.imagesjournal.com/issue05/features /black3.htm. 7. Judith Crist, “Pointing a Pinky at the Negro,” New York Herald Tribune, January 17, 1965, 29. 8. Hal Hinson, “Nothing But a Man,” http://www.washingtonpost.com . . . /videos/nothingbutamannrhinson _a0a832.htm. Accessed July 10, 1993. 9. Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 115. 10. Ibid., 118. 11. Ibid., 120. 12. Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Film and Television (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988), 157. 13. Joseph Gelmis, “New Filmmakers Are Anything but Typical,” Newsday, January 25, 1965. 14. Ibid. 15. Sylvester Leaks, “Film ‘Nothing But a Man’ Hailed as Honest Negro Saga,” Muhammad Speaks, January 29, 1965, 15.

Nothing But a Man Thomas Cripps

In r ecent yea r s, a subgenr e of black film h as celebrated the heroism of the picaresque outlaw who, like Sir Gawain in mortal combat with the Green Knight, Lancelot in pursuit of the Holy Grail, or Amos Tutuola’s novel Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) in quest of the ultimate high, seeks himself in brave quest outside the benisons of society. The urban outlaw has especially appealed to a number of black writers. The hero of the best novel ever written by a black, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), came from this picaresque tradition. In black genre film, this outlaw is a combative hero, who roves the city from one adventure to another, each one offering deeper rewards of both selfknowledge and gratitude from the black group in whose name he fought. Indeed, the urban outlaw often seemed more appealing than the pastoral hero; though rural ambience provided an opportunity to sketch an anatomy of white racism, the urban scene lent itself to rich fantasies of black aggression and rebellion. John Shaft simply called forth more heartfelt response from black audiences because he scored more points against “the system” than did Br’er Rabbit. In the midst of the recent “blaxploitation” movie cycle, filmmakers found it convenient, and even self-serving, to neglect and even demean, the less urbane pastoral hero of black folklore. For them, the rural hero must have seemed too close to Uncle Tom and too much at his ease among the whites in the master class. To be on the side of the pastoral hero was somehow to acquiesce in his plight. And yet in black genre film history, a few filmmakers attempted to create a folk Negro who was his own man. 72

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In fact, over the years, the pastoral subgenre has yielded some fine movies and a few lost films with good reputations. One of the earliest black films, the Lincoln Company’s The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), followed its prim black version of Kipps or David Copperfield from country roots to city success. While such pioneers did not start a tradition, in the 1970s when a few blacks took nominal control over a few movie projects, the genre surfaced again. Raymond St. Jacques successfully combined a fad for nostalgia and the black pastoral genre in The Book of Numbers (1973), a tale that tells of small town hustlers who take on big city adversaries. Gordon Parks Jr. reached for a similar style in his near-miss biography of folksinger Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. In the white-dominated depression years, Hollywood contributed several small black pastoral films, among them the two-reeler Yamacraw (1930), Langston Hughes and Clarence Muse’s Way Down South (1939), and a string of imitators. The best Hollywood attempts­ – MGM’s Hallelujah! (1929) and Fox’s Hearts of Dixie (1929) – were among the earliest, although each was burdened by excessive sentimentality and uneven treatment of traditional black roles. Recently, the genre has enjoyed a revival through the success of four powerfully done, pictorially elegant pastoral films and an interesting liberal tract shot in the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands: The Learning Tree (1969), Sounder (1972), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), and Conrack (1974). But as in earlier genres, such as the hard-boiled film noir detective films of the 1940s, the infusion of lush financial support allowed enlargement of the sphere, variations in the form, and additions to the motifs, to such an extent that some of the films were carried outside the bounds of the genre. This is not to say the results lack the former quality, but rather, former qualities. The Learning Tree combined painterly camerawork by Gordon Parks, the natural pastoral settings of his boyhood Kansas, and a crackling narrative of a black boy initiated into the rites of passage to adulthood – all of which were the branches of Parks’s “learning tree.” Sounder similarly used pictorial beauty and rural nostalgic detail as means of nearly equaling the effect of Parks’s coolly paced work. The film suffered only from its backers’ too-obvious wishes that it succeed financially as a “crossover” movie that would touch the sensibilities of both black and white audi-

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ences. Predictably, like a good Andy Hardy movie punched out by MGM in the 1930s, it eventually spawned a colt in the form of Sounder II. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman also drew its strength from pastoral roots, although its success owed less to genre formulas and more to a gimmick that allowed its story to be told through the point of view of a white reporter; the film thus qualified for viewing in the ultimate “crossover” market, the parlor audience of prime­time television. Its finest quality derived not from genre traits, but from a bravura performance by Cicely Tyson as the vigorous, open­hearted black girl, who grows to antique maturity without losing her zest for involvement in life. Conrack was yet another colorful pastoral film. The latest of the genre was the least successful because its story rested on an ingenuous white hero imbued with a missionary spirit that many blacks regarded with suspicion. While Conrack is not as naively patronizing as the college student who works in a community organization only long enough to earn his three credits in “Soc. 102,” he comes close. As a result, the rural black kids, their local teachers, and their gruff white supervisor are mere foils for the white carpetbagger who can risk innovation and censure because he has no permanent investment in the situation’s outcome. In the half century between The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition and Conrack, the best example of black pastoral genre film was Nothing But a Man. A low budget, independently produced little movie shot on location in the South and New Jersey, the black-and-white, penny-pinching format did not allow deviations from generic formulas nor intrusions by well-known stars. Finite resources required that the producers rely on materials at hand, and familiar pastoral elements thus gave the film a rough-handed integrity. Straitened circumstances forced the hero to develop his character on familiar ground. Unlike the outlaw picaresque hero, the pastoral hero succeeds by keeping faith with himself, by remaining the same rather than changing, and by acquiring self-knowledge that eventually reinforces his preference for the small victory of survival with dignity. Like the hero of nineteenth-century romance, he neither kills nor is killed. In the end, he may not prevail but only endure. His integrity is nonetheless preserved, because his small victories take place on a field chosen by himself – ”down home” rather than in the city where, as revisionist

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historians are now suggesting, the integrity of the nuclear black family was destroyed by the shock of the Great Depression. From its opening titles to its quiet ending, Nothing But a Man unfolds in harmony with this pastoral generic tradition. Like the myth of the eternal return, the narrative carries the hero from familiar life into inferno (the city) and then to eventual rebirth back home. The same line of incidents carries the hero’s son by an earlier liaison out of the same urban blight, wrapping him too in the redemptive folds of pastoral innocence. Reinforcing this quest for the stable norms of familial heroism is the fact that the hero begins as a gandy dancer on the railroad, a monastic, nomadic life whose sterility promises none of the fulfillment possible within the family circle. We are in a black movie, not only because the themes are black, but because our point of view is from within black circles in segregated Alabama. Whites are seen only as malevolent grotesques, omnipotent employers empowered to deny the gift of a job and wages, and polite mutes who are powerless prisoners of their racist culture. Indeed, the lines are drawn so sharply between the black and white antagonists that we need no detailed anatomy of black life to tell us who the heroes are. Nevertheless, anatomic subplots abound. During the course of the narrative, the hero is at spiritual loggerheads with his unctuous father-in-law; he wrestles between the poles of black male freedom and domesticity; he is driven to the verge of vengeful violence, pulling back in time to keep his integrity; he descends into the wretched black city, only barely escaping its baleful forces that destroyed his own father. Nothing But a Man opens on a black male, almost cloistered society of gandy dancers, which appear under the main titles. They work out in the flat Alabama countryside where life is hard, but as satisfying as the ring of a good hammer against steel. We are in the midst of an idyll. The camera tilts up and catches the sun; the rhythms of labor throb in time with the track workers’ bending backs; their work is depicted as the central theme of their lives as the camera peers tightly down to where the hammer hits the spike. The reality of life in a track gang, brought to us by a long fade to black and out to the interior of the bunkhouse car, is a little like a minimum security prison. There the men play fitful games of checkers with bottle

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caps. One of them paces from one pal to another, picking verbal fights, hazing, and “signifying.” Another worker, still in his overalls, aimlessly shaves as though to break the dullness. At last the camera tilts down on the hero, Duff Anderson – even his name has a good brown tone – paring his nails. “What are you getting pretty for?” one of the gang asks, as though to a “lifer” with nowhere to go. At last a cut takes us outside the cloying walls, perhaps to a better place. We are on a handcar, driven along the tracks by a one-lung engine. The men are seen against the lowering sun, their heads leaning forward in anticipation against the wind. A string of truck shots catches the piney woods, telephone poles, glinting car tops, and tidy rows of trackside shacks flickering by. Through another cut, we are in a rustic juke joint. Duff is morose. The seedy saloon is little different from the bunk car, except for a whiney whore cadging beers. Real emotion and feeling are disguised by the poses of aesthetique du cool; the masks devised to conceal feelings from white men are used against black men. Aimlessly, Duff ambles into a nighttime church service and brightens a bit at the sight, if not the message, depicted as a serial montage of warmhearted women and homey institutional ambience. The opposing lifestyles at last confront each other: black male celibacy versus the warm circle of black institutional family life in which respectable women have a place. After the service at a chicken supper, Duff meets Josie, the strong, cool, quietly beautiful preacher’s daughter. Upstairs as the service resumes, led by a hard-driving visiting preacher from Birmingham, Josie is seen as a cool quiet island amid the cadenced black litany. A cut carries Duff outside, away from the church’s light and into the dark. But we know he has been touched by the experience and that he has been drawn toward its promised affirmation. Cutting back to the bunkhouse car or to the juke joint would have made the dichotomy into a cliché. Instead, we are made to witness a debate by being taken into the preacher’s family circle where they argue about the social effect of Josie taking up with a railroad section hand. Another cut tells us she has won: a floor full of dancers seen against a backlight, and then a two-shot of Duff and Josie sipping beers. Black masculine life makes a last bid for Duff’s loyalty when two of the sec-

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tion gang unsuccessfully intrude and try to draw him away. Duff has left celibacy for the traditional family. Thus, in two reels, Duff’s place in the black world and the choices it thrusts upon him have been established. Only the introduction of his white antagonists remains. They come in the dark, hovering over Duff’s parked car where he sits with Josie. His new role is thereby challenged by the whites, who press against its territorial limits and the limits of Duff’s ability to protect the vulnerable blacks within his orbit. To the whites, Duff is anything but a man. Indeed, they stop hazing him only when one of them identifies Josie as the preacher’s daughter and fears the wrath of some powerful white protector of the preacher. Duff is a cipher in the cracker’s calculation of risk. The incident exposes Duff’s impotence against white violence and begins to threaten the pastoral family life that Josie has opened up to him. We sense it visually as they dawdle among some playground swings. Duff talks of going north. But then he says, “It ain’t that good up there neither.” He thus rejects the city life as a solution: “Guess I belong here more than there.” But ambivalence clouds his future. “They can’t get you if you keep movin,’” he says. A cut takes us to Josie’s house where we know her father can help only by asking Duff to become, like himself, less than a man. As though to confirm the point, there is even a white man there, the superintendent of education, who calls Duff “boy.” Duff bristles, both at the white man’s casual effrontery and at the preacher’s safety in his protective shell within the accommodating black bourgeoisie. The power of Josie’s father extends only to denying Duff access to his daughter and to offering gratuitous advice. “I think if you’d try living in a town like this instead of running free and easy you’d soon change your tune,” he taunts Duff. Visually, the point is made when Duff and Josie part. She stands out against the white of the verandah as Duff walks out into the rain on the way to the city and to his son. For him, the price of pastoral life and its dignity is too high. We know Josie will not give him up easily when she contrives to meet him at the bus station. But his errand is symbolically vital and he must do it alone. His son lives in a shack in Birmingham with a skinny woman

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who has tired of him. Duff’s life becomes an episode in a long black history when the woman tells Duff of his own father’s presence in the town. The quest for his son turns into a quest for his father, a drunk whose life was broken in the streets of Birmingham. Through gritty streets, up a rickety back stair, into a seedy room, Duff goes to find his father. Shabby, drunk, left arm hanging limp and useless, the man has been kept alive by a good tough woman whom he bullies and exploits. The not-yet-old man’s life reaches no farther than the dirty saloon where he sometimes rests his head in the bar slop. It is clear from his example that the city promises nothing. In contrast, on the way back home, Duff is lifted by Josie’s appearance, beautiful and resilient in white gloves, in the bus station. Marriage down home, despite the opposition of Josie’s father, points to a finer life than either flight to the city or escape into black male tribalism. In the long, visually powerful sequence that follows, Duff, Josie, and a linear montage of prospective white employers serve as an anatomy of black victory and defeat in the rural South. She supports him in small bits of witty badinage, intercut with scenes of painful rejection by indifferent white foremen and supervisors. From marriage ceremony, to bed in a small house, to sleepy rising to face a new job, everything is closely shot with quiet intimacy, but not claustrophobia. Duff’s new black coworkers are less nomadic, more caught up in society, more politically aware. In his carpool, they chuckle between puffs on cigars over their lame attempts to shuffle and “tom” in the proper manner. At the lumberyard, the white workers serve as an anatomy of the variety of white responses to blacks. Within the limits of the movie’s segregated point of view, the whites are outsiders. Nevertheless, they are seen clearly enough for Duff to distinguish between one of the them who decently surrenders the right to call Duff “boy” and another who insists on learning the details of Duff’s sex life. We do not yet know how Duff will respond to his new, more stable life. We only know that he feels comfortable enough to refuse to smile to whites on demand and to begin to think of organizing black workers into a union. At home, he finds a flurry of visual delights with intimations of black defeat off in the distance. In rapid succession there are giddy two-shots of the newlyweds exchanging gibes about sexual prowess. In their carefree sharing of taking the laundry off the line, everything is all puffs and

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billows of sheets and laughter, punctuated, only slightly ominously, by Josie’s whimsical request for a boxing lesson for her schoolchildren. The soft scene is broken late in the day by a shrewish argument in the next cabin between a shrill wife and her husband lounging on the porch in the half-light. “You no good around the house,” she snaps. Again, Duff is given a glance at cloying, psychic dangers in the black South. Surely enough, his circle of tranquility collapses under pressures generated by his headstrong resistance to white hazing. His efforts to organize the workers are used as an excuse for a locker room confrontation in front of his more accommodating coworkers. Duff is fired and eventually blacklisted. In despair, unwilling to pick cotton, wear a bellhop’s uniform, or take other “nigger work,” Duff must move on. In a montage of arch white bosses remote from the centers of black life, the film loses its black focus. Only Josie remains as a figure holding the film’s center. Leave the South? “You can always do that, Duff,” she says, acting as the voice that favors pastoral roots. But it is asking too much, especially when Duff must come to find her in the beauty parlor in order to borrow money to fix his car. “It’s not as bad for a girl,” she says. “They’re not afraid of us.” The conflict between the urge for roots and desire for mobility grows. At home Josie, though pregnant and soon to lose her teaching post, volunteers to do “day work.” Duff’s response is to smash a chair he had been repairing in the yard. The older generation further corrupts or distorts the issue. On the one hand, Duff’s father says “make them think you’re going along, and get what you want.” On the other, Josie’s father sneers “maybe you ought to leave. . . . You’d be a lot better off in the North.” Josie literally bleeds over the argument; as Duff, slumped in despair, sighs “so I’ve been told,” she gashes her finger in the kitchen. The accident is Duff’s cue to snap at her father: “You’re half a man!” Reinforcing the kinetic and verbal languages are pictures, which line the walls of their home, painted by Josie’s schoolchildren. These paintings strengthen the suggestion that, despite the pounding taken by Duff, the pastoral life is verdantly fertile. Nevertheless, Duff is broken by the pressure, at least for the moment. He shoves the pregnant Josie to the floor, and in one of the film’s few fade outs, goes to Birmingham, compulsively drawn to his father’s boozing

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half-life. Duff seems ready to surrender the last tendrils of pastoral roots for the numbing comforts of urban anomie. He ambles through the wet streets of the city, searching for his father, who first blindly rejects his son, and then dies in a drunken stupor on the way to the hospital. Clearly, the streetscape is hell. A black funeral director blankly looks up from his desk and asks if he should “say a few words” over the dead and impersonal corpse. The dead man is the nadir of urban rootlessness: he had no age, no job, not even a birthplace. At the cemetery, a clanking backhoe, shot from a low angle, digs the nameless grave. Duff and his father’s woman return from the burial through an urban wasteland like the Jersey meadows or the ashen empty landscape in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Ancient marshes now dry, strung with utility poles and dotted with out-of-plumb tombstones are intercut with the empty faces in the car. It is life on the bottom and Duff is touched. He decides in these depths to go back home, to “make me some trouble around town.” He will even chop cotton at $2.50 per day, the job he refused when he still thought of the city as a last clear chance for salvation. His father’s woman cannot believe in his rebirth. “They’ll run you out,” she predicts with a city dweller’s skeptical shrug. In one of the few dissolves, the filmmaker moves from urban despair toward reinvoking Duff’s low-key revival of faith in the pastoral scene. The dissolve is out of a one-shot of Duff turning into a rain-soaked doorway as he seeks to rescue his son from yet another generation of urban blight. He takes the boy back home in the rain, into the room where Josie’s pupils’ pictures line the wall, and where she receives them with wide-eyed assent. Their two-shot embraces are from a low angle, reflecting the faith in the rightness of the decision to return home. They cry as Duff reassures her: “It ain’t gain’ to be easy, baby. But it’ll be all right.” Duff, by returning, sets himself apart from the picaresque outlaw hero who rejects his ascribed status on the bottom rung by choosing hustling opportunism rather than the integrity of home country. Duff, the pastoral hero, has learned the value of being governed by a formula that equates survival and success with sameness, roots, and permanence, rather than social mobility. Here symbols, unifying motifs, and a mythic system all support the pastoral ideal of endurance. He has a vibrant coun-

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try woman, who teaches the young. He knows that if all else fails, he can still pick other people’s cotton at least to be close to the soil. He knows he has, at the least, drawn the line by refusing to endure the extremes of humiliation at the hands of white bullies. He has even told them he will kill for the right to be “nothing but a man.” To distort Faulkner, the pastoral hero does not wish to prevail, only to endure. .

Note This essay originally appeared in Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

The Derailed Romance in Nothing But a Man Karen Bowdre

Nothing But a M a n (1964) is a compelling film that depicts some of the racial and social challenges in the life of an African American railroad worker in the early 1960s. One of the many reasons this film stands out from other films with black casts is its exceptional and complicated portrayal of an African American romantic relationship. Before analyzing this unusual and afflicted cinematic union, I examine Josie Dawson and Duff Anderson as products not only from the minds of Michael Roemer and Robert Young but also as representative of young African American people during a turbulent time socially, culturally, and racially in the United States. Josie, a teacher and preacher’s daughter, has sporadic dimensionality far beyond what might have been expected of two white filmmakers, Young and Roemer, of the period. Her character is not a compliant child but a grown woman with her own thoughts and ideas. She does not allow the potential class and educational biases of her parents (or larger community) to keep her from becoming involved in a relationship with Duff. Though she still lives with her father, she does not feel obligated to view the world the same way as her father and step-mother do. However, despite her willingness to disagree with her parents, Josie’s agency – specifically her desire for Duff – seems to be an anomaly within the entire narrative of the film because it is difficult to glean information about other aspects of her character. Her agency only seems to be expressed romantically or sexually and not through any explicitly articulated set of politics or political discourse. Hence, while she is very passionate about Duff, she seems to only exist with regard to him.1 She 82

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does not have developed relationships with her family or other members of her community, and this emotional distance does not seem to be because Josie went to college. Her work colleagues would most likely have gone to college and her parents both appear to have degrees. (Historically, African American pastors were educated and her parents’ home, its furnishings, and décor as well as their demeanor reflect people who are or aspire to be middle class.) Josie’s parents sent her to college not only to keep her from having to work in the homes of white Americans, but also to ensure her continued middle-class status.2 As Robert Young mentions in his narrative of the film’s production, it was not uncommon for young women to be collegeeducated even if their parents were poor as they wanted to avoid their daughters working in white homes; the fact that the Dawson family is not poor makes it all the more likely that Josie’s parents desired her to get a degree.3 Since she did not marry immediately after completing her degree, Josie returns to her parents’ home and becomes a teacher at the local segregated elementary school. Even with all these ties to this community – it is where she grew up, her parents have lived there for an extended period of time, and she currently has employment in this town – the film does not show any of Josie’s childhood friends or work colleagues. Indeed, at her wedding she is shown with no bridesmaids or maid/matron of honor and, though it is possible Josie is that isolated, it seems unlikely that she would not have even one close female friend. Ultimately, as are most women in male-centered narratives, she is drawn as a female character who is only alive as she relates to the male protagonist. Josie’s fractured existence, being intelligible and dynamic only with regard to male characters, is similar to the other women in the film. Susan, Josie’s step-mother, who I will examine later in this essay; Lee, Duff’s father’s girlfriend; and Doris, a prostitute we meet early in the film, all function in relation to Duff specifically or other men. Doris solicits work from Duff and his coworkers. Unlike his peers, who give Doris a hard time, Duff is kind to her even as he turns down her advances. His treatment of Doris sets Duff apart from his colleagues and his father. Lee is in an abusive relationship with Duff’s father and there is a question as to why she continues to tolerate such ill treatment from him. Lee is a young woman; she seems to be in her thirties and Duff’s father

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is in his late forties or early fifties. And she is light-skinned, which can carry a lot of weight in certain African American communities. Her forbearance of this bad relationship places Lee in the same position as that of the men from Josie’s town. They all seem to accept that their current situation, whether a job, relationship, or position in society, is the best they can attain; there is no reason to seek out something different. This defeatism also places these characters in contrast to Duff, who does not tolerate the status quo. Many of the female and male characters of Nothing But a Man share this defeatism. Doris and Lee have a tired and worn quality in their interactions with the men in their lives. Both women seem to have had the life taken out of them and approach their existence as if it is another chore they have to complete. When Doris solicits Duff and his colleagues, she does not have makeup on and her proposals are listless. It appears she knows she needs to proposition men to get paid, but she really does not want to be at the bar. Likewise, Lee lacks emotion in her interactions with Duff, and, from what we learn about her character, this lack of emotion could be depression from having to care for an abusive partner. These raw portrayals offer a view that is very different from Hollywood depictions of black life. In Hallelujah! (1929) and Cabin in the Sky (1944), African American characters are poor but not hopeless and often singing, and the all-black worlds these films create do not have the challenges of racism or disempowering poverty. The performances of Doris and Lee, like Josie’s, do make the challenges of being an African American woman in the South in the 1960s tangible. Early in the film, it becomes apparent that Josie is not close to either her father or step-mother. There appears to be coldness in the way she interacts with either of her parents; they do not hug one another, and their conversation seems distant, like those of acquaintances not family members. As viewers, we get the impression that her parents’ disagreement about Duff is one of many areas where the three do not see eye-to-eye. In fact, Josie’s initiative with Duff can allow us to read her as an individual who does not conform to traditional African American notions of middle-class respectability. Her parents clearly expect her to marry a man of their status and not an uneducated drifter from the railroad. The fact

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that she desires a relationship with Duff may also mean that she would break social norms in other areas, specifically civil rights as well. Though her attitude toward civil rights is not explicitly stated, her attraction to Duff is because he is not “sad” like the other men in her town. Sad can be interpreted as beaten down or functioning without the possibility of hope. Thus, her selection of Duff, a man willing to challenge the status quo, specifically the racial oppression in Alabama, puts her at odds with her father, who is clearly appeasing the whites in their community. Josie’s parents object to Duff because of his lower-class status. While this scenario is a common convention in stories of romance, in Nothing But a Man, their objections reflect a class and color consciousness that has a specific history in African American communities. Prior to her first date with Duff, Josie and her parents are having coffee and they are reiterating their disapproval of him. Her step-mother starts by questioning the appropriateness of Duff as a suitor for Josie. She says to Josie, “I know you pay no mind to my feelings but do you think it’s right to go out with him?” Susan clearly feels it is morally and ethically wrong for Josie to date a man from the railroad. She assumes he has little or no secondary education and it is implied that Josie, Susan, and Frank, Josie’s father, are all college-educated. Duff’s lack of education is a status issue for her parents because after Susan initially fails to sway Josie, the former appeals to her husband. Her father tells Josie she must consider the family’s standing in the community. Though this is supposed to dissuade her, Reverend Dawson does not seem nearly as concerned about this situation as his wife is. Before and after being drawn into this conversation, he is engrossed in his newspaper though he does says “thank you” to Josie for giving him what appears to be his after-dinner coffee. Once Susan requests his assistance, he tells Josie there are “lots of other young men” she can date, and quickly goes back to reading his paper. His lack of eye contact with Josie as he states she has a plethora of options can lead a viewer to understand his statement lacks veracity. There are not many young men in his church so the question is, where are all these eligible young men for Josie to date? Moreover, if he and Susan are so concerned about Josie’s dating prospects why have they not tried to be more proactive in assisting her

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to date? His comments do not dissuade Josie, so Susan continues her campaign against Duff. His only other comment on the matter is when he senses Josie is being disrespectful to her step-mother. He rebukes her in a manner that is somewhat infantilizing, “hush your mouth child.” Ironically, immediately after he has said this, the doorbell rings and she leaves. Thus in spite of these attempts by her parents, Josie is determined to engage in this relationship with Duff regardless of their thoughts. Susan’s reaction to Josie dating Duff appears to stem from the fact that it is not what she would do and she strongly believes Josie is engaging in highly inappropriate behavior for a pastor’s daughter. She married Josie’s father and he is a man with obvious status as the town pastor, possibly the highest position, in the community. Moreover, Susan is fair-skinned and in certain segments of black communities lighter skin is prized. Some of this adulation for light skin is the result of being in a country that holds, white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes as the final statement in beauty. Another reason is historically fair-skinned black people were the offspring of European American men, who often freed and educated their enslaved children.4 Hence, having lighter skin often meant those individuals had education and money, something that Susan believes Duff does not. In Susan’s world, Duff is a monumentally bad choice based on his lower-class status and possibly his darker skin. She tries to serve as a type of gatekeeper for Josie maintaining middle-class status, though her attempts to stop Josie from seeing him fail. When Susan states that Josie’s mother would not have approved of Duff, Josie becomes more dismissive of Susan and her concerns about Duff. With all her persuasion tactics thwarted, Susan can only understand Josie choosing him based on physical attraction and possible sexual intimacy. Though Josie appears to have found a way to negotiate and move beyond her parents objections, Duff is haunted by his family situation. His father is a broken man both physically and spiritually and Duff appears to be emulating aspects of his father’s destructive behavior, specifically drifting from place to place and never having a steady relationship. After years, perhaps decades, of estrangement, Duff visits his father and their reunion reflects the fact that they never really had a close relationship

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with one another. Adding to the pathos of their interaction is his father’s drunken state and the fact that the father is threatened and/or jealous of his son. The fact that the father and son do not have a close relationship could be seen as a dramatization of the Moynihan report, that pathologized African American families as broken because so many were headed by females.5 What the report did not address was how past institutions such as slavery, chronic unemployment for black men because of discrimination, family aid guidelines that kept men out of the households, and policies that historically separated African American men from their families all contribute to black families not being together. Duff’s father most likely constantly moved to find work and avoid commitments. It appears that his marriage to Duff’s mother was destroyed because she slept with his boss. Though his father does not elaborate on the circumstances, it is quite possible she was coerced to do this so her husband could keep his job. The silence about Duff’s mother’s story reflects the often unspoken history of sexual violence against black women; it is usually not addressed because they have been characterized as “unrapeable” and sexually insatiable. Duff’s fraught relationship with his father portrays the ways the oppressed can internalize their oppression. If his father wanted to provide for and support his family, there were obstacles to his finding employment based on historical occurrences in the South and the rest of the United States. After slavery, many African American men often found it difficult to find jobs close to home. In addition to challenges in the workplace, vividly portrayed through Duff’s difficulties in maintaining a steady job, his father most likely faced other types of discrimination and racism outside of work. Most store owners were white and sometimes would not serve African American customers. In the South and other areas in the country, whites levied poll tax and literacy tests to prohibit blacks from voting, the Ku Klux Klan was strong and many members of local law enforcement were members of the Ku Klux Klan.6 While these negative outside forces are not explicitly articulated in the film, the filmmakers allow for this political and historical contextualization to exist. Thus these forces such as the pressures of racism made it difficult

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for Duff’s father have close, intimate relationships with his family. He drifted from job to job and at his death, Duff does not even know the date and place of birth or his occupation. At the start of this story, Duff seems to be following his father’s lifestyle pattern. Duff’s job on the railroad keeps him drifting from place to place and though he makes good money, he does not have sustained relationships. Later in the story, we learn that Duff has a son and he has not seen the boy in two years. There seems to be no real sense of urgency for Duff to see his son and this emulates his father’s behavior. While some of his complacency may be due to the fact that Duff is not sure if the child is his, during his visit he seems reluctant to connect with his son. Fortunately, Duff starts to break this pattern of paternal estrangement at the close of the film, and Josie seems to be the reason for this change. Duff and Josie’s relationship is significant to film history because it is one of the first times an African American romance made for both a white as well as a black audience takes place on screen in a dramatic format. Prior to this film, Hollywood movies portrayed romance between black men and women as lacking passion as in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather (1943) or troubled and turbulent as in Hallelujah! Race films, movies created for black audiences from the 1910s to the 1950s, would chronicle black romance, but few white audiences would view these films. Given this history of African Americans on screen with limited opportunities to have or be loved, Roemer and Young’s decision to portray this romance gives the audience an opportunity to empathize and identify with Duff and Josie. Viewers watch him as he consciously makes the decision to leave his current work situation and settle in a town to be near the woman he is interested in, Josie. Being able to view their relationship from the start and see their attraction to and their flirtation with one another captures the ordinariness of these actions while simultaneously being extraordinary as this type of depiction for black Americans was so unusual. We can also observe the constant challenges Duff faces and how these forces alter Duff’s behavior. The two first meet because Duff is working in a town close to Birmingham, Alabama, and he visits a local church that she attends. It is clear from their initial meeting that they are attracted to one another.

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Their body language and radiant faces exhibit their emotions. The African American community is small and Josie makes note of the fact that he is new in town. He learns she is college-educated and teaches at the local elementary school. In spite of his making a gaffe about not wanting to attend the revival meeting (her father is the church pastor), he asks her out on a date. The negative reactions that both Duff and Josie receive from friends and family prior to their first date demonstrate how the narrative positions their romance as both a critical component and obstacle in Duff’s life. Throughout the film, Duff faces a series of challenges to his person and masculinity, and his relationship with Josie is no different. While the resistance from Duff’s friends may be expected because his coworkers clearly do not hold women in high esteem and dating a preacher’s daughter would definitely delay sexual gratification until the two were married, Josie’s parents’ unfavorable response, noted earlier, gives us insight into her character. Josie and Duff’s first date demonstrates the potential conflict this couple could have if they pursue a long-term relationship. Duff does not understand why Josie has agreed to date him. He questions her about this for the duration of their date. Her initial response is, “You don’t think much of yourself, do you?” He is shocked and angered by her evaluation of him and retorts, “that’s a funny thing to say.” Later when the two are talking in the car as he is dropping her off, he again asks about their relationship because he feels she wants marriage and he knows he wants sex and their goals are not compatible. She tells him he has very primitive ideas and he angrily asks what she wants with him as he is so primitive. One partial reason for his anger is the truth of the statement. As a college-educated lighter-skinned black woman in the South, Josie has traits considered invaluable for a wife and mother to many African Americans, particularly of this time period. Her selection of him is confusing to Duff based on her middle-class background as well as her desire to have a long-term relationship with him. When she finally explains the reason she went out with him is because he is not “sad” like the other men she knows in town and believes they “might have something to say to each other,” to create an intellectual connection. Duff is taken aback by her response. Like Josie’s step-mother, Duff would have understood

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their dating if Josie had wanted a physical relationship. Yet her desire for something more both intrigues and challenges Duff. Unfortunately, it also reveals his inability to understand her wants and needs. In addition to the relational challenges the couple will face as they start dating, there are outside forces that will have a significant impact on them. After Duff and Josie have left the club, they talk in his car outside of the city. As they continue to flirt and kiss, they are approached by two white men. The two men are not police officers, so it may not be clear initially what they want. It quickly becomes apparent that they would try to rape Josie but they do not proceed to do so because she is the preacher’s daughter and this violation would aggravate the white area superintendent. During this interaction, it is clear Duff wants to fight the men, but Josie cautions him to not make trouble. Their contrasting styles when dealing with physical abuse by whites Americans reflects two broad positions many African Americans found themselves in at this time. In not wanting to make trouble in the face of violence and injustice, Josie represents nonviolence that some blacks were beginning to view as accommodationist because equal rights were still a long way off despite many promises and the lives of thousands of African Americans. Duff’s desire to physically retaliate represents what will eventually become the Black Power movement embodied in the philosophies of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.7 This incident also foreshadows the way outside forces, specifically Duff’s employment, will be a continual threat to him and Josie having a stable relationship. As the scenes described demonstrate, just as their relationship is a significant transition for Josie, it is equally so for Duff. He is not satisfied with life on the railroad and, though the pay is good, he yearns for something more. His pursuit of Josie is just one part of his journey and she plays an important role in his life. She helps him see what sets him apart from others. Obtaining this affirmation regarding his uniqueness and humanity causes Duff to reevaluate his life. His attraction to, and fascination with, Josie makes her instrumental in his life. Her desire for a relationship with Duff demonstrates how she does not conform to the cultural expectations of a schoolteacher and/or preacher’s daughter. While she respects her father and his rules, she also makes choices regarding Duff that decidedly set her apart from her family. She sees how

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everyday racism erodes the confidence of most of the African American men she interacts with and desires to be with someone not beaten down. However, she does not seem to be ready for Duff’s confrontational style when it comes to dealing with everyday racism. Though she also wants to be a partner in a relationship built on ideas and interest, their inability to communicate their expectations, dreams, and desires will cause conflict in their relationship. One scene that clearly demonstrates Josie and Duff’s challenges in expressing their feelings to one another is after he has been fired from his job and obviously marked as a troublemaker because he cannot find work other places in town. He asks Josie why she does not hate white people and she says, she is not afraid of them. Duff scoffs at this because he remembers her reaction to the white men harassing them on their first date. She replies, “They can’t touch me inside,” and he dismisses this as well. After stating that the whites cannot hurt you “if you see them for what they are,” he gets angry and says she is “full of talk” and is not a “real nigger” because of the lifestyle her father gave her. He ends the conversation telling her to shut her mouth. Though Josie is trying to encourage Duff, her statements simply aggravate him. Instead of their talking diffusing his anger, it seems to cause Duff to make Josie the target of his rage and this pattern culminates (later in the film) in his pushing his pregnant wife to the floor. Initially, the romance in the film is exciting as neither Duff nor Josie are expecting it. The lead up to their meeting one another emphasizes the different spaces they inhabit as Duff moves from the railroad to a bar/pool hall and finally almost accidently stumbles upon the church Josie attends while he wanders through town. There is a spark in their first interaction during the church dinner that resembles the meet-cute moment from romantic comedies. While it is not clear this meeting is meant to signify that Duff and Josie are made for one another as romcoms imply, this interaction does alter their lives. In the earlier moments of their relationship, they enjoy the company of one another and their conversations. However, their romance shows the complications and contours of love and life. The film masterfully depicts for the audience how external conflicts such as parental expectation and job loss affect relationships. Also because of its absence, the

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narrative reveals the necessity of getting to know one’s partner through discussion of and experiences with difficult situations. Due to his transient lifestyle, Duff could remove himself from circumstances that disturbed or threatened him. As he embarks on his relationship with Josie, it becomes apparent that racist situations are very challenging for him. His exchanges with various men from Josie’s father and his own father to new coworkers, bosses, and white men from town appear to directly influence his behavior and how he treats Josie. Duff’s first conversation with Josie’s father, Reverend Dawson, not surprisingly, does not go well. The two men have radically different views about whites and how to interact with them. Reverend Dawson has a position of privilege in the town as a community leader and has gained material advantage through his status by being accommodating to whites. Unlike church leaders such as Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King Jr., who stood against racial oppression, he does not challenge the continued wrongdoing of the European American community. Most recently, he acquiesced to the school superintendent’s desire to maintain segregated schools when integration was happening in other parts of the country. Eight years previously, there had been a lynching in the town and Reverend Dawson knows who perpetrated the lynching but has not told anyone who the people involved were. Within the context of the film, his silence on these issues demonstrates his fear of “making trouble.” This sets Reverend Dawson and Duff at odds; Duff knows that in order to be treated as a man, one must be willing to disrupt the segregated world in Alabama. And, toward the end of the film, Duff states he is going to “make me some trouble” when he discusses with Lee returning to Josie. During the visit with Josie’s father, Duff questions why they are not integrating and suggests that it is European Americans that need God based on their ungodly treatment of African Americans. His defiance offends and condemns Reverend Dawson. His remark about Duff living free and easy because the latter has no ties to a community exposes the reverend’s own hypocrisy as he has ties to the community and has had the good life at the expense of others. He has kept silent for eight years about the men who murdered or lynched an African American person from this town. Moreover, one of the reasons the preacher dislikes Duff

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is the very same rationale that attracts his daughter: Duff’s unrepentant assertion of his own humanity, his desire to be treated as “nothing but a man.” This is still a radical notion for African American men in most of the United States at this time. Their exchange ends with the pastor telling Duff not to see Josie any more. Needless to say, Duff is vexed and when Josie returns to see him off before he leaves, he questions the viability of their relationship. Though she is keen for them to continue to see one another, her father’s comments appear to send Duff in another direction that have negative consequences for Josie. He declines her invitation to spend time with her the next day because he is going to Birmingham to see his son. Prior to this moment, the audience does not know about Duff’s son. While this knowledge would have almost certainly surfaced later, it poses another challenge to their fledgling relationship. Duff having a child with another woman means that the couple will not only have to contend with their socioeconomic differences but also become immediate parents as they are still beginning to understand one another. While in Birmingham, Duff not only sees his son but his estranged father as well. Injured while working, his father drinks too much, which adds to the problems of this much damaged character. Duff’s father is shattered physically and emotionally and unfortunately his inability to cope with these issues along with the racial oppression in his life manifests in the abuse of his girlfriend, Lee. Meeting his son for the first time in two years does not seem to have as much of an impact on Duff as the subsequent interactions with his father; the father is threatened by and becomes contentious with Duff. Similar to his interaction with Reverend Dawson, Duff’s encounter with his father seems to trigger another redirection because his father urges Duff not to marry. After practically breaking up with Josie the previous day, he proposes marriage when they meet up later in the day at the bus station. This is a defining moment in the film that anticipates and sets in motion the travails in their lives that follow. For her part, Josie is not necessarily overwhelmed with his offer, but she does not turn him down. Though the duration of their courtship is not entirely obvious, the audience knows they have not known one an-

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other that long. The parallels between Duff and Josie’s short courtship, their obvious physical attraction to one another, and their rapid marriage are traits that correspond to those in romantic comedies.8 Indeed, the alacrity of their dating and marriage foreshadows the obstacles the couple will face. The period of their honeymoon is brief. Duff has a good job and together he and Josie have made what was once a dilapidated structure into a home. However, Duff is unable to play the prescribed role of the happy “darkie” demanded by a fellow white worker and the mill’s management and this gets him fired and ostracized by other mills in the area. As prospects for work decline, he becomes more anxious and his behavior toward Josie becomes more irritable and later violent. Initially, Josie tries to comfort him and he rebuffs her. After an extended time of unemployment, he becomes more aggressive, grabbing her when she does not respond immediately to one of his questions. Though he seems to realize he is taking out his frustration on her, he does not apologize and claims she is being too understanding. Duff’s inability to provide for his family appears to cause him to feel as if he is less than a man and the fact that they have to live off of Josie’s income and that she is pregnant seem to exacerbate his feelings of inadequacy. The nadir of his crisis in masculinity occurs after a near-violent confrontation with four white men that causes him to lose a newfound job at a garage and gas station. As Josie tries to comfort him, he pushes her to the floor. Though Duff’s violence is framed by the persistent attacks on his manhood, his aggression to Josie is disappointing because throughout most of the film Duff has been different from other men. He treats Doris, a prostitute, with respect and is courteous with Lee. Moreover, his ability to perceive himself as a man set him apart from other male characters in the movie. His abuse of Josie demonstrates the “wandering man is a source of self and communal destruction” that Khalil Muhammad describes and likens Duff to his father, who most viewers comprehend as a bitter, cruel, and pitiable man. While Duff’s abuse of Josie is disturbing, the film does create a means for the audience to have an understanding of domestic violence in both former times and currently. The spectator knows that Duff’s

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father is abusive and it has been established that work is an important component of male identity. Roemer and Young give audiences a plausible scenario of how a husband, who would not necessarily be suspected of being abusive to his wife, descends into violence. And unfortunately these series of events are not bound by time or place. The film assists in making the past and present of domestic violence, however reprehensible, intelligible. Yet with this realism, the film does make spectators question the speed of Duff and Josie’s courtship. They come from very different places in life and would seem to need time to discuss how they would negotiate life together. During a heated exchange after Duff has been fired a second time, he tells Josie she does not understand what he is going through because her class position makes her less black. While this comment could be attributed to his anger, his exclamation was a common idea among African Americans from dissimilar socioeconomic classes. And though one does not want to dismiss issues of class in the United States and in the 1960s, race and all its problematic baggage cannot be so easily unpacked. There is also the issue of gender. During another tense time, Josie notes that finding a job is not as difficult for her because white men are not threatened by her. While she is clearly making this statement to diffuse Duff’s anger, she does not seem able to cope with this “new” angry man who is now her husband. Her continued allegiance to him in spite of his outbursts, begins to undermine the strength of her character previously observed. His escalating violence and her inability to contend with it or turn to a friend add to the despair of the film’s final third. In addition to these challenges that Duff and Josie face, the characters reflect the writer’s pessimistic outlook on love. In his Black Camera interview, Young states that he believes “Josie’s love for Duff proves to be a trap. Loving her makes him vulnerable.”9 While love can cause both Josie and Duff to be vulnerable to one another, it can also provide an important support and bond that would enable them to overcome the significant obstacles they face. Though the actions of the majority population definitely affect the lives of Duff and Josie just as they did and continue to impact black people in the present day, several African Americans view their homes (and in the past their segregated communi-

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ties) as a place of safety from the cruel incursions of society. This does not mean that there are not conflicts in the home or relational difficulties, but love does not have to be the “trap” that Young imagines. Young’s attitudes with regard to love and his hope that Duff stand against racism collide and give an ambiguous ending to the film. Young believes that Duff’s return means he desires to endure and eventually prevail against the racism in that town.10 However, based on the world the filmmakers have created, Young’s hope seems to be misplaced idealism.11 At the close of the film, his father has died and Duff has decided to return home to Josie with his son. When Lee asks how he will sustain his family in light of his past employment problems, he states that he will get whatever job is necessary, such as chopping cotton. Earlier in the film, Duff refused to do this, so his desire to do so now is the sacrifice that he is willing to make for his family. While these are positive steps toward reuniting and supporting his family, most viewers would wonder how long Duff could maintain this idealism and, if he could not, would he die or continue to harm Josie? The possibility of Duff’s death, I argue, looms large because of his past work experiences in that town; he is now marked as a troublemaker, the fact that a lynching took place in that town eight years ago, and Alabama’s history of extremely violent suppression of African Americans during the 1960s – the church bombing that killed four young black girls is one example of the state’s horrific acts of violence. Josie is aware of these factors also and I read her crying upon his return as her realization that she will soon be a widow. Thus Young’s view on love overwhelms his proletariat sensibilities and hope with regard to Duff’s return. He believes that Duff’s inability to not be a man will ultimately “destroy his relationship with Josie.”12 Moreover, when Duff returns, he is aware of the fact that “the [job] situation is unchanged.”13 Though viewers may not share Young’s understanding of Josie and Duff’s relationship, the film’s narrative leaves audiences with a sense of doom regarding Duff’s future. The unusual nature of the film reflects Young’s sensibilities coming from a background in documentary film and television. With these “outsider” credentials, the filmmakers have a tenuous link to other white producers of race films. This connection is subtle because after this project, Young and Roemer did not continue making films with African Ameri-

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can casts, though they did create other media products. The production history of Nothing But a Man, specifically the background of the film’s producer and director, is significant because it is another reason for the film’s placement within the independent-film genre category. The project initially circulated in venues, such as festivals, that were composed of mostly white audience members and judges. This exhibition history situates the picture in a unique place and makes the independent label more understandable; the film’s creators and most of its viewers are white and its independent status meant that few African American audiences would have seen the movie. Also with regard to content, the film does not neatly fit within Hollywood genre categories; it is one of the first black cast movies to have a dramatic focus. Hollywood-produced films with African American casts were typically musicals focused more on performance than narrative. Three years prior to the release of Nothing But a Man, Hollywood delivered a marquee film, A Raisin in the Sun (1961), that had a black cast and dealt with the issue of integration dramatically. The fact that Young and Roemer’s film exposes racism as well as racial oppression in a very direct manner makes it distinct from Hollywood films with African American casts. While there are lovely moments in the film between Duff and Josie, their relationship is fraught with tension and with escalating incidences of domestic violence once they are married. Though Duff starts out as a unique character who contests his treatment as an African American man in 1960s America, his descent into domestic abuse mars the love story. In spite of Roemer and Young’s being nontraditional filmmakers, their portrayal of Duff and Josie’s story is consistent with several depictions of African American relationships, both romantic and familial, in literature (Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God) and media (Hallejulah! and Precious) that characterize them as violent. Yet Nothing But a Man remains a provocative film that provides a decisive break from Hollywood movies about African American life. The film makes the past intelligible through its depictions of a slice of black life at a specific time and in a specific place. Through analysis and examination of this film, audiences can gain an appreciation of the past that can give insight into the present.

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1. This is a problem in cinema generally because most narratives center on the male character with other characters, specifically women, only being important as they interact with the male protagonist. I would argue that Josie not being fleshed out as a fully embodied character makes it difficult to view her as an incarnation of Diane Nash without “political agency” but a “fully formed, confident, engaged woman” as Khalil Muhammad suggests in Black Camera. Nash, still working for civil rights for African Americans, is known for her work as a freedom rider and, as thousands of blacks did, put her life at risk for racial equality. Michael T. Martin and David Wall, “Close-Up: Historicity and Possibility in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Khalil Muhammad,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal 3, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 161. 2. For more information on how this violence was systematically used against black women, see Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street (New York: Knopf, 2010). 3. Young’s comments are found in “Close-Up: Nothing But a Man: Filmmaker’s Perspective,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal 3, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 97. 4. Information concerning African Americans and colorism can be found in Willard B. Gatewood’s Aristocrats of Color:

The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Audrey Elisa Kerr’s The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). 5. McGuire, Dark End of the Street, 188. 6. Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 289–290. 7. Painter, Creating Black Americans, 289–343. 8. See Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007); Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn (eds.), Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); and Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (London: Routledge, 2010). 9. Young, “Close-Up: Nothing But a Man,” 100. 10. Michael T. Martin and David Wall, “Close-Up: Nothing But a Man: Cinematic Principles and Practice at Work,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal 3, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 115–116. 11. Martin and Wall, “Close-Up: Nothing But a Man, ” 115–120. 12. Martin and Wall, “Close-Up: Nothing But a Man, ” 120. 13. Ibid.

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About Nothing But a Man . . . our film is very myopic. It moves in, in, in, when he proposes to her. You only see half of his face and she’s in profile. We’re moving in all the time. Bob Young (2010)

Can’t Stay, Can’t Go: What Is History to a Cinematic Imagination? Terri Francis For egrounding the artist’s exper ience, Bob Young’s words quoted here convey his stylistic choices for Nothing But a Man (1964) and they help us to think about the capacity of fiction film to make the past intelligible and to envision varied ways of approaching the relationship between film and history. Young and Michael Roemer, the film’s cowriter and director, chose to make a film whose photography relies not on wide observational, contextual angles but instead on close, “myopic” framing on the face that emphasizes skin, eyes, and mouth. The conflicts in the film are highly personal, between neighbors, between friends, and between family members and they are also the product of historical forces. Indeed, historical and political pressures catalyze the personal dramas on screen; thus, there is no meaningful, sensible, or necessary dichotomy between the personal and the historical here. In Young’s photography, we see the tiny gestures within gestures of a look, of a passing thought, or of an intention. The face is the landscape, the world writ small. Furthermore, Young captures a fundamental reality of filmmaking in precise terms: what is within the four corners of the frame is the whole world, for that moment. Telescoped and framed in the lens, the historical world condenses and thickens into fiction – a constructed world, heightening our awareness of characters and their emotions and motivations. Because Nothing But a Man is indirectly related to a specific historical period, drawn with minimal references to Birmingham, “a mean town,” and the world beyond, its sketch of time contains all the emotion and possibility that belongs to us at any time in history, whenever we view 101

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the film. Its minimalist realism is precisely what allows us to watch the film both as time travel or access to the past and as a relevant reflection on our contemporary moment. Fiction films have their own logic and their own histories by which they work over the past; history is material in such films, not evidence. Historical fiction films are not merely passive or transparent windows to the past. Despite the hazards of its imprecise historicity, the life depicted in Nothing But a Man is hardly quaint or apolitical. Relatively slow-paced, it bears a sense of doom, and as characters walk on racialized eggshells, emotions are heightened and intense. The story concerns the courtship and marriage of Duff (Ivan Dixon) and Josie (Abbey Lincoln), but centers on Duff’s internal and social struggles. When he decides to leave the relative camaraderie and financial independence of the railroad crew, marrying and taking up residence in a small town outside Birmingham, Duff finds that his efforts to make a life for himself and his new family put him in the middle of power struggles that involve conflicts among black men with values incompatible with his own and who are additionally in unequal positions of power. He finds himself amid strife within Josie’s family, and he is a close witness to intimate family conflicts among his neighbors. Eventually, he is wedged into competition between blacks and whites not only for economic power, but also for attention: says a white character of Duff, “It’s like he don’t even see us.” Thus, the film does not include straightforward representations of named, recognizable, or brand-name historical events or elements of the civil rights movement, such as marches or colored/whites-only water fountains, in the way that, for instance, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) or other made-for-television or Hollywood dramas have done. Through its narrative and characters, Nothing But a Man nevertheless responds to these events by exploring how they manifest emotionally in the interpersonal dynamics and relations within a small town and within a couple. Young and Roemer deploy a number of strategies to signify modes of political address and mobilization during a period of intense racial conflict and upheaval in the United States circa 1960. These include the musical score and newsreel action footage of the men working. But it is the use of close framing that most powerfully brings viewers into prox-

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1. Josie and Duff in the car. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

imity, intimacy, and sympathy with the characters and their experience of racial conflict. Consider the sequence where Duff and Josie sit in Duff’s car on their first date and share a kiss. The first shot shows them seated next to each other, the light catching the bullet-shaped hole in a passenger-side window, just behind Josie’s head. The photography, where all around them is darkness, emphasizes their closeness and, other than the broken window, they are in a shared solitude, apart from a visible social context or specific location. The next few shots alternate between Duff and Josie’s images, pictured from the head to just below the shoulders, until a stranger approaches the window and their narrative and photographic seclusion is broken. The intimacy of Duff and Josie’s conversation gives way against the realities of its fragility. The stranger’s presence changes the dynamic of the scene. His angle of vision alternates with that of Duff and Josie for the next few shots. The camera’s angle shifts from a neutral perspective to a subjective one, as

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2. A stranger’s hand on the car. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

the stranger gazes down at Duff and Josie in the car. An off-screen voice intrudes, further expanding the space and eventually another set of eyes stares at Josie and Duff: “Are they doing anything?” Lit from the right side of the frame, the stranger, a white figure, stands in stark contrast to the otherwise warm and enveloping dark night. The second stranger joins him and shines a flashlight on Duff and Josie, settling the light, invasively, on Josie’s breasts. Duff looks up and protests, but Josie, looking almost straight ahead, at neither of the men, interrupts, attempting to protect Duff and defuse the situation. The lights that Young uses to illuminate the scene are visible in the actors’ eyes, emphasizing the ways in which this battle is a confrontation of looks. The scene exemplifies the intensely personal registers of racial conflict. Duff and Josie’s relationship is exposed in ways that they can neither prevent nor regulate during the interaction. The strangers’ interconnected feelings of desire, fascination, and repulsion are all on display here. The boys somehow either know that it is a black couple in the car or that there is a couple in the car and they are aroused by

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3. Both strangers look at Duff and Josie in the car. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

surveying and intruding upon the physical intimacy of other people. The strangers, by the way, are actually neighbors of Josie’s – at least one of them recognizes her. But before he acknowledges her and ends the standoff, the two couples, the boys outside the car and Josie and Duff inside it, form opposing reflections of each other. They fit a specific and clear dynamic of racial conflict that is both intimate and public, signified by the car, which is an enclosed personal space for Josie and Duff while it is also open to the air; the car has its top down and the boys are standing outside the car. Historical racial conflicts occurred not so much between anonymous, abstract entities but between people who were familiar with one another. Nothing But a Man explores the ways in which, despite the public nature of segregation’s policies, racial conflict was textured with familiarity between supposed strangers. Young’s framing reduces the whole world to this face or this side of the face, or these two faces, or that angled gaze into the car or down onto the railroad track. That is the whole world, and everything else outside of the frame is beyond the scope of the filmmaker’s thinking at that mo-

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4. Duff looks at the strangers. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

ment. While the cinematographer is composing a shot, his or her attention is on the four sides of the frame. Thus, on a literal level in making the film, there is less focus on what is going on around the camera and the larger context. Roemer and Young’s photography creates psychological landscapes in faces. In such a signification, rather than play noble but reactive victims whose faces or bodies are unimportant unless they are brutalized, Josie and Duff take up all the available cinematic space of every frame. Archetypal in some ways, Josie and Duff are not racial representatives as much as they are clearly drawn individual characters as reflected in their photography, even if the image is occasionally and exquisitely out of focus, slightly or softly focused. They are photographically larger than their white aggressors. The camera is more sympathetic to them while the lighting allows us to see the depth of their thoughts and feelings on their faces. By contrast, the white characters invade and remain estranged even if, in terms of the narrative, they seek to dominate and the camera temporarily takes their point of view. The scene in the car ends with their yells or screeches

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5. The men look at Josie and Duff. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

rendered as off-screen sound. Duff defines them as follows: “they don’t seem human, do they?” Nothing But a Man is neither an action film nor a melodrama. It does not entertain with dramatic and simplified gunfights – or any physical confrontations – because Duff tends to react to aggression in an intellectual or emotional way, except the moment when he pushes Josie (and then leaves the house to find his son and reflect) and the possible eruption of it at the gas station when he defies the men who threaten him. There are no tearjerker scenarios drawn from the lived realities of racial conflict, and the film’s lessons are unclear and ambiguous. Creating its own visual grammar through photography, the film accords visual authority to the black folks, creating a language of racial conflict in which the black characters have significant moments where they look upon and observe the “sick and ridiculous” world of racist white folks.1 Some of the most poetic moments in the film are also the more documentary, nonnarrative ones, such as the opening sequence of the men working, before the music starts. Viewers hear the sounds of different

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tools the men use to lay tracks, and although the shots are close, the lack of narration gives the sequence an observational feel. The rabbit hunt, which is brief, shows a quick rush of energy as the men are running through the field. Does it document a rabbit hunt? No, it is broader and even more fundamental because the image, the sound, and the pacing of both documentary-like sequences convey something of the texture of the men’s lives or at least that day. There is a certain realist inflection to these scenes due to their incompletion; however, they are also poetic, adding variation and new angles to the film overall. Nothing But a Man is not a documentary, clearly, and its approach to the past is the approach of a fictional work that is on a continuum where reenactment and dramatization of historical events lie on one end and indirect works, suggestive and elliptical in their representations of a volatile past, lie on the other. The challenge Nothing But a Man poses to a contemporary version of 1960s history is that it goes beyond normative black and white racial paradigms of conflict, which in turn is lived in varied ways apart from specific organizations and their confrontations over institutional, corporate policies. Nothing But a Man treats racial conflict of the 1960s on a personal and nonmelodramatic, nonredemptive, nearly amoral scale. That ambiguity may be the most distressing aspect historically, but the most liberating for the rest of us. Nothing But a Man is 2011 and it is 1964 – and it is of the years in which it was actually written and filmed. Audiences and critics may receive the film in particular ways when it is released, but in an expansive historical imagination of film material, critical reception is not the only history of the film, if only because it continues beyond that moment just as it had a preceding life, but also because critical reception is often at odds with the reception of other viewing audiences. Reception, like meaning, is fractured and contingent. Fiction allows us to look at many histories at once. Film history is not only the literal history of when the film was released – when the film appeared in theaters or at the film festival. We need to account for the long incubation period between when the filmmakers and the artists think about what they are doing and when the film is actually in front of audiences. A film’s history includes the histories of the technicians and

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6. Duff in confrontation with Josie’s father. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

the actors; their careers and the characters they have played previously constitute a film history as well. In Nothing But a Man, cinematic devices bring us closer to selected aspects of historical reality, putting us in proximity to the body, but fiction can also place distance between us and the political potential that representing racial conflicts as they were lived in real time evokes. Yet even with fictional distance, politicized violence still threatens audiences. A film is not only an artifact – or it is not a stable artifact. It lives a continued present, reinventing itself as it is transferred from film to DVD to Internet streaming formats, and as it finds new audiences and it is viewed in changing contexts and thus assigned new meanings. Like a nautilus with many chambers, so a film has many histories. And yet as artists create their works, audiences create meanings; artists’ intentions, or lack of intentions, are only part of a film’s history. Nothing But a Man

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has a complex, enigmatic, and not entirely optimistic ending. It explores the complications of friendship and integrity within a context defined by racial hostility. Earlier I described Nothing But a Man as indirect, but there is nothing indirect about Duff losing his job at the mill when one of his coworkers rats him out to the boss for suggesting that the men stick together and stand up for themselves, or when bigots harass him at the gas station. Likewise, when Duff confronts Josie’s father with the words, “you’ve been stooping so long you don’t know how to stand,” this statement clearly condemns his father-in-law’s compromises with local white power representatives. Duff eventually leaves Josie, and when he returns viewers (and Josie) are presented not with a resolution, but instead with a new set of troubled questions and uncertain answers. They may indeed be free inside but the world outside awaits them. In fiction, artists draw upon reality as a source, not a testament. Decades of sociological readings of African American art have made us forget the mysterious process at its core; we use materials and ideas that are available in order to refashion them into work that is layered and keyed to resonate in a number of registers. The question is not how does this film represent the past, but rather how does this film refract the past and what does it reveal. This latter formulation directs us to reflect upon the film itself, its grammar, its ideology and strategies of signification upon and interpretation of the past – how it takes the raw material of historical reality and remakes it, plotting it on a new and renewable grid of time, place, and meaning. Films, even documentaries, are not real per se though they may draw upon realities, historical moments, and historical figures as sources of reality, as touchstones, or drive-by references. All that material is reworked and remixed to express ideas that may in fact reveal little that is particularly accurate about the historical moment such as what happened and who did what. I am tempted to say that fiction reveals greater complexity and tenderness than can be accessed in public documents or in proper history. Diaries and letters, like secret recordings, bring to light feelings underneath the narratives of triumph. Yet this idea of fiction as more complicated or more telling than historiography is a cul-de-sac, a dead end.

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The main issues to bear in mind or take away from this discussion are (1) the nature of the past, and (2) the means by which fictional films transform historical reality. The shared past is a vast and wild frontier in our collective consciousness, not an orderly pageant with events and characters proceeding in clearly defined roles along tidy pathways of meaning. When we ask whether film can help us access intelligibility, we are asking for a pageant. But a pageant is a denial of history. The past is a hurricane, and we are rubble, what remains afterward. History needs a cinematic imagination, but also a literary, theatrical, musical, sculptural, painterly, and all other imaginations as well. It is not history just because it happened or because it is past, if history is to mean anything now. It has to be imagined. It has to be passed on. To belong to us, history has to have images, narrative – or nonnarrative – representation, story, embodiment, and feeling. As much as history needs imagination, imagination is its enemy as well. Yet, it is not history until it is imagined. We need stories in order for historical events and people to enter into the imagination. And then it belongs to us. At the same time, history is something that we cannot escape. Neither can we recuperate it fully. Can’t stay, can’t go. During the symposium, Young said of Nothing But a Man, “the film is not even old news but maybe ancient news.” The film and its references are fifty years old. When we watch it, we are looking back in time, but its mythic dimensions transport us to ancient times. The film’s fictional form gives us the elasticity to see it as both past and present and outside of visible time boundaries. The film’s lack of specificity is key to its applicability or accessibility in the contemporary moment. This town outside Birmingham where Duff and Josie reside significantly remains unnamed because it can thus become any small town or any community within or outside Birmingham. The town is a geographical, political, and psychological location in the film. Film history is its own history. Film is its own phenomenon. It has a material history, a production history. Sometimes directors provide their own kind of history. Sometimes they give answers that are generative and illuminating in certain ways, and sometimes they are not illuminating at all. It just is what it is. The director’s evidence or testimony can

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constitute an account of his or her process, which is a history. Spectators have a history too in which is outlined how film is viewed in particular communities. How does film function for African Americans? What is film as a cultural practice? What is film an occasion of or an occasion for doing? Such questions open up points of entry into a film, each one claiming authority that is contingent on the others. In the African American community, film functions partly as an occasion for working out the position of black people in America. Regardless of the film’s setting or time period, the film becomes an occasion for reflection on the present day, not as a metaphor, but as a ritual event in which the current state of cultural and political representation is assessed. Such issues arise in different ways. Whether or not it is productive to do so, the members of every generation of movie reviewers write as though they are the first people to ever address the question of representation. And they must always find that the question of representation is bankrupt, because it is not possible to have the kind of full representation in fiction that is expected in politics. This phrase “politics of representation” collapses all of that. It all becomes quite convoluted and very confusing. And yet, as a film historian, I find the issue of representation cannot and should not be avoided because that is the space in which film becomes meaningful. Representation here is akin to the question of historical accuracy. People do think of films with black characters as representing a form of “us” just as they feel that films about the past are gateways to factual history. Such works provide occasions for talking about realities. A film’s fictionality is usually only evoked to dismiss it, as in “oh that’s not real.” Yet the unreality of fictional films constitutes its site of instruction. We tend not to discuss the kinds of conflicts that emerge in fiction: man against man, man against himself, man against the environment, and so forth. Still, the form of a film is its expressive history, an utterance as the vessel of history. Notes 1. Charles Mingus, “Fables of Faubus,” Mingus Ah Um (1959; New York: Columbia/Legacy, 1998). The album was

originally issued on analog disk in 1964 (tracks 1–9) and 1979 (tracks 10–12). “Fables of Faubus” is track 7. The expression

Francis “sick and ridiculous” comes from lyrics Mingus wrote for the song “Fables of Faubus,” the instrumentals for which he also composed. He recorded “Fables of Faubus” with both lyrics and instruments for Columbia Records, but they rejected the political content and had Mingus record the song as an instrumental, although he continued to perform the song with lyrics in live performances. Some of the lyrics involved exchanges between Mingus and

113 his drummer Dannie Richmond. Mingus later recorded the song with lyrics on Candid Records in 1960. Here is an excerpt of the lyrics: Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie. Governor Faubus! Why is he so sick and ridiculous? He won’t permit integrated schools.

Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man Judith E. Smith

The film Nothing But a Man opens with a long pan of a crew of black railroad workers laying tracks, in a Southern rural landscape. Its first sounds are those of the jackhammer, pounding in the spikes; the camera comes upon the man operating it from behind. The title appears, taken from the refrain of the folk ballad about the legendary black steel-driving man, John Henry. Then the camera shows the face of the jackhammer operator, Ivan Dixon, the film’s steel-driving hero, in two long close-ups. Other black crew members come into focus, laying the rail dropped by a white crane operator. An arresting riff from a blues harmonica joins the soundtrack as the jackhammer sound is dimmed. Nothing But a Man closes with a two-shot of Dixon embracing a pregnant, weeping, Abbey Lincoln, in a modest living room, children’s art on the wall behind them, reassuring her that “It ain’t gonna be easy, baby, but it’s gonna be all right,” ambient sound giving way to the blues harmonica, which plays over the credits. This opening sequence foregrounds the contradictory status of African American labor that lies at the core of white supremacy; the ending calls attention to male-female interdependency and familial solidarity as resources critical to resisting white supremacy. Produced just as a new civil rights insurgency was emerging, Nothing But a Man features labor and gender as key elements both of racial subordination and liberation. Watching the film now invites viewers to expand their imaginations beyond iconic images of King and Parks, youth, dogs, and fire hoses, to ask what “freedom dreams” animated the civil rights movement in the 114

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early 1960s, and in turn, what “freedom dreams” the civil rights movement set in motion.1 An independently made black-and-white film released late in 1964, Nothing But a Man is often listed in the 1970s surveys of black film, but it does not fit comfortably into that category. The film has not received sustained critical attention in film studies or in-depth historical analysis.2 It uses certain documentary techniques and offers a complex representation of black life, but the film was scripted, directed, and filmed by two white men. A fruitful, although not egalitarian, collaboration across racial lines produced the film’s unusual framing of civil rights protest in response to white supremacy’s assault on work and family life. Political frameworks borrowed from the 1940s inflected the film’s distinctive representation of civil rights insurgency in the early 1960s. The white filmmakers, Michael Roemer and Robert Young, embraced the black freedom struggle in the U.S. South as part of the broader World War II mobilization against fascism and the postwar challenges to colonialism around the world. Their perspective shaped how they conceived the social and familial effects of racialization and the cultural dynamics of acceding to and defying white supremacy. Centering their story on the struggles of a black couple drew on a strategy utilized by progressive artists in the 1940s and 1950s: to diversify the category of “ordinary family” in order to broaden the norms of democratic practices associated with the rights of expanded and presumptive citizenship.3 The film’s black characters took shape in conversations Roemer and Young had with young Southern black male and female students radicalized by the sit-ins and Freedom Rides in 1960 and 1961; with colleagues in New York’s progressive black theater scene, especially Charles Gordone, the playwright and actor who helped cast the film; and with limited and sometimes contested input from its extraordinary actors, professionals Ivan Dixon and Gloria Foster and first-time film actors Abbey Lincoln, the renowned jazz artist and activist, and Julius Harris, who worked as a nurse. Roemer and Young’s direct access to political debates within black communities was likely possible only in this historical moment, poised between grassroots direct-action mobilization and an intensified conservative racist backlash, before sharp partisan divisions emerged

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in response to the calls for black power and the heightened debates over the domestic and international costs of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The central character in Nothing But a Man is Duff, a railroad worker, who meets and marries Josie, a minister’s daughter who teaches school in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. In order to find work that is decently paid and compatible with both self-respect and family life, Duff must give up the unionized but transient work of the railroad section gang conveyed in that first scene and try to break into the segregated low-wage work of the local economy. Talking to fellow workers even in the most coded language about “getting together” leads to Duff being fired from his job at a sawmill and lands him on an antiunion blacklist among local employers. Eventually his inability to find work that does not require him to demonstrate servility and accept his assigned place in the racial hierarchy spurs him to leave town, abandoning his now pregnant wife. He goes to Birmingham, but what he sees there, in an encounter with his embittered, alcoholic father who has been disabled in an industrial accident, leads Duff back to Josie. He brings home with him a son from a previous relationship, renewing his commitment to Josie and to “making trouble” in the town where they live. Featuring complex black characters who both acknowledge and resist class and racial constraints and foregrounding black subjectivity, Nothing But a Man stood at the margins of cultural production in the United States in the mid-1960s. Its resolute distance from familiar black good-time film genres, especially minstrelsy and musicals, made it an unlikely feature film. It did not provide a sympathetic white character as a point of identification for white audiences. It did not presume the goal of assimilation into white society. Instead the narrative incidents represented the obstacles to and the possibilities for mobilizing black opposition to white supremacy. Although its title signified a central focus on the black male condition, women characters command attention and demonstrate agency outside of conventional representations of domestic labor or nurturing service to white households. Exploring the film’s uncertain path to production and exhibition – thematic and stylistic choices of its makers, the terms of political protest it conveyed, and how these were recognized by white and black viewers – offers a rare opportunity to listen in on public conversations about race and labor,

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political economy, and gender before anyone knew the outcome of the unfolding midcentury grassroots campaigns to topple white supremacy. Wor ld War II-Er a Antifascism and Inter r acial Solidar ity in the Ear ly 1960s The filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert Young came of age in an era when many shared a common understanding of World War II as opposition to fascism. This framework had broad currency during and after the war and was indelibly shaped by the racial equality demanded by the wartime Double V campaign for democracy and freedom at home and abroad. Within this framework, racial injustice was a central, not exceptional, feature of society, resulting not from intolerance, prejudice, or misunderstanding, but from institutional forces driven by political economy. Principles of antifascism, internationalism, and interracialism comingled; black struggles for justice, dignity, and self-respect were seen as significant because they illuminated the path toward achieving a just society for everyone. Roemer later made a distinction between the early 1960s and a later period in which black cultural nationalism challenged white filmmakers who tried to narrate black experience: “In those days we had the gumption to think we could identify with blacks.”4 Young, born in 1925, grew up Jewish on Long Island and served in the navy as a photographer’s mate in the South Pacific between 1943 and 1946. Roemer was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Berlin, who managed his escape to England in 1939 and then to New York in 1944. Young and Roemer met each other in 1947 at Harvard College, where they were both fledgling members of Harvard’s first film society. The film society offered a refuge for students excluded from mainstream collegiate life structured by social pedigree and class privilege. Wartime filmmaking had popularized the use of cheaper and more portable 16-millimeter film stock and equipment; newly organized local film societies, multiplying from just a few in 1940 to over two hundred nationally by 1949, screened European films, including the electrifying new neorealist films from Italy, and experimental independent films. In 1949, Young and Roemer collaborated on a student film scripted by Roemer and filmed by Young. Through the 1950s, both Roemer and Young gravitated to filmmaking

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outside of Hollywood: Roemer worked on educational films and Cinerama features for Louis de Rochemont, the creator of March of Time‘s filmed newsreels. Young worked for Willard Van Dyke, a left-wing U.S. filmmaker known for his social documentaries from the 1930s, and then for the documentary film unit at NBC.5 Young’s stint at NBC exposed him to the new generation of black activists inside and outside the United States provocatively challenging racial inequality and exclusion. Working on the NBC White Paper documentary Sit-In (broadcast December 20, 1960), Young traveled to Nashville, using raw news footage of the events at the local NBC affiliate to identify and meet the Fisk University student activists John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Diane Nash, and James Bevel; the white exchange student Paul La Prad; the combative black minister C. T. Vivian; and the distinguished black economist Vivian Henderson. They helped him produce a riveting story showing the sit-ins and the use of Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience, emphasizing their absolute refusal to accommodate the racial status quo accepted by an older generation of black and white leadership, and the related economic strategy of boycotting downtown stores. The interviews Young filmed revealed a painful generational divide in the black community and confident white insistence that racial boundaries could and should hold firm. Sit-In introduced its TV viewers to new forms of black protest and revealed passionate local white resistance to racial equality in any form. For his next NBC assignment, letters of introduction from U.S. civil rights activists enabled Young to make contact with the Angolans fighting Portuguese colonial rule in order to film Angola: Journey to War (broadcast September 19, 1961). Accompanied by an African American cameraman, Charles Dorkin, Young walked three hundred miles to meet a group of Angolan rebels. The documentary laid bare the system of forced labor – passbooks, contract labor, women’s and men’s labor gangs – at the heart of Portuguese rule in Angola. Young showed the Portuguese using force as if “every African hand were against them,” flattening villages, strafing them with napalm (although the network insisted on cutting out evidence that the napalm bombs were made in the United States).6 The film also conveyed the chasm between colonizers and Africans, filming Portuguese people who were surprised at black calls for

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independence; as one remarked, “The native has been so wonderful with babies and children. . . . We know these people. We love them.” Although Robert Young’s dialogue asked, “how could the ragged group of [rebel] men and boys hope to become an army” that could mount a meaningful challenge against superior Portuguese force, the final credits suggested a different possibility, as they scrolled in front of footage of the African troops, holding their rifles aloft, singing. Young won awards for both NBC documentaries; he was then allowed to choose the subject for his next effort and asked Roemer to join him in making a documentary exposé of poverty in Palermo, Sicily. Young was inspired by Danilo Dolci, a charismatic Italian reformer who employed the tactics of Ghandian nonviolent civil disobedience to mobilize the poor. Dolci and his followers demanded that local government, the Roman Catholic Church, and the local mafia take responsibility for the conditions of poverty and hopelessness in Sicilian slums. Young and Roemer concentrated on the everyday survival of families in a poor neighborhood, with a film, then titled The Inferno (Cortile Cascino). They experimented with neorealist technique within the documentary form, innovatively using images and sound to knit together a series of sequences exploring how daily struggle with scarcity shaped relationships between men and women, parents and children, men and local political authority. At the last minute, NBC refused to broadcast Inferno as “unfit for the American living room.” Young later speculated that the film was dropped because of fears in New York or Washington that it condoned communist influence in Italy. Roemer and Young were devastated that their most creative and ambitious work to date would not be seen. “Here we were, we’d just done the best thing in our lives and it was taken away from us.” This experience pushed them to work independently of the major studios and on the project that became Nothing But a Man. “We had to do something fresh that came out of both of us.”7 In 1962, Young invited Roemer on an eight-week trip to the American South to find background material for a film inspired by the students Young had met in Nashville. Roemer considered himself a stranger to the American racial regime: “I suppose I knew three African Americans before I went South. I had just never really met any.” To his surprise, he found that encountering the circumstances of segregation in the South

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was “like coming home.” White supremacy in some ways resembled Nazi racialization, especially in its impact on families, he observed. “The man who has no way of supporting his family turns his violence against those who are closest to him and against himself. My father was such a man. So you get the father who doesn’t stay, and a family raised by women.” He went on to comment that “destroying the family, which is such an old pattern in American race relations, isn’t simply a black experience.” Roemer’s European perspective did not reify race or color. In 1965, he asserted, “Bob and I don’t feel we went down South to make a film about somebody else. We felt very related to it.”8 Young’s connections with civil rights leaders from his work on SitIn gained him and Roemer unusual white entrée into Southern black life. Roemer described how being “passed from one black community and family to another” gave them the chance to “learn as much as possible about their experiences, relationships and feelings.” They attended a Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention in Atlanta, where they heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak and met King’s father and the fiery Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker. They established contacts among members of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Duff Anderson’s refusal to defer to white men, even at the cost of a job, developed partly in conversation with young activists Diane Nash and James Bevel, now married and living in Mississippi, who pressed to keep the defiant male character committed to the Southern struggle. Roemer remembered that repeating theme in conversations he and Young had with the younger generation of activists: “one thing we’ll ask of you – don’t let him go North.”9 Duff, the defiant character they created, drew on shared experiences that were animating the new civil rights challengers – union membership, military service, travel outside small-town rules of segregation, and knowledge of the struggles in other communities – to motivate Duff’s commitment to “making some trouble in that [Alabama] town.” It is difficult to excavate the terms of collaboration, especially in the context of film production hierarchy and across the fault lines of racial experience. Roemer and Young authored the script. They began with a screenplay Roemer had written in 1957 about a young married couple and the man’s violent, alcoholic father. What they had learned on their two-

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month trip through the South enabled them to transform the existing screenplay, which Roemer described as psychologically and dramatically sound, and to add the additional generational dimension of Duff’s son. They then filmed the script they wrote; Roemer noted that there were no improvised situations or lines of dialogue. “There were some unplanned things that were taken advantage of, but each scene was, otherwise, quite heavily prepared.”10 To cast their film, Roemer and Young looked to Charles Gordone, the black playwright, actor, and cofounder of the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers.11 Gordone showed the script to the actors Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and Julius Harris. The actors then brought astute observations from their own experience to the script and the characters.12 On the set, possibilities for interracial collaboration were limited by the overlapping hierarchies of film production and race. Roemer talked through the emotional registers of Duff’s character with actor James Earl Jones, who was not able to persuade Roemer to present Duff as angrier and less easygoing in the early scenes. Ivan Dixon fought as hard as he could for his conception of how Duff should look and act, winning some points, losing others. Looking back on the filmmaking, Roemer and Young thought they had earned respect from the actors both by holding firm to their interpretation and by conceding to the actors’ insights. Although retrospectively Roemer and Young were self-critical about not yielding to more of the actors’ suggestions for their characters, at the time they felt constrained by their aspirations to get their resisting black characters in front of white filmgoers who might otherwise remain unaware of what was at stake in dismantling segregation: “We went as far as we thought we could take a white audience at the time and still not lose them.”13 The sharpest racial conflict during the filming was not about script or character. Dixon, who had marched on Washington in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Prayer March in 1957, wanted to be at the March for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, but the filmmakers, working on a very tight budget, vetoed the delay. A tense exchange led to blows between Dixon and Richard Rubin, the soundman. Dixon took off, but with the intercession of Clayton Riley, a black production

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assistant, Dixon rejoined the production, and filming continued. They were still filming in New Jersey on September 15, the day four young girls were killed by bombs at the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham, the starting point for many of the marches that previous spring. The actors were overcome with grief and rage, but somehow managed to finish the film.14 The left-wing framework and Jewish identifications of Roemer and Young allowed them to view racial discrimination and black experience within segregation as part of a broader politics and struggle and helped sustain the commitment of filmmakers, actors, and crew to the final production. Abbey Lincoln remembered Roemer telling the cast, “‘This is not about black people necessarily. This is about oppression.’ He was a Jew. . . . He went through that. He knew something about oppression and the story was about how, when you are oppressed, you finally learn to oppress yourself. That’s the way it works, and he was right.” But she also noted the actors’ active participation in the collaborative effort: “It was his song that we made our own.”15 “Making It R eal”: Documentary Style and Author ity Nothing But a Man blended feature filmmaking with documentary style. Roemer and Young had learned their craft just after World War II, when combining location shooting, handheld cameras, fictional reconstruction of nonfiction footage, and the casting of nonprofessional actors announced the filmmakers’ social aspirations. Examples range widely across film genres, from John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (1940) to Orson Welles’s experimental Citizen Kane (1941), from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to works of Italian neorealism such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicyle Thief (1948). This hybrid was so widely recognized in the 1940s that it was labeled “newsdrama cinematography” by the motion picture industry, and it was commonly identified with social problem films (as well as with urban noir) in the late 1940s.16 These techniques were crossing between Hollywood and alternative filmmaking just at the moment when foreign films and independent cinema were becoming a more visible part of U.S.

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urban film culture, particularly in the smaller second-run theaters that were experiencing new commercial viability as art houses in the 1950s and early 1960s.17 Newsdrama cinematography is prevalent in the film. Roemer and Young were thoroughly committed to a documentary look, with underlighting and high-contrast photography, along with a style of acting that Dixon described as “very naturalistic, very realistic.” Some of the film footage came from the filmmakers’ trip South; they shot fields and townscapes from their car windows in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Maryland, and they photographed a railroad section gang working near where they were staying at the home of one of the Nashville sit-in students, in Eastover, South Carolina, that would become part of the film’s opening sequence. They recorded the blues harmonica playing of a local black musician, Wilbur Kirk, before his white landlord threw them off his property for sitting publicly, black and white, on the porch. The scenes with actors were all shot on location in New Jersey, with black neighborhoods and black churches in Cape May providing the look of a small Southern town, and the black ghetto in Atlantic City passing for Birmingham. The experience of being tailed by sheriffs during the preparatory trip taught the filmmakers about the potential danger of filming in the South with an interracial cast and crew. Young filmed with a handheld camera, refusing to use a zoom and preferring to move into the center of the action.18 His attention to black faces in close-up produced images of depth and intimacy rarely seen before in American filming of African American characters. The film’s authority to represent lived experience relies heavily on its use of everyday sounds, from jackhammers and other machines in the opening sequence to the clanking tailpipe of Duff’s car when he is driving back, with his son, to Josie. The filmmakers used radio microphones, not yet common in feature films, to produce extraordinarily clear sound in everyday registers.19 They used sound to mark spatial and psychic shifts. The noise of the track-car engine gives way to the sound of a bell announcing the borders of town. We hear the jukebox playing “Heat Wave” as we see the pinball machine that tells us we are in a pool parlor; outside, on a dark street, “Heat Wave” fades and the first haunting notes of a woman singing a gospel song leads Duff to the doorway of the

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church. Documentary techniques are most obvious in the church scene; a devout congregation and a renowned revivalist create the cross-class space in which Duff and Josie meet. A hit song in 1963, “Heat Wave” was produced by the black-owned Detroit record label Motown, a company name that referred to Detroit’s significance in offering employment to black workers in the automobile industry. “Heat Wave” and other Motown hits in the film, with proven crossover appeal to white as well as black record buyers, introduce another set of powerful black voices and sounds into the film’s created world, signaling the life of black neighborhoods and marking spaces of black sociability – low-down bars, crowded streets, and rickety backalley tenements – in what the film shows as Birmingham’s poor black district. In contrast to the blues idiom of black nightclub vocalists, the Motown songs project a forward-looking optimism, and as Roemer would later describe it, “say the thing that couldn’t be spoken in the film.” Black newspaper reviewers were especially excited about the film’s use of Motown: “When you hear Martha and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, the Marvelettes, or the Miracles, you automatically know that this movie is going to be for real: the honest to goodness everyday living kind of thing.”20 The filmmakers’ approach to sound enhanced the film’s realist effects and supported its claims to verisimilitude. Nar r ating R ace and Class, Family and R esistance Nothing But a Man showcased the interconnections between race and class exploitation and encouraged sympathy for the young civil rights radicals who were transforming deference into defiance in the early 1960s. In a press release, the filmmakers are explicit about the social and generational location of its characters. “‘Nothing But a Man’ concerns a Negro rover, a carefree laborer on the railroad section gang in the Deep South, when he abandons the easy camaraderie of the bunk-car and the honky-tonk, and marrying the daughter of a Baptist minister, seeks to settle down and make his living in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. The younger generation is weary of the pattern set by their parents. The young man’s cockiness soon brings him into conflict

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with his white bosses. He determines to fight the battle with dignity and independence.”21 The film’s attention to the working conditions of black men illuminated issues of racial discrimination that had been raised by black and white progressives and trade union radicals since the mid-1930s. The narrative positions labor – its physical demands, racial hierarchy, remuneration – at the heart of Duff’s situation, and, referring to the legend of John Henry, identifies labor as central to the black male condition. The class distance between Duff and Josie is in play from the moment of their first meeting, when they quickly establish that he works on the railroad and that she is a schoolteacher who has been to college. The demeaning rules of white supremacy are shown to shape all public spaces, but they have their most devastating effects in the white-controlled workplaces in town, which offer Duff nothing more than a variety of opportunities for subservience and exploitation, filmed in near-documentary detail. Unionization is shown to be the best protection for black workers, but the power of the bosses to exacerbate racial divisions in the sawmill that employs both black and white workers – and to blacklist even potentially prounion workers – makes this a precarious possibility at best. The conclusion of the film does not resolve the problem of exploited black workers, but Duff’s comment, that he can always chop cotton if he has to, emphasizes the social necessity of working-class labor – part of the resolution in such familiar works as Sean O’Casey’s frequently performed play Juno and the Paycock (1924), the film version of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and both stage and screen versions of Raisin in the Sun (1959, 1961). The film shows the unfolding civil rights struggles in the early 1960s as building on wartime ideals of antifascism, labor militancy, and racial equality. Duff’s spirited refusal to defer to white supremacy is explained through references to these prior forms of resistance. Duff’s mention of how his army service in Japan exposed him to other ways of life evokes the unwillingness of many World War II veterans to return to Jim Crow rules. His unionized job on the railroad section gang marks the collective accomplishments of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Duff refers to Birmingham as an inspiring model of militancy: “if they can do it in Birmingham, and that’s a mean town, we

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ought to do something here.” Here the film is making use of multiple associations with the city: as a site of organizing drives to unionize black steelworkers in the 1930s and 1940s; a voting rights campaign in the late 1940s; and Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth’s embattled desegregation campaign in the spring of 1963. These multiple references emphasize the wider significance of the black struggle in the United States. The repeated reference to the “lynching they still had here eight years ago” makes a chronological connection to the horrific 1955 murder of Emmett Till in nearby Mississippi, invoking both its violent repression of challenges to segregation and the widespread outrage in response. At the same time, the film shows collective resistance to be a demanding, uncertain, and unfinished political project. Coerced forms of accommodation to white supremacy result in painful divisions among black people: a black sawmill worker’s collusion with the white bosses costs Duff his job; Duff quits rather than accede to the boss’s demand that he publicly repudiate his support for “getting together.” Josie’s minister father has made a deal with the white school superintendent to get a new black school in exchange for quelling any demands for legal school desegregation – a familiar white segregationist strategy to resist enforcement of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. The film consistently frames Duff’s personal defiance as “trouble” because of his potential as a leader/instigator of collective forms of racial resistance. At the same time, it conveys collective resistance as not to be taken for granted or assumed to be inherent in the “black community.” Nothing But a Man emphasizes the importance of male-female sexual partnership as a critical source for sustaining resistance to white supremacy. The film conveys the cost of racial discrimination and exploitation in the workplace especially through its punishing effect on Duff’s willingness to commit himself to marital intimacy and mutual dependence. The camera sharply juxtaposes a series of domestic alternatives: the all-male but temporary camaraderie in the bunk housing of the railroad section gang; the patriarchal rule and spirit-numbing respectability of Josie’s middle-class dining room; the emotionally barren and crowded living space of the child minder in Birmingham who boards Duff’s son after the boy has been abandoned by his mother; the alcoholic acrimony of the small room that Duff’s father and Lee share; a

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beaten-down neighbor on his front porch, fending off his wife’s enraged disappointment; an implausibly hopeful exchange between Duff and Josie, hanging clothes on the line and playfully shadow boxing. Gender conventions ordinarily pose men as concerned about social and public good and women as defending private family well-being. But Nothing But a Man proposes that it is precisely the resources of marital and familial reciprocity that will enable Duff to go on “making trouble” in the public sphere. The radical message – that to sustain a marriage it is necessary to resist white supremacy, which requires the joint social efforts of wives and husbands, mothers and fathers – is built on the precedent of an earlier left-wing film, Salt of the Earth (1952), itself the result of an unusual collaboration, between blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers and Mexican American miners. According to the film’s narrative, Duff is driven to leave his pregnant wife because of his refusal to accept the only work available to him, which is demeaning and structured by segregationist racial discrimination. When Duff, haunted by his father’s immobilizing rage but moved by Lee’s generosity of spirit, returns and chooses his family, it is because he has decided to accept Josie’s emotional as well as wage-earning support – which will enable him to go on “making trouble” in that town. Duff’s renewed commitment to family, including his son, clears away any alternative personal explanations for his fate, squarely placing the “blame” for the black laboring man’s condition on institutional forms of white supremacy. This narrative resolution effectively shifts attention away from familial failures and disappointments, now resolved, and back toward the necessity for collective pressure to challenge segregation. Black female agency is shown as central to the project of sustaining the resistant black family, although the film foregrounds the vulnerability and final assertion of black manhood. Duff’s wife Josie insists on her own subjectivity and sexual desire. From her first encounter with Duff, she rejects his efforts to pigeonhole her as someone shaped by middleclass standards of respectability. She acknowledges the class divide between them, but she also lets him know she is interested in crossing it. She explicitly refuses her step-mother’s class-based characterization of her interest in Duff as sexual slumming. On their first date, in a crowded bar with dance music in the background, Josie will not let Duff define her

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as a naive and inexperienced good girl, instead describing her attraction to him as someone who shares her own resisting spirit. Josie’s agency in this first date contrasts vividly another first date, between Terry Malloy and Edie Doyle, the lovers played by Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront (1954). Edie’s innocence and naïveté have already been established when she replies to Terry asking her for a date: “What for?” When they do meet in a bar, she accepts several drinks, gets dizzy, and needs to be rescued by him from the wild wedding dancers spinning by. In contrast, Josie dances with Duff with pleasure on a crowded dance floor, makes it clear when she does not want another drink, and continues to convey her forthright interest in him. On the Waterfront represented the relationship between Terry and Eddie as ricocheting between her virginal innocence and his tragic, child-like vulnerability, her sexual awakening in the face of his passionate need. With vivid characterization, Nothing But a Man represents the relationship between Duff and Josie as growing out of their mutual sexual attraction and their developing openness to the possibilities of what a shared life drawing on their collective differences and resources might entail: rough times, economic uncertainty, but the potential for commitment to reciprocity. A delicately filmed bedroom scene and explicit dialogue depict shared delight, breaking new ground in the representation of romantic and sexual desire between a married black couple. Josie’s repeated offers to parent Duff’s other child expresses her expansive and generous view of kinship. Choosing Duff and supporting his oppositional stance suggest her rejection of privileged respectability. Josie’s commitment to teach in this town, rather than find a better job elsewhere, and her unwavering support of Duff’s defiance constitute her own commitment to “making trouble” where she lives. Her self-possession, determination, and personal agency are critical to the film’s representation of gender and family mutuality, which, despite unequal power dynamics, constitute a key resource enabling resistance. Signifying to Audiences, White and Black Many obstacles stood in the way of this independent film reaching a mainstream audience. Roemer and Young had raised $160,000 to make

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Nothing But a Man from a group of about forty investors. When they had a print to screen, thanks to the financial support of Young’s brother (then in charge of DuArt, the family’s film processing lab), the mostly white audiences from whom they hoped to raise money for postproduction found it “depressing” and left in silence.22 Contemporaneous works associated with promoting interracial understanding would not have prepared potential contributors and Hollywood film viewers more generally for the film’s sharp economic and social analysis. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) featured a story set in Alabama in 1932, comfortably distant from the hotly contested present, revolving around, as Playboy quipped, “children learning about evil and adults learning about good.” With its focus on the motives and responses of white characters when a small-town Southern black man is falsely accused of rape, the white family equipped with the requisite all-knowing and nurturing black maid, and the film narrated through the eyes and words of a child, To Kill a Mockingbird was “not likely to offend any but the most bigoted viewers,” the Atlanta Constitution reviewer noted.23 Another contemporaneous film, Lilies of the Field (1963), showcasing the unlikely mutual regard between a group of German-speaking nuns and an itinerant black carpenter who helps them build a chapel, was recognized with an Academy Award for Sidney Poitier’s performance, but like Brock Peters in To Kill a Mockingbird, Poitier was the lone black character in a film that did not attempt to depict black subjectivity or the potential for collective resistance. Nothing But a Man was only able to attract critical attention and viewership as a result of a chance opening created by the imperatives of Cold War civil rights, in which U.S. foreign policy goals could be advanced by representing America with a primarily black cast film. Because another entry generated controversy and was withdrawn at the last minute, Nothing But a Man was accepted as an official U.S. entry at the Second Venice Film Festival in August 1964. Enthusiastic applause from the audience there made film news in the black press, Variety, and the New York Times.24 Winning what Roemer later referred to as “two good-guy” awards, the Prix San Giorgio and the City of Venice award, translated in publicity material for the film as “the double prize winner at Venice.” Possibly influenced by the positive response from European

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critics, the audience at a New York Film festival in September “rendered its verdict with loud, prolonged applause.” Roemer and Young were finally able to make a distribution deal.25 As a 1965 article on the film in Ebony observed, “American movies which attempted to treat racial matters in a realistic way” were often honored in Europe before being accepted in the United States.26 Finding exhibition venues and audiences in 1964 for a film that showed defiant black characters presented a challenge to industry practices. With white audiences moving to the suburbs, watching more television, and going to the movies less frequently, distributors were already facing a decline in ticket sales. Former assumptions about how to attract a mass audience gave way to marketing to audiences differentiated by age, class, and cultural sensibility. Legal efforts to desegregate public accommodations meant that previously accepted norms of segregation at movie theaters were in flux. Demographic shifts produced new black majorities in neighborhoods adjacent to downtown movie theaters and protests against segregated practices, including a “stand-in” led by some of the Nashville sit-in students The many owners committed to customary race-based exclusion would not have been likely to exhibit Nothing But a Man. The 1964 Civil Rights Act legislating the desegregation of public accommodations did not overturn the obstacles to commercial distribution of films depicting black life. Despite the increasing number of black moviegoers (10–15 percent of the general population, but 30 percent of the first-run movie patrons by 1967), white theater owners remained reluctant to encourage black patronage. In the north, theater owners assumed that white moviegoers would not attend films in theaters frequented by black patrons. Lawyer-turned-film producer Frederick Wiseman, involved with another independent film about black life, ridiculed the presumed assumptions of white theater owners that “if they show a movie about Negroes, they’ll have a riot on their hands.”27 Committed to desegregation, Roemer and Young rejected the conventional wisdom that dramatic black characters would only appeal to black audiences. Their triumph in Venice garnered a distribution deal from Cinema V, a newly formed independent acquiring black-themed movies and marketing them beyond the “Negro market.” Cinema V’s

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strategy was to target downtown art house theaters appealing both to moviegoers aspiring to see European and neorealist films and downtown grind-house audiences looking for exploitation films.28 Variety described Cinema V’s previous 1964 publicity campaign for The Cool World, an independent film exploring the pressures on young black teenagers in Harlem, as emphasizing “sexploitation.” Although initially the film “played only in Negro theatres, with grind promo, in Washington [DC] and Philadelphia,” in Baltimore, The Cool World started out in an art house and then moved to a lengthy engagement at a black theater. In San Francisco, plugging from an enthusiastic radio disc jockey drew both black and white ticket-buyers to a theater distant from the main black neighborhood, where it stayed for a two-month run.29 The marketing campaign for Nothing But a Man bore the traces of a combined art-house/sexploitation approach. In New York City and Boston, most of the ads for Nothing But a Man in the daily newspapers featured the outline of a black couple’s embrace, showing only the woman’s face; black newspapers used these ads but also ran glamorous promotional stills of Dixon and Lincoln in many of the articles they ran about the film. Especially outside of New York City, Cinema V’s ad campaign for Nothing But a Man emphasized sexual explicitness over racial struggle, with posters circulating the shot of Josie getting out of bed to take off her nightgown, her back to the camera, her silhouette and skin color indistinguishable. Roemer later wrote that the ad campaign “almost buried the fact that Nothing But a Man is about African-Americans.”30 Rather than emphasize the film’s sexual explicitness or its provocative challenges to white supremacy, Roemer and Young promoted what they hoped would be Nothing But a Man‘s universal appeal as a family story. Presenting black experience as a point of identification for white as well as black audiences offered the possibility of imagining a richer, more inclusive citizenship, undistorted by either the presumption of whiteness or by colorblindness. This promotional strategy also had the potential to avoid provocation while the film found an audience, but the focus on the marriage-and-family story, conventionally associated with daytime radio and melodrama, might deflect attention away from the film’s racial critique and focus on political economy.31 And, as Nikhil Singh has argued, struggles to claim universality for black people have

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rarely succeeded on their own terms, even when they have laid bare universalism’s implicit whiteness, challenging “not only particularism masquerading as a universalism, but also a universalism distorted by its long monopolization against blacks.”32 The “common sense” that universality was white and blackness was the problem was deeply ingrained. Roemer’s public comments – that the filmmakers wanted to “make a good film about young Americans’ experience that people would like to go and see,” about how “boys have to settle with their fathers before they can become men” – may have encouraged some white reviewers to emphasize the film’s love story as private, positioning the film as outside of politics, especially the unfolding civil rights struggle.33 The emotional resonance of the family story eclipsed the film’s racial challenge to white supremacy for some white reviewers. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, an admirer of the Italian neorealist films Open City and The Bicycle Thief, wrote that “on the surface it might seem a drama of race relations in the South . . . but essentially it is a drama of the emotional adjustment of the man to the age old problem of earning a livelihood, supporting a family, and maintaining his dignity.” The review in the trade paper the Motion Picture Herald suggested that the universal dimensions of the love story outweighed its racial specificity: “first of all, this picture . . . is a realistic and solid drama about some likeable human beings. It is of secondary importance that the color of their skin happens to be black. Primarily it is a love story.” A reviewer in Syracuse, New York, suggested that the family story could reassure white viewers unsettled by the social changes associated with desegregation, describing the film as “personal, without the violence of marches.”34 Other white reviewers who recognized the film’s political protest applauded it. One noted how the film explicitly probed “the question of equal rights without evasion or compromise” and praised it as “perhaps the best picture about Negroes made since the upsurge of the civil rights movement . . . a damning portrait of social injustice.” Another recognized Duff Anderson as “an emotional spokesperson for his generation” and the film as revealing “the particularized lives of a young married couple faced with the problems common to hundreds of negroes like them – unemployment, poverty, humiliation.”35 One white critic particularly appreciated the black subjectivity that distinguished

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Nothing But a Man from films limited by Hollywood’s imagination of civil rights; Life‘s reviewer noted approvingly that there was “no Hollywood subtheme of white liberals in search of a Negro who is really white inside.”36 Another white critic explicitly praised Nothing But a Man‘s linkages between work, family life, and racial protest: “most people are so busy keeping abreast of life, earning a living, dealing with personal problems, that they don’t want to take part in bigger issues, in this case, full Negro rights. But they are all connected. It is impossible to escape, even for the timid or temporizing among the oppressed.”37 Black press reviewers criticized white commentary that dichotomized racial experiences and universality and missed the film’s political messages. Ebony‘s coverage of the film dryly noted that “audiences and critics alike have expressed surprise that the story of a Negro can possess universal meaning.” Ebony‘s reviewer neatly reversed the formulation. “Though the theme (resolute man colliding with the silent invisible rules of his society) is universal, the tale is a very particular one, woven around a seemingly ‘common’ man who brings home to the audience just how uncommon the man is who must fight for his status as a man.” What is “everyday” is the “struggle of a Negro man trying to live with dignity in a world which degrades him.” A critic from the Cleveland Call and Post, a black newspaper, cleverly reframed white reviewers’ response to the film as “no message” as a “credit to the acting talent and skill” of the principals, Dixon and Lincoln, expressing a guarded hope that the film “may increase understanding and diminish hatred where it exists.” He questioned white audiences’ capacity to acknowledge what they were witnessing on screen: “White theater goers will never admit it, the white assaults upon a Negro’s dignity, the condescending timidity of his friends, and the patient understanding of his wife are the things Negro males live with every day – in the South and in the North.”38 Black reviewers responded with mixed emotions to the film’s focus on black working people and family life. The black film critic Albert Johnson regarded Nothing But a Man as too narrowly focused on the family drama, which he termed “familiar Americana.” He felt that the film’s representation of “heartbreakingly commonplace situations of married couples everywhere, the courtship, marriage, new home (or shack), the quarrel, separation, and reunion, and the imminent baby” pushed it into

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the terrain of “mere domestic tragedy” (he preferred The Cool World).39 In contrast, the reviewer for the Cleveland black newspaper welcomed the film’s emotional catharsis, writing that “sensitive Negro men, viewing this picture, will undoubtedly weep as they see the daily frustrations of their lives so vividly portrayed. They will [r]ebel with Duff when insults are heaped upon them.” This reviewer also praised the power of Abbey Lincoln’s portrayal of Josie: “Her contribution to ‘Man’ is full of warmth, sensitivity. . . . Josie in her quiet strength fairly screams to be heard, and Duff, finally, hears her.”40 A viewer from eastern New York wrote to the Amsterdam News to say that she was deeply offended by the film’s black characters, who seemed to her too ordinary, “uncultured . . . each generation of men are of the lowest status.” Six weeks later she was sharply answered by a reader from East Harlem who enthusiastically defended the film: “any Negro who has been in the South and many Northern towns will easily recognize this picture as an honest conscientious portrayal of the conditions as they exist and the barriers that must be overcome.” This viewer hoped that the film’s political framing would “enlighten many white people and unaware Negros to the enormity of the struggle of our people.”41 Radicals who were already committed to a political framework connecting labor and race welcomed the racial and class analysis embedded in Nothing But a Man. Reverend Malcolm Boyd, the white Episcopal minister and former Hollywood press agent who became a civil rights activist, wrote in the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier that whites would be “blind no more” if they watched Duff Anderson knock “his head against the stone wall of white supremacy, segregation, bigotry”; they would see a man who despite the risk of losing work and the constant threats of physical danger “will not buckle down to the system.” Boyd explicitly remarked that the film “portrays Negro class differences and examines some of their meanings.”42 Black writers and activists who were already involved in the struggle to broaden the representation of racial experience beyond demeaning stereotypes and the invisibility of mainstream culture were particularly excited by Nothing But a Man. Sylvester Leaks, long-time member of the Harlem Writers Guild, offered the film singular praise in the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks: “Never before has black life in America been

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so vividly portrayed and depicted with such stark realism. . . . Here is a blood and guts movie of black life as it is, without apology – now searing, now soothing, now scintillating, now ingratiating, now solemn and sad, now filled with laughter and joy.” Leaks quoted Duff’s description of the feeling of being unable to find a self-respecting job: “It’s like a lynching. They don’t get you with a knife. They get you deep down inside.” Although he singled out Lincoln’s “warmth, inner strength, and beauty,” he made the connection, for his Nation of Islam readers, between militancy and masculinity: “Nothing but a man, with the will to fight the system, will survive the ordeal of being black in America. One cannot run, or hide, or compromise. One must face it. One must fight it. Duff chooses to be nothing but a man.” It is likely that these qualities also appealed to Malcolm X, who stopped in the street in New York when he recognized Julius Harris (Duff’s father), introduced himself, and said how much he liked the film. After Malcolm X was killed, Wyatt Tee Walker described the film as “the story of another Malcolm, fictitious yet very real, who can be found all over this land.”43 Alice Childress, an actress and writer whose writing about black working-class women since the 1940s foregrounded “so-called ordinary characters. . . . They represent a part of ourselves, the self twice denied, first by racism, and then by class indifference,” was reported to have wept when she first saw the film.44 There is no way to tell how many people heeded Sylvester Leak’s exhortation: “this is a you must see – don’t dare miss movie,” or the other rave reviews in national news and cultural magazines, and white and black newspapers. According to the trade press, New York City moviegoers bought enough tickets from “art house to nabes [neighborhood theaters]” to cover the film’s costs by early February 1965, even before its limited release in twelve key cities in the United States and Canada, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In 1966, the film was selected to represent the United States to the African diaspora assembled at the First World Festival of the Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in April 1966: both the film and the actors were awarded prizes.45 Nothing But a Man continued to circulate into the 1970s as an important black film, a powerful and provocative challenge to white supremacy. The film had a second life outside movie theaters, with screenings

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in churches, colleges, and community halls, largely to black audiences. Sometime after 1966, Tom Brandon, who had been active in the 1930s Film and Photo League and was interested in the distribution aspects of filmmaking, acquired the film for his company, Brandon Films. By the late 1960s, the film averaged twenty to thirty bookings a month during the school year in one regional office; by 1973, the film had generated rental fees ten times its purchase price. Screenings of Nothing But a Man took place at celebrations of black culture, such as the Watts Arts Festival and Grand Fiesta/Freedom Jubilee sponsored by the Centro Hispano and the National Negro Foundation in Los Angeles in 1967, a Black Cinema Series at the Afro-Arts Theater in Chicago, and an “Images in Black” Festival at the Afro Arts Cultural Center in New York, sponsored by Harlem Congress of Racial Equality, both in 1968.46 Nothing But a Man remains in circulation. It premiered on public television in February 1984; a restored print won a second theatrical release in time for Black History Month in February 1993, with special screenings in New York organized by the Black Filmmakers Foundation and the Coalition of 100 Black Women, and bookings in Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Seattle. The film was released on video, and selected for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Its 2004 release on DVD garnered another round of reviews and rediscovery. The lasting appeal of Nothing But a Man is explained less by timelessness or the universality of the family story than by the multiple points of identification embedded in a film created by a historically contingent, cross-racial collaboration. Audiences continue responding to how the film portrays the daily indignities and larger psychic costs of racialization; as Abbey Lincoln put it, “when you are oppressed, you finally learn to oppress yourself.” It provides a tantalizing glimpse at alternative forms of mutuality enabling “making trouble.” The collaboration that shaped the film’s representation of its historical moment led to its focus on the centrality of working people in collective resistance, the critical resource of familial reciprocity as enabling solidarity, and the connections between racial and social justice. The film that resulted helps to explain how the civil rights insurgency functioned as the “borning struggle”

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then and continues to call attention to the multiple strands underlying struggles in our own time.47 Notes 1. The phrase comes from Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 2. Clyde Taylor wrote appreciatively about NBAM in The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract – Film and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); a dismissive film studies essay is John Nickel, “Disabling African American Men: Liberalism and Race Message Films,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 34–35. 3. For a fuller discussion of the leftwing project of representing working-class and black families as ordinary, see Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); “Talking Back to Hollywood: Ordinary Love Stories on Film, 1946–1964,” in Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film and Fiction, eds. Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau, 287–315 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4. Roemer quoted in Clarke Taylor, “‘Nothing But a Man’ Classic on T V Tonight,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1984. 5. “Harvard Movie: Student Film Has Kites and Conflicts,” Life, October 1949, 63–64; Saul Cohen, “Three American Film Makers,” Film Comment 3, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 13. 6. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 227; broadcast of Angola: Journey to War, viewed at the Paley Center for Media, New York City.

7. Cohen, “Three American Film Makers,” 9; Jim Davidson, “Telling a Story: The Making of Nothing But a Man,“ Common Quest 3, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 8. “Telling a Story: The Making of Nothing But a Man,“ Common Quest 3, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 8. 8. Roemer quoted by Jennine Lanouette, “Nothing But a Good Tale,” Village Voice, March 2, 1993; Sheila Rule, “Black Film Portrait Back on Screen,” New York Times, March 16, 1993; Archer Winston, “Rages and Outrages,” New York Post, January 11, 1965. 9. Rule, “Black Film Portrait,” in Film Stories, ed. Michael Roemer, 7 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001); Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 9–10; Taylor, “‘Nothing But a Man’ Classic on T V Tonight.” 10. Cohen, “Three American Film Makers,” 11. 11. Jesse Walker, “Theatricals,” New York Amsterdam News, March 9, 1963 and June 1, 1963, and “Gordone Returns to ‘The Blacks,’” January 18, 1964. 12. Interviews with the actors, Nothing But a Man (New York: New Video, 2004), DVD. Esther Rolle, director of Asadata Dafora’s African dance troupe, New York dancer and stage actress, made her film debut as the church member Sister Sarah. 13. Cohen, “Three American Film Makers,” 10–11; Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 12, 16–17, 21–22. 14. Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 22–23. 15. Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 11, 23. 16. Tom Doherty, “Documenting the 1940s,” in Boom or Bust: American Cinema

138 in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 417–418. 17. Lauren Rabinowitz, “Experimental and Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1940s,” in Boom or Bust, 447–448. 18. Cohen, “Three American Film Makers”; Davidson, “Telling a Story”; interview with Roemer and Young on the 2004 DVD. 19. Shirley Clarke used radio microphones in The Cool World; Clarke, “The Cool World,” Films and Filming, December 1963, 8. 20. Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 12; “‘Nothing But a Man’ Identifies with Negro,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 3, 1965; Phyl Garland, “Listening In: Big Sound from Detroit,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 10, 1965. 21. “U.S. Film on Negro is Hailed in Venice,” New York Times, August 30, 1964. 22. Cohen, “Three American Filmmakers,” 12; Roemer, Film Stories, 9. 23. “Movies,” Playboy, February 1963; Marjory Rutherford, “‘Mockingbird’ Film Has Truth, Integrity,” Atlanta Constitution, March 21, 1963. 24. Vincent Canby, “Italo Festival Ways Puzzling,” Variety, August 19, 1964; “U.S. Film on Negro Is Hailed in Venice” New York Times, August 30, 1964; “Italians Acclaim Film on Life in Colored USA,” Afro-American, September 12, 1964, and “Theater Wing,” Chicago Defender, September 15 and 19, 1964. 25. Bosley Crowther; “Film Festival Varied: ‘Nothing But a Man’ and ‘Lilith’ Presented,” New York Times, September 21, 1964; “Nothing But a Man,” Cue, January 2, 1965. 26. “‘Nothing But a Man:’ Triumph on a Budget,” Ebony, April 1965, 198. 27. Thomas Doherty, “Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts and Lily White Palaces: Desegregating the Motion Picture

Essays Theater,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, eds. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 196–214; Kevin Heffernan, “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968),” Cinema Journal 41, no. 3 (2002): 62–63; Wiseman quoted in Michael Willis, “Puzzle re Clarke’s ‘Cool World,’” Variety, November 11, 1964. 28. Heffernan, “Inner-City,” 61; “Cinema V Looks at $500,000 ‘Potato,’” Hollywood Reporter, July 14, 1964; “Cinema V’s ‘Potato’ Could Lead to Meatier Things,” Film Daily, July 14, 1964; George Todd, “Head of Movie Chain of ‘Art Theaters,’” Amsterdam News, January 9, 1965. 29. Willis, “Puzzle re Clarke’s ‘Cool World.’” 30. Advertisements appearing in Boston Sunday Herald, February 21, 1965, 10; Boston Globe, February 24, 1965, 24; Amsterdam News, December 26, 1964, 15; January 30, 1965, 15; February 27, 1965, 15; film materials in Black Film Collection Posters, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Roemer, Film Stories, 10. 31. Vincent Canby, “The Race to Film Race Issues: Indies React to Negro News,” Variety July 17, 1963; Margo Miller, “A New Clark Gable: Film Director Describes Making ‘Nothing But a Man,’” Boston Globe, February 28, 1965; Smith, Visions, 311–322. 32. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 44. 33. Canby, “Italo Festival Ways Puzzling”; Margo Miller, “A New Clark Gable”; and articles and reviews in Boston Traveler, February 14, 1965, February 25,

Smith 1965, and Boston Herald, February 24, 1965, February 25, 1965. 34. Crowther, “Film Festival Varied”; Motion Picture Herald, January 20, 1965; Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard, March 18, 1965. 35. Reviews in Los Angeles HeraldExaminer, March 20, 1965; Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1965; Oakland Tribune, September 30, 1965, 37; The Berkshire Eagle, August 19, 1965. 36. Brian O’ Doherty, “Classic of a Negro Who Stopped Running,” Life, February 19, 1965; Mark Bricklin, Philadelphia Tribune, February 23, 1965. 37. James Powers, “‘Man’ Is Timely, Meaningful Pic,” Hollywood Reporter, March 24, 1965. 38. “‘Nothing But a Man’ Identifies with Negro,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 3, 1965. 39. Albert Johnson, “The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works,” Film Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1965), 25–28. 40. “‘Nothing But a Man,’” Ebony; “‘Nothing But a Man,’” Cleveland Call and Post, identifying Abbey Lincoln as “a jazz singer who has been steadfastly identified with the freedom movement.” 41. “Letters,” Amsterdam News, January 30, 1965 and March 20, 1965. 42. Malcolm Boyd, “Blind No More,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 23, 1965. 43. Sylvester Leaks, “Nothing But a Man,” Muhammad Speaks, January 29, 1965; Julius Harris interview on 1994

139 DVD; Wyatt Tee Walker, “Nothing But a Man,” in Malcolm X: the Man and His Time, ed. John Hendrik Clarke, 67–68 (New York: Macmillan, 1969). 44. Davidson, “Telling a Story,” 23. 45. Coverage in Hollywood Reporter, February 2, 1965 and February 3, 1965; “‘Nothing But a Man’ American Film Entry,” New York Amsterdam News, April 2, 1966 and May 7, 1966. 46. Taylor, “‘Nothing But a Man’ Classic on T V Tonight”; Lanouette, “Nothing But a Good Tale.” The demand for the film was such that the office of Brandon Films serving northern California and nine other western states had fourteen prints in circulation in the late 1960s, averaging around twenty to thirty bookings a month; e-mail from former Audio-Brandon employee Tim Reagan to author, June 23, 2010. “Art, Drama Mark Watts Festival,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 23, 1967; ad for “Grand Fiesta/Freedom Jubilee ‘67,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 1, 1967; display ads for the Afro Arts Theater Chicago Defender, July 20, and July 28, 1965; display ad for “Images in Black” at the Afro-Arts Cultural Center, May 4, 1968 and May 11, 1968, 22. 47. Bernice Reagon, “The Borning Struggle: The Civil Rights Movement,” in They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: Seven Radicals Remember the Sixties, ed. Dick Cluster, 35–38 (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

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Historicity and Possibility in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Khalil Muhammad Michael T. Martin and David Wall Michael T. Martin [MTM]: Please elaborate the historical setting for Nothing But a Man and its correspondence to the political economy and actuality of Southern race relations circa the late 1950s–1960s. Khalil Muhammad [KM]: The film emerges at a moment when the future of black citizenship in the United States was indeterminate. Recall, it’s the early 1960s and the civil rights movement had stalled after the earlier successes of Brown v. Board of Education [1954], the Montgomery [Alabama] bus boycott [1955], and the integration of Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas [1957]. It’s a period about making real the promises of integration, as well as desegregating all public accommodations, which led to the sit-in movement, culminating in the Freedom Rides of 1961.1 We are also in the second decade of the Cold War. The NA ACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] had purged its communist sympathizers and card-carrying members, which means that the anticommunist moment has limited the possibility of radical politics on the ground and eviscerated interracial unionism across the country, particularly in the industrial North. As for civil rights, traditional organizations like the NA ACP and the National Urban League are tacking to the right. So the threat in the South, in particular of being tainted as a communist organization, causes great caution in terms of the kinds of organizing traditions that had been effective up to that point. Glenda Gilmore argues, in fact, that radical politics in the South ends in the 1950s.2 So, to come back to the original point, there’s this tremendous indeterminacy in this moment. We’re not sure from the black perspective – from the Southern black perspective – or from 143

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the urban Northern black perspective, what the future holds. And, in terms of relating Nothing But a Man to that context, the key thing I would emphasize is an indeterminacy and uncertainty in the film that allows for certain visions of what was happening in the South. However, with some hindsight, it seems a little bit amiss with what actually came next. MTM: What about the proxies of the Cold War and the decolonization struggles occurring in Africa and Latin America that affected U.S. policies and the civil rights movement? KM: It’s clear with the Bandung Conference in 1955 that people like Paul Robeson are continuing to draw inspiration not only from the radical possibilities of Left politics but the competing agendas of the Soviet Union and the United States, particularly in Africa. In terms of the domestic impact in this country, the decolonization moment, and the Cold War itself created possibilities for African American civil rights leaders to exploit the federal government’s own rhetoric of freedom and democracy. And one way in which that manifests itself on the ground in the early 1960s in particular is the immigration of African nationals to universities across the U.S. And the circulation of ideas that comes with Africans arriving from places like Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana breaks down some of the ways African Americans viewed the Third World and opened up new exchanges, especially through the expression of those ideas that had gained currency for people involved in decolonization struggles. Donna Murch suggests that the origins of the Black Panther Party are tied directly to student activism on the Berkeley campus and at San Francisco State through conversations conducted between newly arrived African students and African American students about freedom struggles.3 So, there’s no question that the kinds of conversations that were happening here [in the United States] created new possibilities for social change that ultimately helped shape the politics of revolution in this country during the 1960s. David Wall [DW]: And all this is taking place while that other process you’ve identified is tacking to the right of the mainstream civil rights movement? KM: They are to some extent simultaneous, but the trajectory of the second stage or the second conversation that is happening better charac-

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terizes what happens after the civil rights movement has achieved its legislative goals. In other words, we really don’t see the formal presentation of those kinds of organizing traditions in the Black Panther Party until 1966, whereas the incubation of those ideas is already unfolding in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. But the impetus for change, the impetus for actually responding to the realities of urban rebellions, 1964 in Detroit and 1965 in Watts, gives new urgency to rejecting the traditionalism or, what many young people perceived then as, the accomodationism of mainstream civil rights organizations. So there are definitely multiple moments, movements, and constituencies, but it should be noted that the degree to which decolonization and the presence of African students in this country had a significant impact, it was largely in the North and the West. MTM: Did decolonization appeal to black nationalists more than to integrationists? Was there a division? KM: I think there was. When we look at the writing and speeches of the mainstream civil rights leaders, such as Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr., we don’t see as much engagement with those issues as we do much more directly with Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael. In a sense, they’re [Wilkins and King] still attempting to hold America to its own principles of citizenship and democracy. They are not attempting to change or revolutionize the system, to make it something other than what it actually is. I think Stokely Carmichael is also a very important figure because in some ways he helps to bridge those two movements. He is very much a part of, not only the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], but he clearly believes that by calling attention to the violence of segregation, the injustice and unfairness of it, by directly challenging it, the system will change and accommodate. But by the early 1960s, when Carmichael’s writing about the underdevelopment of black America through capitalism and when he’s traveling abroad to learn directly from, and to bear witness to, what is happening in Africa, it’s clear that he’s beginning to think on a different scale in the same way that Malcolm X was beginning to do in 1964. MTM: Do Vietnam and Cuba factor in terms of the ideological influences on both the civil rights and nationalist movements?

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KM: I think so. In terms of Cuba representing a free nation [that is] independent of the yoke of U.S. imperialism, it is clear that African Americans are drawing inspiration from Fidel Castro in spite of his limitations and flaws at that point. Castro represents the most explicit and direct challenge to the dominance of the U.S. in the western hemisphere. The North Vietnamese, however, are far less heroic in the eyes of African Americans, but in many ways for those who had accepted the teachings of Mao and the possibilities of socialism in whatever form it took to be a process of liberation for black people, the North Vietnamese represented a people of color attempting to obtain independence from first French imperialism and then later U.S. imperialism. I think in practical terms for many African Americans the issue was not so much a celebration of the North Vietnamese as it was for Cuba’s own independence represented by Fidel Castro. Vietnam was not a black man’s war to fight. It was a white man’s war to fight, and a white man’s war to continue further imperial domination of people of color. In that regard, as the Vietnam War dragged on, African Americans saw it in terms of a zerosum game in a sense. As they participated in that domination, [which] also benefit[ted] whites in their further domination in the world and domestically, African Americans asserted they should have no part in that. Now, of course, there’s a student Left [that] feels in many ways the same way, but it translates differently in terms of what they [the left-wing students] have at stake. DW: I don’t want to get off the issue, but what’s the relationship between the emergent broader social protest movement and civil rights? Is it that the antiwar movement takes energy, ideas, and strategies from the civil rights movement? And conversely, does the radicalization of black politics through the 1960s take energy and ideas from the antiwar movement? KM: They’re symbiotic in many ways. SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] was established in 1962 and emerges formally at precisely this moment when SNCC was trying to organize on college campuses across the nation and to draw resources from the New Left and from the student activists who were sympathetic to the challenge but not necessarily invested in it. It is not necessarily the fight at this particular mo-

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ment. It’s also not to be overlooked that Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney come from student-led New Left and civil rights activism in Ohio and on to Mississippi for the purposes of protest activities.4 So, in the simplest terms, by 1962 we know that there’s a tremendous amount of symbiosis between those two movements. MTM: What connects these seemingly disparate currents and discrete impulses? Is it anticapitalism? KM: I think that’s difficult to determine. But what all of these movements do share in common is the desire to change the on-the-ground realities for black people. And in some ways, it took the form of crafting a new set of ideas. We forget that though Martin Luther King Jr. is engaging in mass protest, he doesn’t renounce the legislative focus of, say, the Legal Defense Education Fund. But he’s also writing at great length and drawing on old traditions of the social gospel movement of the early twentieth century and calling out the Christian traditions of socialism.5 So there’s a tremendous explosion of idea making at the same time that there is a tactical focus on how to change the world we actually live in. But, we have to be very careful to recognize that many people simply wanted the right to vote, the right to participate in a capitalistic economy, the right ultimately – although they would not have articulated it this way – to exploit others. I think there’s a time element as well because what might have been the possibility for actually changing the economic priorities of the United States, and by extension western European countries, is eclipsed by the effectiveness of the anticommunist movement. So, even organizations whose own history spoke to the possibilities for reorganizing the economic priorities of the nation are no longer engaged in that conversation, which means that from the late 1940s through the 1950s, you have a closing of ranks around what I would say was a reformist agenda. To reinforce this point, it is difficult to find for indigenous black folks, whether they are in Africa or the United States, a common strategy or set of ideas that yoke them together. All that they were really sharing is a commitment to some form of antiracist activity, which in their minds will extend and make better the lives of black people. So, something that moves from civil rights to human rights, to socialism, to revolutionary

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violence is at play depending on where you fall, but all are committed to black people’s humanity in some way, shape, or form. MTM: Considering the indeterminacy of the historical moment, how accurate is Nothing But a Man‘s take on race relations in the South as well as its portrayal of the black community? KM: I think the film captures one, maybe two, slices of black Southern life. It is wonderfully rich in capturing the ways in which the Southern economy’s oppression of black life stifles outward resistance to the daily realities of segregation in the South. It’s embodied most clearly of course in Josie’s father, the accommodationist reverend in the town. And make no mistake about it, men like Josie’s father were well represented in the South. It is very much a part of that history, particularly of the black church. The film also captures the implicit threat of violence that is a constitutive feature of daily life in the South, such as when the young white men with their flashlights approach Josie and Duff on their first date. That scene raises a poignant and beautifully artistic moment with those flashlights embodying Southern law enforcement. MTM: And surveillance? KM: And surveillance. It stands at a distance in this film but is symbolically brought into focus there. The filmmakers are to be credited with capturing in this scene the sexual violence that white men perpetrated against black women. The implicit threat that is made explicit in the scene that had heretofore not been fully appreciated by scholars until Danielle McGuire recently published At the Dark End of the Street, which is, in a sense, a history of the civil rights movement viewed through campaigns against the sexual violence [directed at] black women.6 The first, of course, to speak to this form of violence was Ida B. Wells. She talked about the lynching problem, but she also talked about the violence perpetrated against black women.7 So, in capturing the constant threat of violence hanging over the most intimate domestic spaces, Nothing But a Man does a wonderful job. MTM: Rendered, though less explicitly, too, in the workplace when Duff and several other black workers are eating lunch and another white worker at the mill makes a sexual remark about Josie: “Hell, I bet those black girls really go for you, huh? That’s the best-lookin’ colored girl in town.”

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1. Lunch at the mill. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

KM: The sexual objectification of black women as the potential playthings of white men further speaks to that. I think to extend this particular dimension of the film the relationship between black workers and their white bosses also captures in a sense a general ethos of the Southern political economy, which was antiunion. The union movement was never able to succeed fully. For example, Operation Dixie was launched by the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations] in 1946 and failed miserably in the South, in part because the local politics left a white working class far less equipped to challenge capitalist domination whether it was in the sawmills, lumber mills, or wherever. So you had a far weaker white working class tied to a largely agricultural-based economy, which meant that single men could control the lives of hundreds of workers, both white and black, which was not the case in the North where you had corporations that were run by foremen who had less investment and less of a personal stake. So, in that way, the film also captures at this moment the limitations of the black working

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2. Josie’s father, Reverend Dawson. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

class, the proletariat of the South in relation to capital, and to capital’s domination of labor at the site of the lumber mill. But that is only one version of what is happening in the South, and in this way, the film gives us a limited view. Similarly, though the film legitimately portrays the black minister’s accommodationism, we have no counternarrative of a black church or black preachers challenging segregation or brokering with the white power structure by saying to them that “If you do not meet certain obligations within the black community, we will not support your business, we will not come to clean your homes, we will not ride your buses,” which by the time this film was made had already proven to be an effective way of challenging white supremacy in the South. It always bears recalling that chambers of commerce were often the first to bend to the demands of civil rights protestors in terms of pushing the envelope of desegregation, as opposed to political leaders or citizens at large, because they looked at their economic fortunes and said, “Well, we would like to meet them halfway if at all possible.” The film denies those possibilities.

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There’s even more at play here that’s worth noting. Nothing But a Man offers a liberal secularist perspective on the black church, or a Marxist perspective on the black church, which is to say that religion has no place in change, in revolution, in reform, in prodemocracy movements. So, in an early scene when Duff happens to walk by the church, he is bearing witness to the religious emotionalism of black people who seem to be giving up. Now, of course, Duff does not interpret it this way. But for the film, it functions as a narrative vehicle to encapsulate religion as an ineffective mode of resistance when in fact it is absolutely the case that without those independent black churches, without the indigenous black church in the South, it is hard to imagine the civil rights movement achieving anything. At the same time that you could have a figure like Josie’s father as an accommodationist preacher, you would have a Wyatt Walker, or a C. T. Vivian, or a Fred Shuttlesworth, or ultimately a Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Baptist Church. So the film in its moment of indeterminacy and its own mode of resistance, which is interracial unionism or the possibility for a class-based challenge to white supremacy, cannot anticipate or account for the fact that it would be through the black church that the Southern civil rights movement would be successful. DW: It’s not, necessarily, that the film is unable to anticipate that because it had already happened. KM: But it’s undervalued. DW: So I suppose the best we might say is that it’s merely an oddity in the film? KM: Yes. DW: But if it’s not merely an oddity, what is it? KM: It’s the politics of the filmmakers representing traditions of the Old Left and who, as secularists, do not appear to see the powerful significance of religion. In other words, they are capturing and encapsulating Martin Luther King Jr. as something other than a Baptist minister. There is no figure or evidence to substantiate this in the film and the only way to explain that is to suggest that they don’t see him for his Christianity but as something else. It’s also worth noting that the filmmakers, particularly Bob Young, had by that time made a documentary [Sit-In, 1961] for NBC on the Nashville sit-in movement. And it’s fair to speculate that he did not see the activists in their own religious identities. He perhaps

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saw them more as young people challenging the status quo, representing again a liberal secularist tradition or a Marxist tradition of class warfare. MTM: Are you saying it was intentional or that he had blinders on? KM: I believe that it’s both. I think he undervalues, but he also doesn’t want to celebrate the historical importance of religion in that moment. If you’re a secularist and don’t believe that God is real then it’s hard to capture and harness it. It’s also fair to speculate whether Bob Young and Michael Roemer, or the film itself in its own narrative language, sees that there is anything more for the nation or the South to do to change the fortunes of black people, which is a different conversation and a different vision. DW: Bob Young has talked very clearly about feeling a sense of identification with the movement because both he and Roemer – being secular Jews – were outsiders themselves. Would that support the broader point you’re making? KM: I think it might help us to at least begin to understand why they could have missed, or how they could have missed, the centrality of the black church in affecting this moment. MTM: I would say that it was intentional and expressed through Duff, who in the scene at the church when the congregation gathers outside and after Josie is introduced to him, she asks, “You goin’ back inside?” Duff replies, “No. Never had much use for hell-howlers.” KM: Right. MTM: In Duff’s negation then is suggested the filmmakers’? KM: There is also a gender dimension to that characterization. If you recall, we see mostly women in the congregation crying and wailing, caught up in the emotionalism of the guest preacher’s message. And, what’s interesting about that is that Josie is a preacher’s daughter and comes from what we could only presume to be a typical Southern community, where most blacks would have some connection to the church itself, either as active members or as the children of active members, or they were born or baptized in that church. Most people are connected in one way, shape, or form. And in that way, what was also undervalued is that black women were often the engines of organizational change within the church itself. So we get a one-dimensional portrayal of black

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3. Women singing in church. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

ministerial leadership in the South rather than the recognition of the centrality of black women as primary organizers and members of these churches and [the ones] who represent the church’s interests in civil rights activism. This begs a larger question about the gender politics of the film in relation to Josie herself, who seems to be not only unattached to any religious identity (other than a kind of general secular humanism evidenced by her commitment to education) but is completely detached from the community of the church. And in that way, a woman like Ella Baker, for example, who comes out of the church, is the leading field organizer for the NA ACP, and who in a sense is the mother and brain of the SNCC tradition, really does embody the importance of black women as ground workers in the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], SNCC, and the NA ACP. So what we have in this brief moment is the corporal vision of black women as either the face of religious impotency and emotionalism with no purpose, or in the character of Josie, who is

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detached from the church and represents both a mode for reaffirming black male patriarchy and a kind of secular humanist tradition of giving back to the community with no religious overtones. MTM: That’s very helpful and important. You suggested earlier that different modes of resistance are depicted in the film, from the personal to the collective and organizational. Please elaborate. KM: The obvious point to make is that there’s no white male working class in the film. But this, I think, is where the filmmakers stand in. It is their vision that Duff should be willing to embrace unionism, and so embody the possibility of fundamentally changing society through this form of Left-labor politics. So, the black workers become a kind of chorus for accommodating the white boss, and the white boss represents the voice of the racist Southern white working class that would rather trade its economic fortunes for its racial identity and privilege. It’s more valuable for them to be white than to share the class interests of blacks, and in that way, race trumps class. But the way the film evokes the possibility of organizing within the mill suggests that there are alternative means for change. The smokestacks, for example, that represent Birmingham on Duff’s first trip to the city strike me as optimistic. They are the site for progress. We do not see the stacks in relation to the dehumanization of workers. All we have is the contrast to the lumber mill, the quietude, and the emasculation of Duff in the rural town in comparison to the possibility of urban modernity. Now, I think the film falls short of really empowering this notion of an urban modern possibility, ultimately because Duff returns to the town. But the film clearly evokes the images of a city through the smokestacks as a possibility of modernity, sophistication, and change. DW: So the possibility for black liberation is modern, urban, and secular? KM: Yes. DW: And the Southern, the railroad, and the religious fundamentally . . . ? KM: Backward. DW: So, if it is backward, reactionary, and utterly rooted in the black experience in the South, is the film saying that it is part of the problem and in no way part of the solution?

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4. Birmingham smokestacks. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

MTM: An alternative reading of the smokestacks is that the city is emblematic of a ghettoized black lumpenproletariat or underclass, a site where black industrial labor is redundant for manufacturing and who is personified by Duff’s father Will, [who is] handicapped by an industrial accident. KM: Yes, I think I agree. That’s what I was getting at, that it falls short. It doesn’t entirely embrace the city by definition because the film has another agenda. The other agenda is the shift from rural to urban, and in this way I think the film is deeply historical and it draws upon sociological discourses that by this time were well known. So, let me be clear. The film sees urbanity also in relation to the broken black family. As Duff is faced with the possibility of leaving, one mode of resistance – unionism – is replaced by another, that of migration and movement. He comes into the space by virtue of the freedom of the railroad gang, and that in and of itself gives him the possibility of living beyond the pale of the Southern town, the yoke of the lumber mill, and dehumanized men like

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Barney. Duff always faces the choice to actually use industry as a means of moving on. He can move on through the railroad, or he can move on by going to Birmingham. And so I think there’s a tension in the film, and this is where the indeterminacy is made clear because at one point the city represented the land of hope – the promised land. But it’s not clear that the legacy of the Great Migration, either in the World War I period or now in the post–World War II period has lived up to its possibility and promise. MTM: When Josie asks Duff, “Been up north?,” he says, “Yeah. Knocked around for a couple of months after the Army. . . . Well, it ain’t that good up there neither.” KM: That’s right. And in this way, we must credit the filmmakers with capturing some of the tensions at play in these modes of resistance, and that it’s not at all clear which way they will go. But I do think, again to come back to this point about the broken black family, that the lens through which the film articulates why the city may not be all that it’s cracked up to be is one that is in conversation with sociological literature and policy debates about urban life for black people. And so it becomes less a critique of an urban industrial racial state that dehumanized black people through various forms of red-lining, police repression, and a racist white working class within the city itself. What we see are the distant smokestacks and the single-parent household embodied by Duff’s father, then the mother who was taking care of Duff’s own child, and other variously abandoned children. So that positions the city as a very ambiguous place, not for whites but for blacks. MTM: In view of the ambivalence, indeterminacy, and degradation that the city represents for black working people, is it suggested that a rural space – a bucolic site – is where community is possible? After all Duff takes his son out of the city and heads back to the town. KM: No, I don’t think that. I don’t get a sense of community. I get a much more powerful and subtle critique of the political economy of a small Southern town. In other words, this is where I think the film elides a larger commitment to a clearer ideological focus and solution, which is structural. In other words, it returns to the pastoral . . . MTM: And the personal . . .

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5. The woman who cares for Duff’s son. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

KM: . . . and the personal, not as a solution to structural issues but rather to Duff’s particular problems. And ultimately the ending articulates the notion that if the family unit is loyal to itself it can survive anything, thereby undercutting both unionism and migration as options. The family could just as easily have been reconstituted in Birmingham, but I don’t see a commitment to place so much as I see a commitment to individual or family agency as opposed to some other structural alternative. If anything, the commitment is to patriarchy, a male-centric household where the child needs the father and the wife is uncritically loyal to her husband and will stand by him at all costs. MTM: Even when he knocks her down. KM: Even when he knocks her down, and that’s also the story of Josie in relation to her father. That’s where I think the film is most explicit in moving to some sort of conclusion. And it is here that the movie resists capturing the social protest possibilities that the historical moment demands. Interestingly, Roemer gave an interview in 2002 where he ef-

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6. Duff and Josie embracing at the conclusion. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

fectively resuscitates and validates Daniel Patrick Moynihan by arguing that female-centered households were the source of pathology within the black family and that limited the possibilities for other modes of resistance because the family itself was flawed.8 And I don’t think that can be pushed aside in terms of what we actually get in Nothing But a Man. MTM: Your argument corresponds to that of Thomas Cripps who concludes that Duff’s return is an expression of a wholly personal and passive resolution. How do we reconcile this position with the scene at the cemetery when Duff tells Lee, “I guess I’ll make me some trouble in that town.” KM: I think that’s one of the lines I suggested may anticipate “trouble.” We could speculate as to what form Duff’s resistance might take. But I think that it’s a moment where the filmmakers leave open infinite possibilities for the future. And that comes back to the theme of indeterminacy we discussed at the beginning of this conversation. When Duff says that to Lee, followed later in the final scene with the family coming

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7. Josie is pushed to the floor by Duff. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

together, the reconciliation of the family is complete, implying that the family can triumph over any adversity. And so in a sense, that is the ultimate source of their power to move forward in whatever form it takes. But it also suggests a starting point. I wouldn’t want to overreach in this case because the film doesn’t tell us what to make of this. But ultimately, a reconstituted black family with a strong black man, with a pregnant wife who will in the politics of that moment produce a freedom fighter, and the reproductive politics of black nationalism also supposes that Duff’s child born to an intact family is itself the ultimate countermeasure to white supremacy. Starting with slavery, the destruction of the black family becomes the precondition for the dehumanization of the people. So, the reconstitution of the black family then becomes a site for liberation in and of itself. Add to that, then, the reproductive realities of a young male child who will represent the future and the unborn child who represents the reproductive capacity of black

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8. Duff and Lee at the cemetery. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

women to recreate the race. But I would say this is an overreading for the filmmakers. MTM: I don’t think so. KM: I’m not sure that they were informed by that sensibility. DW: We can’t know that, but what you see is an unsatisfactory shift from a broadly political framework to something that becomes a much more personalized reconciliation to a certain predetermined or overdetermined family structure rooted in Duff’s authority. You’re arguing, then, that the film is making merely gestures of resistance and refusal? KM: Yes, it is a gesture. It’s a gesture to the possibilities even embodied in the future because the immediacy of the present demands the reconstitution of the family. Outside of that there are no family units within the film. Josie’s mother has passed. The father has remarried. The couple that is fighting may or may not be married; we aren’t told. And then we have these broken figures mostly embodied in black men in

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9. Frankie and the prostitute Doris at a juke joint. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

the film. So again, the movie climaxes with something that represents a strong black man who’s willing to die to protect his family. DW: I was thinking more of a gesture in that the film is saying, “Look, this is still about politics even though it is reconstituting itself as melodrama.” Is your argument that the film is trying to still maintain a political credibility that it has lost at that point? KM: I think so absolutely. We could also reread Nothing But a Man from back to front by saying that it was always a critique of the unrooted male figure in a community, and that a wandering man is a source of self- and communal destruction. In this way, we could start the film with this motley crew of railroad workers where Duff becomes the exception. There’s a scene early in the film where a prostitute approaches Duff in the juke joint and he walks away. So, he is depicted here as exceptional within the context of a group of men who are all too familiar to the Southern landscape.

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10. Duff and his son in Birmingham. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

MTM: And whose loyalties are largely, if not only, to the men in that group. KM: Right. And so, if we read the film back to front with that set of issues at play, then we could argue that this is always a deeply personalized film about what kind of man is needed to transcend a world of bachelordom where men are not loyal to their families or their children, but to themselves. And everything else that fits in between becomes an occasion and a possibility for bringing the South into the story but not being committed to that story. MTM: I hear that, but I want to argue something different. As Duff chooses to take responsibility not only for his unborn child but also the young boy whose paternity is unclear, is he not affirming not only his responsibility to family, but also to this other and much larger category we call the nation? Am I going too far with this? KM: I would say so, though I think that the film allows for that reading because that’s what we have. There is a black nationalist politics that

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preexists and that will continue through this moment. That is the moment in which the film is grounded, in which case it’s fair game for suggesting that this is not merely about reconstituting community in the way I have suggested through the trope of the wandering man. I’m saying that the film doesn’t move any further than community, but you could ratchet it up from community to nation and argue, then, that this family is also about nation building. MTM: Another aspect of Duff’s statement about going back to the town with the intention of making some trouble corresponds to a key feature of Third Cinema, which implicates the audience to consider their own outcome for his return. DW: Can we consider the audience for a moment and the variety of audiences that might have been seeing Nothing But a Man? Like all film it is undertaking certain cultural labor for its audiences, but is there a way that we can think about that in racial terms? Is the film working differently for its white and black audiences? KM: It is. To the extent that the film is characterized as a form of documentary realism, and Bob himself will lay claim to shooting the film in that way, it represents a long tradition of the sociological investigation of black life for the purposes of informing whites as to who black people really are. And in this way, the politics of the filmmakers are not conservative but liberal. They are in other words attempting to capture the humanity of black people and to share with white audiences that black people under these circumstances behave no differently than white people would if they were positioned similarly. The critics picked up on this, which is why they so quickly embraced the notion that this was not a film engaging in a critique of white supremacy in the South, or in the nation at large, but in fact a love story about the travails of a young married couple trying to make a go in the world. MTM: Who happened to be black? KM: That’s right, who happened to be black. And though some issues may shade in a particular direction distinct from certain whites, certainly Jewish Americans – and here we should note the filmmakers’ own awareness of antisemitism affecting the lives of young Jewish couples in urban ghettoes of New York, or Detroit, or Philadelphia for that matter – would have identified with that sense of the external forces

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11. Josie caressed by Duff in bed. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

working against them. So the union travails, trying to challenge workplace discrimination, resonate with any number of working-class Jewish immigrants in this country in the early twentieth century. So there are many ways in which the filmmakers are bringing a very familiar liberal sociological tradition of documenting real black people with real struggles for the purposes of saying they’re just like us. They struggle, they bleed, they cry, they fail in the same ways we do. DW: While certainly not the intention of the filmmakers, is the film confirming for a white audience that blackness and poverty are synonymous? KM: Absolutely. And though I think there’s a certain kind of white person that is in a sense reading the film, I also think that it affirms the brokenness of the typical black family. DW: You mentioned Moynihan earlier as example of the way that whiteness talks about blackness through poverty. KM: Right, so in some ways, we could read Moynihan through Nothing But a Man, in that it actually helps to legitimate Moynihan’s own

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ideas about what the real problem is, in the same way that the audiences for his research certainly would have agreed. Yes, I agree with that. Now, you ask about the black gaze. It’s hard to identify one in particular, but to the extent that it could be reduced to one, critics at the time very much appreciated placing the film within its own filmic history, which is to say that for them this was an unprecedented depiction of a heroic black figure who embodies a sort of indigenous perspective on the difficulty that black men face attempting to be producers in the political economy of the South. So, the idealized black male producer is what Duff is moving toward and for them to see a man embody that in a three-dimensional way rendered the film unprecedented and praiseworthy and worth seeing. But of course the other critique was the evisceration of any explicit analysis of white supremacy, of Southern racism, the silences, all of the other things we’ve talked about that are absent. And then there were those voices that actually saw the film as not in any way challenging dominant filmic representations of blackness but actually reproducing, if not reifying, them through its representation of compromised black masculinity. I think that captures three of the main perspectives that blacks brought to bear on the film. MTM: Would you revisit and discuss further your take on how Nothing But a Man depicts class and gender relations within the black community? KM: As I alluded to earlier, gender is signified in the film partly through the counterhistorical representation of older church women as offering no engagement and having no agency. Josie is a slightly more complex character. Although her sexuality positions her as a modern black woman, a woman who embraces her sexuality, the film avoids casting her into the all-too-common Jezebel trope. So in a sense she seems to be a fully formed woman who can engage in sex on her own terms. She neither is Duff’s plaything nor does she dominate him. They appear to be equal partners to the decision to share that form of intimacy. MTM: And it’s beautifully handled. KM: And it’s beautifully handled. So in that way, the politics of sexuality in the film are well done and do speak to the changing tenor and tone of the ways in which black women themselves are articulating who owns their bodies and what they plan to do with them. Other forms of

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gender I think play mostly into reified patriarchy as a mode of resistance to this moment, and so we see Duff in relation to Lee, his father’s dutiful companion. She is simply there as his mate and plays a very somber and depressing character in the film. MTM: Why is Josie the exception? KM: I think the film’s politics are moving toward patriarchy. The trajectory of the film, again to reinforce the point, starts with these rootless men who are implicitly self-destructive. MTM: Though Duff commits. KM: Right, but in that way, he’s moving – as the film is moving – toward a patriarchal conclusion embodied in the nuclear family. So, in a sense, we need Josie to be a vehicle for the kind of woman that a man would want to be committed to – neither a sexual slave nor domineering, [and] the film posits Josie as a certain kind of fully formed modern black woman who would be the helpmate for the modern black man who can survive the outside world no matter what is thrown at them. MTM: Are we left with the simple and stereotypical archetypes of the black man as the physical on one side and the black woman spiritual on the other? KM: I don’t know if the dichotomy is that clear because Josie again doesn’t bring a commitment to spirituality in the way that the church women might. MTM: I mean that she is the source of emotional stability and maturity for their union. KM: She’s Diane Nash but stripped of her political agency. We don’t know how Josie came to be this way because her mother is dead, her father’s a punk, and her stepmother is his helpmate. How did she become this fully formed, confident, engaged woman? But she’s Diane Nash. So she’s heterosexual. MTM: And a leader? KM: She’s an educator, a leader, taking care of her family. She’s all of those things. She also happens to be Abbey Lincoln, too, who herself brings a history to the role. MTM: Back to the class issue? KM: I think the film, interestingly enough, does not offer as sophisticated a treatment of class politics within a Southern black community

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as one might expect. Because the film posits the minister as the ultimate black broker of privilege and opportunity in this community, there really is no black middle class. And so in the way in which we might see the black shopkeeper, the black low-level political mover and shaker, someone embodied in the Northern context as a kind of poll worker who rallies black people to support the machine, there’s no counterpart in this small Southern town. Because there’s no constituency for the black minister, we’re effectively left with the minister himself standing in for a combination of a conservative black middle class and a working class that is, by and large, emasculated. So, I think we can talk about class politics in relation to the filmmakers’ own vision of change coming from working-class men like Duff who challenge the middle-class power brokers like Josie’s father, but this is not a film that directly engages in an extended discussion about class politics. You are effectively left with an urban black working class and a rural black working class, both of which are failing. And the invisible hand of the black capitalist does not seem to be a major player in the fortunes of either. The only thing that we know is that the accommodationism of Josie’s father is not helping the situation. But even he doesn’t seem to be necessarily an active agent in the demise of that community. If anything, the fact that he’s brokering the new school seems to suggest that in this limited space, community is still being developed, that someone like Josie is still teaching, kids are being educated, and the future is still possible, which gets back to the indeterminacy of the moment. DW: And that would be consistent then with your reading that ultimately this is a personal story upon which race and class have been hitched? KM: That’s right, it’s secondary. MTM: Is there a distinction to be made between the church – the black church – civil rights activism, and labor struggles? KM: I think that there’s, at best, a dubious dichotomy posited of working-class resistance embodied in a kind of unionism, an invisible civil rights movement that seems to hover around the film because we as viewers know the context for it, and then the church itself. We often think of unionism, civil rights, and the church as three completely different and separate sites of engagement. But Robin Kelly in Race Rebels

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defies the notion that these are three separate spheres for blacks.9 In some ways, a white outsider might miss the connection because a commitment to a liberal secularism would push the church aside. But for a black person who is working with the Alabama Communist Party for the purposes of improving the life and fortune of sharecroppers, but who believes in Jesus Christ, there is not necessarily any incompatibility. I think it’s important to underscore the multiple identities that Southern blacks brought to the table in terms of being, for instance, Baptist, cardcarrying members of the NA ACP and willing to join a union if it was an effective means for challenging the tenancy practices or the exploitation of black sharecroppers. It’s fair to say that most of the historical figures, the real people in this moment, are not independent of the church. And it’s also worth saying there was no single, homogenous black church. There were many different kinds of black churches. MTM: By way of concluding this conversation, is there anything else to say about Nothing But a Man? KM: I would like to say something briefly about music in the film, specifically Motown. In the same way that we could read the film as a personal story about a man coming to terms with his patriarchal duties, with that being the source of empowerment for him and for his community, parallel to that is the sound of Motown from the opening scene throughout the film. And it’s an interesting position because in some ways, the film has a kind of timeless quality to it. We’re not entirely sure where we are in the South. I’ve quite comfortably talked about it in terms of Birmingham, but we’re never entirely sure. There is some evidence that it is Birmingham, but the point is that in every other way the film has a timeless and a placeless quality to it. We know we’re somewhere in the mid-twentieth-century South, and then in the city, except for the presence of Motown. And, if you think about the position of the filmmakers in relation to Motown, it’s Detroit, it’s the largest industrial base in the country and the site of tremendous autoworker organizing. It is a place that held tremendous possibility and ultimately disappointment. And so there’s something about Detroit and about Motown, I think, that allows the outsider, the white filmmaker, to step into the world of black cultural agency to, in a sense, celebrate it without unpacking the ways in which Motown itself was already sanitizing a certain reality of black life. We

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should bear in mind that we could just as appropriately have had Nina Simone singing “Strange Fruit” on the soundtrack as Martha Reeves and the Vandellas singing “Heatwave,” or Marvin Gaye, or Tammy Terrell, and so on. And I think that this is where Nothing But a Man also comes back to the possibility of a kind of indeterminate future that is optimistic. Notes 1. See Michael Martin, “‘Buses Are a Comin.’ Oh Yeah!’: Stanley Nelson on Freedom Riders,“ Black Camera 3 (2011): 96–122. 2. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2009). 3. Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 4. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were young civil rights activists murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964. They had been engaged in voter registration drives in and around Philadelphia, Mississippi. 5. A prominent early twentieth-century social justice movement that endeavored to apply biblical ethics and teachings

to problems of social and racial inequality, urban slum conditions, industrialization, and child labor, among other social maladies in American society. “Social gospel” texts are claimed to have influenced the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 6. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street (New York: Knopf, 2010). 7. See Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); and Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (2008; repr., New York: Harper, 2009). 8. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). 9. Robin Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).

I don’t think very often black people really get to be seen the way they should be seen. Bob Young (2010)

Art is in a very deep sense an idealization of life – trying to get not only the way things are but at the way they should be. Michael Roemer (1965)

Cinematic Principles and Practice at Work in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Robert Young Michael T. Martin and David Wall Michael T. Martin (MTM): Let’s begin, Mr. Young, with Nothing But a Man’s release in 1964 followed by its rerelease thirty years later in 1993. How was it received by critics and by audiences in 1964? Robert Young (RY): It was very well received in 1964, but the exhibition was very limited. All of the major press reviewed it. It got marvelous reviews and was on most of the “Best Ten” lists. I have a whole book of them. To me, it’s wasteful to read, but there was a lot of praise for the film because there hadn’t been a film quite like it. However, it opened at the Sutton Theater, and the distributor wouldn’t allow us to put photos of the cast in the ads. We wanted to put in pictures of Ivan [Dixon] and Abbey [Lincoln]. They wanted to use the Greek dramatis personae, the masks. And they wanted Nothing But a Man to be seen as an art film, which was to ghettoize it. David C. Wall (DW): An art film as opposed to? RY: An art film people would come to rather than a film about black life. That was very disappointing, although the reception was very positive. There were articles written on the front page of newspapers, and Mike [Michael Roemer, the director] and I were overwhelmed in the sense that we were nobody and people wanted to interview us. We were offered a major film, Goodbye, Columbus (1969), but were stuck in our own psychology and viewpoint. We never campaigned for an Academy Award for Nothing But a Man, but with those kinds of favorable reviews it would have been possible. We never thought of things like that. We thought it was immoral to have an agent. I think it had a lot to do with our naïveté, but sometimes in the depth of one’s naïveté is some kind of 171

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1. Duff and Josie in the kitchen. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

recognition of who you are. And I think that if we had done Goodbye, Columbus, it would have been a disaster because we would have come into real conflict with all of the studios’ assumptions about casting. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but in a fundamental way I think I am. Mike and I wrote the script for Nothing But a Man during 1962–1963, after we left NBC’s White Paper series in 1962. We then raised money, and the film came out the next year at Christmas [1964]. One thing that was so surprising to me was the reactions of some [white] people. The scene that got them the most was Ivan and Abbey in the kitchen and in the bedroom. They couldn’t imagine that black people are the same as white people in intimate situations. And, of course, our aesthetic approach was to go in rather than out. We had meetings with liberals. I mean who else was going to give us money to make the film? We had this script and I remember a meeting when someone corrected my English among other things. They wanted us to see if we could get Dr. King [Jr.] to be in the

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2. Duff and Josie in the bedroom. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

movie. And that was about the last thing in the world that we were interested in doing. I actually met Dr. King and his father, and other people in the [civil rights] movement. But we didn’t want to make anything that was overtly a diatribe or obviously political because I think that when you make a political statement like that it’s reductive. My aesthetic, and Mike’s too, is really to let people discover things themselves. Obviously, a film is a construct. Obviously, there’re things that we’re trying to accomplish. We have sympathies and feelings, but I don’t want to be presenting an argument. DW: There’s no explicit reference to or mention of the civil rights movement. RY: Right! DW: An absolutely critical moment in America’s racial history. RY: Quite honestly, I didn’t think it was necessary. Mike and I didn’t even want to draw any awareness to that specifically. I made another film not so different from Nothing But a Man called Alambrista! (1977). It’s the first film about a Mexican immigrant who illegally comes to the U.S.

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It won the camera awards around the world. And I made it like Nothing But a Man. I had $200,000. I wrote and shot it myself, and I directed it with a tiny crew. But anyway, getting back to Nothing But a Man, I guess the reason I was thinking of that is because of your question about not being explicit about what was going on politically at the time. At that time, I had been approached by Peter Matthiessen. He’s a great writer and fantastic guy, and Zen Buddhist. He wrote Sal Si Puedes/Escape If You Can [1969] about Cesar Chavez and wanted to collaborate and make a film with me. He really wanted to make it more about the farm movement, and I didn’t want to do that. I lived with and am very sympathetic to the farm workers who were very influenced by Cesar Chavez. Actually, I was in a fast for ten days with Chavez, but because he was on a pedestal, I stayed away from him. The fast inspired me. My attitude and approach has always been to be more involved. But, as I said earlier, as soon as you start making statements they’re reductive. So, I believe that pushing things back into situations and character and allowing stories to be told was what I was interested in. We wanted to make a film about ordinary people. The fundamentals in their lives [were] what we wanted to explore in Nothing But a Man. Politically, I didn’t want to say that a father doesn’t send his daughter into a white [person’s] house because he’s afraid she’s going to be sexually preyed upon, but that’s in the mind of every black father. And I didn’t want to say that there are no authority figures. Whites didn’t want black men to have power, and that’s why the teachers were all women. But that’s the story; that’s what we have in our film. The weakest characters in Nothing, and I don’t mean to refer to the actors, are the reverend [Dawson] and his wife. They don’t want Josie to go out on a date with Duff. I’m not crazy about that part of the movie. MTM: That’s an important scene because it depicts the relationship of the church to this community, as well as the class differences between Josie and Duff. RY: Yes. We knew we had to do that, but I’m not exactly happy about the way we did it. I think it could have been looser. For example, the other reverend [Marshal Tompkin] who did speak [to the congregation] was fantastic and would have been a wonderful guy to have cast in Reverend Dawson’s part. We would have gotten something different beyond our imagination. I like a certain amount of risk taking – as much as you can

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3. Josie with her father, Reverend Dawson, and stepmother. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

take, as long as you have the momentum and you’re centered. Then I like things to be as open as possible and to be able to really change things. DW: Let’s return to the 1964 reception of Nothing But a Man. You’re talking about, and it’s clear from the film, that you don’t want it to be didactical. You don’t want to be programmatic? RY: Yes. DW: But it’s a film about the politics of race, of course. RY: Of course. DW: Were the reviews about the film as a vehicle for an investigation of the politics of race, or were they about a human story? RY: It wasn’t as if there weren’t references to those politics. But it was about a human story and that’s what we wanted. People reacted to Ivan and Abbey in a very human way. It gave the film significance because there were very few films that dealt with the [racial] situation on a human level. Maybe this is a story that’s worth telling? When Mike and I finished the film, we had no money. How were we going to get any recognition? How were we going to get the film into a theater because

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nobody knew who we were? We were nobodies. So, we got in touch with the American committee that selects films for international festivals. In 1964, the major festival in Europe was the Venice Film Festival. That was the year that Antonioni’s Red Desert and Godard had one of his really great films there [A Married Woman, 1964]. It was a big festival that overshadowed Cannes. And so we got in touch with [the committee] and said we’re independent filmmakers. We told them we made this film called Nothing But a Man about a black man and a black woman, and we asked them to consider it as the American entry. They said we had gotten in touch with them too soon and to call back in two months. When we did they said now you’re too late. They had selected Lilith by Columbia Pictures as the American entry. MTM: With Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg? RY: Yes, and by the famous director Robert Rossen. Anyway, we were disappointed. What we had done was because we were very naive and unsure. We didn’t know anything about anything, so we sent a copy of Nothing But a Man to Venice. We got a telegram from them saying that thirteen films were selected for the festival, ten by governments and three by the festival director. And so, we were among the three films in competition selected for the festival. The director of the festival, Luigi Chiarini, said, or was heard to have said, which was reported in the press, that “We have just invited an American film that is superior to the American official entry.” Well, it caused a firestorm and that year the American Producers Association pulled out of the Venice festival. DW: In protest? RY: In protest that this prejudicial remark had been made about the American entry. When we went to Venice, twenty-five by twenty-five foot billboards of Lilith were all over the festival. We put up little posters. We won two of the major prizes that year at Venice. We didn’t get any hate mail, but I imagine the expectations of those [studio] executives who were longing to go to Venice with their girlfriends, or wives, or whomever. And they got their film canceled that year because of Nothing But a Man. I couldn’t help but think that was very funny. So that says something about how the film was perceived. We came out of left field. We were kind of a phenomenon. We were invited on talk shows, but we

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were so inappropriate and out of touch. Every agency and agent got in touch with us and said we’d like to represent you. I remember thinking I always gave the right answers: They asked, “How do you feel about stars?” I said, “Oh gosh.” I’m thinking of Kathryn Hepburn and great actors whom I loved, as long as they’re right for the role. But that wasn’t the right answer. I was selected to go to China on Air Force One with Richard Nixon to meet Mao. I had a two-hour meeting with Dwight Chapin at the White House. He asked me what I thought of the president. I replied that “I’m critical of the president but I respect the presidency,” meaning I would not drop soup in anybody’s lap or anything like that. I thought I said the appropriate things but was so completely off the mark and out of touch. At the end of the meeting he said, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.” That’s the way Mike and I were. We knew that we couldn’t have survived in Hollywood. Later, I made a half a dozen studio movies. I made Dominick and Eugene (1988). It was a good movie. And I made Extremities (1986), which was also a good movie. But I didn’t fit in Hollywood. MTM: You’ve been on the outside? RY: Yes, I’ve been an outsider, and I relish that in a way. MTM: In a New York Times article by Shelia Rule in 1993, Donald Bogle, the film critic, and Steve Savage, who at the time was the president of New Video Group that distributed Nothing that year, both claim that the film was as relevant then as it was in 1964 because Bogle asserted “America hasn’t changed that much.”1 RY: Well, I would have to defer. I’m so myopic and very cautious. It’s not like I don’t make wild statements because I do, but I’m no pundit. However, during Mike’s and my trip south to make Sit-In (1960), we stayed with black families and I was chased out of cotton fields. I’ve been in a cabin when someone drove up and said, “You better be out of here before the sun goes down because you may not see another sunset.” We’ve been in places that no white man had ever been in. Not even the insurance guy. You don’t shake blacks’ hands. You don’t sit on their porch. That atmosphere I’m sure had changed by 1993. But I do remember being on the street and people averting their eyes. I talked to a guy who said how much he loved Negroes. And how he attended their funerals because they raised him. He talked about blacks in the same way he talked about

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his walking horses. There was this tremendous undercurrent of “they’re beneath us” and sentiment that blacks were like chattel. I believe that has changed, although I haven’t been in the South recently. I brought you a copy of a film I made with Mike in 1961, Cortile Cascino. For NBC it was called The Inferno. That film will tell you more about Mike and me. I shot it. I’m a cameraman as much as anything else and a director. But my directing started with a camera. And then I studied acting with Lee Strasberg. I love acting and I love the process of directing. I’m a lousy producer. I hate producing because I’m bad about the money, but I’m obsessed with the aesthetics of telling a story. MTM: You’re quoted in the same New York Times article that the impetus for making Nothing But a Man was because NBC refused to broadcast Cortile Cascino [The Inferno].2 RY: Right. It was like somebody had taken something from us. To have the thing that you worked on and made and that you believed in and created out of real life and real people and then have people not show and destroy it was a tremendous blow. MTM: You’re an independent. RY: I came from a Jewish but not religious background. I was protected by my loving parents. They were not wealthy. My father was from Hell’s Kitchen and self-made. He fought to get blacks in the union. He formed a film laboratory and made the documentary Fight for Peace (1939). It got great reviews by Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein. That was my dad. He was the editor and worked with the historian Willem Henrik van Loon. It was a wonderful film about the rise of fascism. But I used to argue with my father. He was too much to the right of me. MTM: Are there parallels between Nothing But a Man and Cortile Cascino, although Cortile documents poverty in a Palermo slum in Italy? RY: One comparison is that we didn’t go off in a room and write out of our imaginations about these people. Both films were grounded in research. Cortile Cascino was inspired by the book Inchiesta de Palermo [Report from Palermo, 1959] by Danilo Dolci. I got to know him. He was a remarkable man who was called the Gandhi of Italy. Reading the book, I wanted to go there so badly because the stories and the people in it were so vivid that they burned with the kind of luminosity that you only find in great fiction. I could see film there. Maybe it’s superficial but I react

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to vivid things. Jack London said, “Go west, that’s where the gold is,” so I went where the gold was. Sicily is one of those places where the gold is. You cannot miss making a great film if you go to Sicily. You just have to have your eyes open. MTM: La terra trema [The Earth Will Tremble, 1948] by Visconti? RY: Sure. I went to Pantalica and to Montichiari where [Giuseppe di] Lampedusa wrote The Leopard [Il Gattopardo, 1958]. The things I saw there were vivid and strong. But, in my exploration, I had to consider how to render it because you can’t just film it. How do you put it together? How do you make it kinesthetic because if it’s not kinesthetic, you have to then say something about it? In other words, how do you make analogs of real life fictively? This is what excited me. I would talk to somebody and they would say something and I’d film that. Then I’d film another person and they’d tell me a different point of view. The problem was putting them together so that I could have both points of view without it becoming a diatribe. This is the stuff that I’m interested in, the aesthetics of it. DW: That’s very interesting, the connection between the aesthetics and the politics of it. What were you trying to do with those two films? RY: I wanted to change things. In making Nothing But a Man no one could have offered me anything in the world, money, fame, glory, whatever, that would have taken me away from what I was doing to any other place in the world. I don’t mean that my head was swollen with importance. I felt very strongly that if this country didn’t solve the problem of race that it was going to be destroyed. I felt that deeply. My parents later had a house in Miami Beach. I remember going south for vacations and seeing chain gangs. I’ll never forget those images and the signs on doors, “Whites Only,” and the humiliation that black people suffered. I’m just being candid. And I’m not religious at all. In fact, I’m very critical of any kind of orthodoxy. I’m also a very nonviolent person, but I’m full of anger and hatred toward anyone who wants to diminish someone else whether a Jew or Palestinian. I can’t stand it. When I was growing up, I wished I was not Jewish. I had a crush on Mary Howard, the girl across the street. I couldn’t play with her because I was a Jew and she was Christian. I’ll never forget, much to my shame, when I was at MIT I had a date with a girl, a beautiful blonde girl. She said something very anti-Semitic and I

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never said anything to her, but I never called her again. She didn’t realize that I was a Jew. MTM: I too was silent when I should have said something at that age and older. RY: Sure. Now, I’m very forward about it. I believe like Martin Buber that I stand in my father’s doorway. And it’s only then that I’m able to walk and talk with people in the street because I have to say “who I am.” It’s not like I’m proud or not proud, it’s who I am. The one thing that I do feel lucky about, because of an accident at birth, is that I’m not in the majority. I came from a minority point of view, which allowed me to see some of the things that were going on in society that a lot of people accept. I remember when I was very young and seeing a black person driving an expensive car. It was a shock. What is he doing in that car? Just as I was ashamed that I didn’t speak up, I became aware of my own [prejudicial] way of thinking and looking at things which I had taken from society. I became very critical of those things and I wanted to do something about it. But I’m not a politician. You can see that Nothing But a Man doesn’t rant and rave about being black. I just wanted to get at the most fundamental thing, just to be alive. Just to be able to grow. MTM: In the essay by Jim Davidson that accompanies the DVD, Abbey Lincoln claims that Michael Roemer said of Nothing But a Man that “This is not about black people necessarily. This is about oppression.”3 Do you agree with Roemer? RY: That’s what the title refers to. It doesn’t say “nothing but a black man.” A “man” is the fundamental thing. I love Mike. Our relationship has been very interesting. After the war, I went to Harvard where we met and became very good friends. He wrote a script called A Touch of the Times (1949) which we made into a movie. I was one of the cameramen. He then went off and worked for Louis de Rochemont as a film editor and assistant director for eight years. And I [went] to NBC’s White Papers. I made three of them, and they were very successful. I got the George Polk Award two years in a row. I remember I was at a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria where I was receiving the Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence. I was invited to be with the executives. I stayed at the table with my colleagues who were the bread-and-butter guys like me. It was probably seen as an affront. I didn’t understand those things. But I was

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cited in the Peabody Award both years that NBC got it. I got all kinds of awards, which allowed me to make Cortile Cascino. MTM: Do you think that because the story of Nothing But a Man is about black people that may have obscured the underlying more general theme about oppression? RY: It had to be tactile, but to abstract something from it. I want the audience to make that connection and not have to say it. Yes, everybody’s the same, but to get to that level you have to peel off a lot of layers. If I am to be compared with a black filmmaker who didn’t have the opportunities I had, you’d have to peel a lot of layers off before there’s even ground between us because he may not have been introduced to a camera until he was twenty years old. I had advantages. My father was a filmmaker. MTM: This begs the question of who was your intended audience. RY: I just never thought about things like that. I wanted to make a film that got at what I thought was, even the truth is too big of a word because we were just trying to tell a story that was grounded in the realities of real life. And that took going south. DW: Your early working document for NBC, the White Paper series, had already made a TV audience of millions of people even though it might not have been part of your consciousness . . . RY: I’m not that self-aware that I thought about those things. DW: But that medium is working to a particular audience. RY: Sure. DW: Now when you’re making a feature film, or certainly a film like Nothing But a Man, which is not a studio film, where did you imagine the film would be shown? RY: I never thought about it, just that we were making a great movie and that people are going to see it. We just never really thought about those things. DW: Did you have any doubt that it would be seen? RY: Not really. Nothing in the world was going to stop us from making this film and that was thanks to NBC because they took Cortile Cascino away. I’d be dammed if I wasn’t going to make this film. We tried to get money. I remember meeting with the head of United Artists. He said he read the script and thought it was a great script but he said, “Who is going to go see a film about black people and by a first-time director, so

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we’re not interested.” Financially, it took thirty years before Mike and I got a check for $3,000, thirty years later. MTM: We’re laughing but that’s not funny. RY: I’m laughing too. We were $40,000 over budget. Mike had to pay $20,000 and I paid $20,000. It took a lot of other films to pay off the debts of Nothing But a Man. Other people made money. The educational rights went for $22,000. I’ll never forget there were 150-odd prints circulating around the country, and the company that distributed it made hundreds of thousands of dollars. When it was broadcast on television, it was one of a package of ten films. I think it was the only film in the ten that really meant something. We never saw a cent, although the film caught and made a lot of money for Sony. I haven’t gotten one penny. I did it for nothing because I wanted to do it. I spent my pension, my life’s pension. MTM: Which, I imagine, is a lot of money? RY: For me, it was a fortune. It was everything I had but I don’t regret it. I say it like I’m bragging. I’m a little crazy and special in the way I’m crazy. When I leave life I will have done some things that I wanted to do. Not all of them, maybe one-fiftieth. But I’ve made a few of the things that I’ve wanted to. I wanted to do Nothing But a Man. I wanted to do Alambrista! I made them happen. I made The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez [1982] the way I wanted to. It wasn’t my money but I wrote the script and made it the way I wanted to make it. MTM: You can account for yourself? RY: Well, not completely. I’ve wasted a lot of time. MTM: Who hasn’t? RY: Yes. I’ve had interesting experiences and seen things: I swam with fantastic animals in the sea. I followed a man-eating tiger in India for months. I’ve lived with Eskimos. I’ve been with cannibal tribes in New Guinea. I was in Angola with the rebels.4 I witnessed the aftermath of massacres and was pursued by the Portuguese. I made a film about sharks that inspired the book Jaws. So, I’ve seen some wonderful [and horrible] things in my life. But I could have done so much more. MTM: Michael Roemer said, “Frankly, I didn’t start dealing with the Holocaust until 1965,” the year after Nothing was released.5 Is Nothing, as it has been suggested, as much a Jewish story about oppression as it is a black one?

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RY: Yes. In the sense that every story is a human story. Mike left Germany and went to England in 1939. He never experienced the Holocaust firsthand. He was saved from it, but his family [experienced it]. MTM: What about for you? RY: As I said earlier, I was deeply aware of my own Jewish background, even though I rejected any kind of formal [identification because] it got in the way of being the other as well. I couldn’t be special. I don’t like that kind of feeling of entitlement that we’re special people. I reject anything like that. I remember, just as much as I loved Moby Dick when I was maybe ten years old, I also reveled in Native Son by Richard Wright. I’d empathize and project myself into other cultures. My uncle Joe was a songwriter and intimately involved with black people, but I’m only coming to know that now at eighty-five through my children who are musicians. They discovered many things about my Uncle Joe that I didn’t know. So, in a sense, I rejected my own heritage but, at the same time, I read a lot about the Inquisition and the history of the Jews and persecution. I wondered what was different about me. What was wrong about me? How could anybody think that I’d have cloven hooves, or that I have horns? Those kinds of questions about what makes you human were things that I didn’t think about formally but speculated on as a young person. Why couldn’t I date Mary Howard? What was wrong about me? What was unsavory? So, yes, I had those kinds of issues, and I think very often I projected myself. I lived on an Indian reservation for three months in 1970 or so, long before most liberals. It’s not like I’m an activist or on the front line. I’m not a political person in an overt way. I’m a filmmaker, so my films have to reflect things that I care about and that’s why when I got to NBC, the first thing I wanted to do was go south. I went to Fayette County in Tennessee to make Sit-In for NBC. I learned a lot of fantastic things and was very inspired by the experiences there that changed my life. There was a boycott against blacks so they wouldn’t vote in what would have been a white Democratic primary. I’ll never forget the first thing I said when I announced myself to the sheriff. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was there subversively. He was sitting in a chair – the stereotypical movie sheriff with a big belly and a gun, and his feet up on the desk. Behind him was a picture of Justice Earl Warren that said “Impeach Earl Warren for Dangerous Alien Sedition.”

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I said, “I’m from NBC and my name is Bob Young. I want you to know that I’m here to make a film about what’s going on, and I’d love to interview you.” He replied, “You’re a New York liberal Jew.” I said, “Yes, that’s right.” I was told by blacks not to eat at any restaurants because “they’re going to put arsenic in your food.” Eat out of a paper bag is what they told me. They laid me down in the back of the car and put their feet over me so that I wouldn’t be seen. They were afraid I’d get shot or something. But I met people who were very inspiring. I met an old [black] man in the field. He said, “I wish my own mother were here but she’s sleeping over yonder. She never saw a plane and she never even seen a car, but I’m here today to tell people to rise, rise, rise.” Then he said, “Lincoln, he took the yoke off of us but he left us with the bowl.” Look, I was inspired. I was in touch with people who spoke in metaphor – ”the yoke.” I mean who talked like that? I didn’t know people who talked like that. Later in life I became friends with Alan Lomax. Alan’s dad, [the folklorist] John Lomax, recorded John Lead Belly [Huddie William Ledbetter] for the Library of Congress. As a matter of fact, not too long ago I found a recording by Ledbetter of one of my Uncle Joe’s songs. It gave me thrills. [lyrics] “I’m alone because I love. I love you with all my heart. I’m alone because I had to be true. I’m sorry I can’t say the same thing about you.” My Uncle Joe, a guy who maybe never had more than two years of school, wrote a lot of great songs and lyrics. So, I’m celebrating being an American and the fact that America releases this kind of fantastic energy by people who come to a place where they can thrive – where they can be a new person instead of just the model of what they were in Europe. I wanted to celebrate that I am a free person, that I am a new person and an individual. I want to have a voice. I’ve wanted my films, not all by a long shot, to give voice to the people who don’t have a voice. And I try to make it as authentic as possible because it’s not my but their voice. So that’s why I had to live with people. That’s why in Alambrista! I lived with migrant workers and that’s how Nothing But a Man came about the same way. I’m not just saying this. I’m limited in many ways. But I do have a passion about certain things, and those are the things where I try to do something. I was always afraid of being derivative. MTM: What do you mean by derivative?

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RY: I didn’t want my films to come from other films’ experience. I never would look at a film to see how it was made or how something was done. I didn’t want to copy. That doesn’t mean I haven’t. Of course, I’ve viewed things by other people. I wanted to live with Eskimos. I wanted to go south. I didn’t want my ideas to come out of film. MTM: But out of lived experience? RY: Yes, that’s what I mean by being derivative. I wanted to do it as much as I could and not from somebody else’s experience. DW: Why did you become a filmmaker as opposed to a writer? RY: I never thought of that. I love visual images. I love the kinesthetic of making a film. I run with the camera. One of the things I’m really proud of is the camera work. I love the faces in Nothing But a Man. I loved lighting them, adoring them in a sense. I felt like their faces hadn’t been seen. That’s not true of course. There were great WPA [Works Progress Administration] images . . . Dorothea Lang . . . but those were mostly of white people. I learned a lot about filmmaking from the thirteen films I made about life in the sea. I shot a lot of them by myself. I studied animals in a tank and figured out how to film them. The big question was how to get people into a story without telling them. Some beautiful films I love are essays, but that was not what I wanted to do. I wanted my films to be more experiential. I believe in triangulation. Let’s say you saw a guy flirting with a woman. He’s flirting with her and another woman comes in the room and says, “Honey, it’s time to pick up the kids.” Right away you laugh and get the situation. And then you wonder did she know he was married? Is he embarrassed? Is the wife upset? Does he not care? And then you’re pulled in. That’s a situation. The situation positions you to watch behavior and that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t want the actors indicating. I want the audience to be pulled in and then all of a sudden realize that by her remark she’s actually talking to another woman and it’s a gay relationship. You assumed the other thing, so your mind spins around and you have to make all kinds of internal adjustments from the woman and the husband to the woman and the woman. I want to have things seen refractively and with uncertainty. That to me is storytelling. That’s what I want to do. I want to be pulled into the audience and then followed by another scene that contradicts some of the things you saw in

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4. Duff with other cotton pickers. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

the preceding one. And so, I’m trying to triangulate and take you places, so that you’re receiving by inference and by watching behavior, ideas, and not being told them. That’s why I don’t want to be telling. I don’t want to cast a politician. I didn’t want Martin Luther King [Jr.] however much I think he was an incredible person. That’s what I did in documentaries. I had to interview people and get their statements. That can be very powerful. I wanted to see people situationally and then allow the audience to be moved back and forth between this and that idea. MTM: The conclusion of Nothing But a Man has been read differently. Thomas Cripps concludes that Duff personifies the “pastoral hero,” who “has learned the value of being governed by a formula that equates survival and success with sameness, roots, and permanence, rather than social mobility.”6 For Cripps, “the pastoral hero does not wish to prevail, only to endure.”7 Do you agree? RY: Not at all. I don’t think Duff Anderson just wants to endure. He has to endure in order to prevail. I think one is a sine qua non for the other. If you can’t endure, how are you going to prevail?

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5. Duff at the gas station. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

MTM: Then, enduring is a precondition? RY: It’s absolutely a precondition. In the script there were arguments with people. Some said he never would go back. Why would he go back? What are the jobs to go back to? Lee [Gloria Foster] says, “What are you going to do?” Duff replies, “I’ll chop cotton if I have to.” While that’s not in Duff’s character to do, he’s saying that if he has to chop cotton, “I’m going to chop cotton, but nobody is moving me out of this place. This is my woman [Josie] and this is my place, and I’m taking this kid [my son] whom I rejected, copping out that maybe he’s not mine. But sure he’s mine and I’m going to get him and we’re going to be here, and you’re [white racists] going to have to deal with us.” That’s prevailing. That’s in a deep sense prevailing. The “social mobility” would be getting the hell out of there. Duff said, “Look, I’ve been to Japan, I’ve been around, I’ve been up North and it’s not so great up there either.” “I’m going to make it and I’m not a boy. I’m not going back to the grocer, but if I have to do that I’ll swallow my pride. I’m nothing but a man. I’m a man and you’re not running me out of here.”

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MTM: Thank you for clarifying what has been misunderstood about Duff’s resolve to resist. RY: That’s what it was. It’s in the film, and I’m surprised that somebody would say that. Why tell a story? If it was about statistics, then Duff never would have gone back because most black men in that situation don’t go back. But why tell that story? That doesn’t take you into the direction of possibilities, which to me is fundamental. A story is something that’s going to ground people. Art should be about grounding and putting you in touch with reality. With the truth. Whether it’s Guernica with its abstract forms, ultimately it’s about very profound things, social forces coming to grips, and horses and men being destroyed. Yes, it’s done in a different way, but deep inside of it is something that’s very big. I think it’s about grounding. If something is not psychologically true I can’t do it. Mike and I tried to bring to Nothing But a Man a sense of life, a sense of immediacy and things that are psychologically true. The car scene with Duff at the gas station is an example. He can’t do anything, but he knocks his wife down. I think that’s much truer to life, like when the boss has been hard on you and you come home and take it out on your wife and kids. MTM: Noel Carroll contends that The Cool World (1964) and Nothing But a Man are “‘theme’ films dedicated to expounding an idea by means of a dramatic narrative.” The idea “is the notion that racism creates a set of circumstances in which blacks themselves inflict a great deal of the misery they suffer upon themselves.”8 RY: Absolutely. MTM: The idea that “racism turns the victim into his own executioner”?9 RY: I made a film called Triumph of the Spirit [1989] and that’s what the “Kapo” did. The Nazis used the criminals to run the prisons. There was an article in the New York Times yesterday about the Gulag – the prison system in Russia. They live in barracks now, but it’s run by the criminals in the prison. That’s the way it always is. When I was working with migrant workers, Chicanos drove the buses and recruited the laborers. Ninety-nine percent of them. In Angola it was the same. The local head was Portuguese, but the tribal chiefs were the ones who rounded

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6. White men confront Duff at the gas station. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

up and recruited the labor. They were the Jews in the camps who were also Kapos. MTM: Susan Strasberg portrays that role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Kapo (1959). RY: Yes, that’s the way it works. MTM: So, is Duff complicit? RY: I don’t think so. He has to work. He has to make a living. He gets a job. He does his work. He doesn’t laugh when the guy says, “Don’t you smile, boy?” Duff replies, “Yeah, I smile when it’s funny.” Look, that’s a watershed in the film because just saying, “I smile when it’s funny” is challenging the whole system [of white supremacy], although in a superficial way. It’s not like we’re talking about whether you can sit down and eat at the counter in a restaurant. That was Sit-In, although someone had to say, “Please can I have a hamburger and a cup of coffee? My God, we don’t serve Negros in here.” It’s taboo to say that priests ought to be

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7. Duff prepares the damaged car for towing. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

able to have wives. Part of the problem is there’s no language to break a taboo. That’s part of the problem Catholics are having because, if you do break it, you’re going to change the whole church. MTM: It’s a regulatory thing? RY: Yes. DW: What Nothing But a Man does in an extraordinary way is it situates people who are inarticulate so they literally don’t understand. The whites in that car who confront Duff don’t have a language to understand their racism. RY: Exactly. DW: They’re simply speaking their culture. RY: Exactly. DW: And that’s the same for Duff, an intelligent guy who doesn’t have the language to understand or articulate what we as academics call “intersecting discourses of race”?

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8. A white manager confronts Duff in the mill’s locker room. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

RY: Right. He doesn’t see the situation. He just responds honestly to it. DW: So what you have in Duff is an extraordinary character in all sorts of ways, but he’s utterly an ordinary man. Is he nothing but a man? RY: Exactly. DW: But the powerful taboos of race are in the most ordinary and contiguous circumstances and interactions. MTM: The scene where Duff’s assisting the white male who crashed his car evokes a powerful taboo and psychological challenge to the master/slave dialectic. This scene was brilliantly enacted by the two men as the setting was construed in the ordinary. RY: You get it the way David expressed it. MTM: And yet, back to David’s point, the scene in the locker room, when Duff refuses to take back what he said to fellow black workers about organizing a union in the mill, language is deployed by the manager

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to distinguish and distance Duff from the others by referring to them as “men” and Duff as “boy.” Here, it is not the absence of language to dialogue across races, but rather its deliberate signifying to demarcate between black men while affirming the racial hierarchy. RY: Yes. MTM: Back to the matter of Duff’s complicity. If in the larger context he’s not complicit, is he in relation to Josie? RY: He wants to work. The manager says, “Are you a union man?” Duff says, “I used to be on the railroad.” He doesn’t want to lose his job. MTM: When the manager asks if he wants to keep his job at the mill, Duff replies, “What you think?” RY: Yes, exactly. But when it comes down to it, he can’t back down. And the very thing that makes it impossible to back down is going to destroy his relationship with Josie, his wife. In other words, he can’t make a living in this town and be a man. It’s like a lynching. He knocks her down and leaves. That’s how fundamental the destruction is. But in going back, he knows the situation is unchanged. MTM: But next time he’s not going to knock her down. RY: Right. He’s not going to knock her down. He comes back with the kid. He’s there. I believe aesthetically that you don’t play results. MTM: What do you mean? RY: In other words, the actor is trying to tell you where the story’s going. I want everything to stay in the moment. I don’t want an actor to indicate because then the story is over. The story isn’t over. He embraces her and says, “It ain’t going to be easy, but I feel so free inside,” but he’s going to face the same kind of humiliation tomorrow because he doesn’t have a job and he’s maybe going to have to chop cotton. No, it’s not over. I don’t want it to be over in terms of story. I want him to succeed. But this is about being in the moment. Result-oriented is as soon as somebody starts telling the result like they live happily ever after. Bullshit, nobody ever lived happily ever after, not if they got married. MTM: The [studio] movies set it up wrong? RY: Exactly. The world is changing constantly. There’s always something. You get ill. What people have to triumph over we don’t know. So, as soon as you start playing the results the story is over. You must not

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9. Duff with his father in Birmingham. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

play the results. That’s bad directing. And it’s bad acting, but it’s up to the director not to allow that to happen. DW: The film ends but the story doesn’t end? RY: Yes, exactly. MTM: How can it, because in real life it is what it is? RY: Yes, but Mike and I weren’t interested in doing it statistically because then Duff wouldn’t have returned. MTM: And for you he would have ceased to be a man had he not returned? RY: Yes, and that’s why the figure of the father [Will played by Julius Harris] is so important to the story. Duff’s fate could otherwise be like his father’s, who’s very negative and self-destructive, and unable to accomplish anything. He’s living on false dreams about getting insurance money from an injury. He says, he’s “got some ideas how I can make more.” Bullshit. He’s not going to go anywhere and Duff knows that.

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When Duff is asked at the funeral parlor where his father was born, he doesn’t know. MTM: Or how old he was? RY: Yes, and “What did he do? Well, he worked around,” Duff replies. DW: He can see that so clearly echoed in the relationship with his son? RY: Yes, that’s what his kid is going to say about him. It’s the things that aren’t in the film that make a film powerful. You’ve got to be the wellspring of things that are much bigger and you want to be connected to those things. So, as soon as you make things like a picture postcard where you’re telling people that’s the world, then it leaves out what really is important. That’s why the situation and triangulating, and only telling so much, are important. MTM: Clearly, aesthetics are an essential concern of yours. Why the choice of black-and-white film and the privileging of high tonal contrasts? RY: I think there are a lot of middle tones that equate with the film’s subtleties. I love black and white and this is a story about blacks and whites, so the next level seems pretty obvious. Why do it in black and white? Beyond that, I think color draws you more to the surface. MTM: What do you mean by surface? RY: That’s where color is – on the surface. That doesn’t mean color reverberates, or that it doesn’t have a meaning, but it’s on the surface. Black and white is more abstract, I think. You see surfaces in terms of light, in terms of shades of gray, but it’s more abstract because it’s not reality. Reality has color in it. But cinematographers very often become immune to colors. I wanted to celebrate the faces in Nothing But a Man, and I think it really works so well in black and white. I loved shooting Duff at the counter proposing to Josie while he’s looking at her profile. I was profoundly affected by their faces and the way they looked. I thought they were beautiful people. I don’t think very often black people really get to be seen the way they really should be seen. It’s not as if Duff’s features are Caucasian. He’s [was] a very handsome and strong man. And Josie [was] a very beautiful woman.10 I was celebrating them in that sense. DW: Does black and white fit into some sort of documentary tradition?

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10. Duff proposes to Josie at the counter in the bus station. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

RY: Yes, it does. I came from making black-and-white documentaries. I hadn’t thought about that, but, yes, definitely. MTM: In Davidson’s essay on Nothing, Roemer asserts that by using close-ups you were making “a tacit political statement, which broke a Hollywood taboo.”11 RY: Now that you say that it resonates with me. Close-ups are like pushing people into somebody’s face, into closer proximity. You’re breaking the social barrier. That’s true. MTM: Perhaps making them more human? RY: That’s an interesting point. Yes, especially if you’re not used to being so close to black people. I felt and operated out of that, but I wasn’t thinking about it and certainly not in this discussion. In lighting, I’m really looking at people. I want to press in. I want the intimacy. So, the shot where Duff proposes to Josie, she’s in profile but so close to him. MTM: At the bus station? RY: Right. I love seeing those images of them. It goes along with my feeling about acting, which is I want people to internalize and allow the

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11. Duff with Lee at the cemetery. Courtesy of Robert M. Young.

audience to see what’s going on but not demonstrate to them. I don’t want them to project. I don’t want them to act. I want them to allow. I’m talking now beyond Nothing But a Man because Mike did most of the work with the actors. I took responsibility for the photography because I was the cameraman and we had no one else. Mike commented on the camera and I on the acting. During the last four weeks of the movie there were only a few people in the crew. I was the only camera person. There was nobody to follow folks and push the dolly. When we did the scene in the cemetery, the editor was pulling the boat trailer where the camera was on. And when I no longer had film I ran to our station wagon and into the changing bag to reload because we had no assistant cameraman. MTM: Music is prominent in Nothing. Roemer said that, “The thing that couldn’t be spoken in the film, we let the music say,”12 suggesting that it was part of the language of the narration rather than to punctuate or serve as background for the story. RY: I think it’s part of the language. For example, when Duff goes in the house and kneels down to look at his kid, Mary Wells is singing a

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gospel song in the background. That is an aspect of that moment, which is felt. Yes, the music to me is a very important part of it. DW: You’re two white guys filming in the middle of black communities. Was there resentment and any tensions? RY: Yes. There was a big fight. There was the soundman, Robert Rubin, a terrific guy. MTM: Was he knocked down by Ivan Dixon? RY: I’m being honest but I can’t remember now whether he got beaten or not. Ivan did pull out a knife and there was a big struggle. It happened in the parking lot of a church, a black church we were going to film. We were tremendously honorable about how we paid everybody. In those days we paid like $5 or $10 a day. It was not a lot of money but it was more than a token, trying to do things on the up and up. I don’t remember exactly what it was but Robert Rubin said something about our well-being needing, or something like that. It was a stupid thing to say and it provoked Ivan, who I love, and led quickly to an explosion. Ivan was sometimes very sensitive and even Mike, for all of his wonderful qualities, was sometimes insensitive. He couldn’t help it. The fact that he would say things while giving direction to Ivan when Abbey was there. That was insensitive to a black man to be told by a white man . . . MTM: In front of a black woman? RY: Yes. Mike is very insightful. He’s a very smart guy, ten times smarter than me, but he was not always sensitive to that and you need to be. Ivan could easily feel humiliated by being told something and by the way it was said. I remember grabbing Ivan because he actually had pulled out a knife. I don’t think he would have used it, but everybody was furious and it looked like the film would end. That happens. In Alambrista!, too, it happened.13 Lamont Yeakey (LY): You mentioned some films and how they demonstrate risk taking. RY: Yes. LY: For example? RY: A number of years ago an agent gave me a script about Huckleberry Finn. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book I loved growing up. It was a studio picture. I read the script and thought it was pretty darn good. I thought, “Wow, what a great thing to get to do.” I had all kinds of

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ideas, scenes came to my mind and how I would do them. Then I called the agent, and he said they don’t want to see you. They have a television director whom they want to do it. They think he’s young and bright and he’s going to be good, so they don’t want to meet with you. I was shocked and disappointed and then relieved in a way because I had opportunities to do those kinds of films and someone else should get the chance. As a matter of fact, at my age I should be doing something different. I should do something that I want to do that I don’t know if I can do it. And that was the film, Caught [1996]. I try to shoot my films from the beginning. I did Caught sequentially. I don’t do all of the scenes at once because I think that things might change and I think that, experientially, I want the actors to grow in the parts. The characters should only know so much at the beginning and keep learning more and more. I want the opportunity to make changes and to rewrite stuff. I want some kind of uncertainty. Of chance. Maybe it will work, maybe it will fail. That’s part of the excitement of doing it. If it’s all set then it doesn’t present a challenge and I’m not as interested in doing it because I know how to do it. Let someone else do it. Maybe he’ll find something in it that I wouldn’t. LY: Where would you rank Nothing But a Man among your films? RY: I would say it’s one of the most important films that I did because it was a total engagement and it meant so much to me doing it. Mike and I were involved in everything about it up until the end. But the only thing that wasn’t fulfilling was that the script was already complete and the photography was composed. When I did Alambrista!, it was much more in process like Caught. LY: Thank you so much. RY: Thanks, Lamont. DW/MM: And thank you, Bob. Notes 1. Sheila Rule, “30 Years Later, A Sensitive Film of Black Family Life Reemerges,” New York Times, March 16, 1993. 2. Ibid.

3. Jim Davidson, The Making of Nothing But a Man (Burlington, VT: New Video Group, Inc., 2004), 3. 4. From which he made the documentary, Angola: Journey to a War.

Martin and Wall 5. Davidson, The Making of Nothing, 7. 6. Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 126. 7. Ibid. 8. Noel Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204. 9. Ibid.

199 10. Both were deceased by the time of this interview. 11. Davidson, The Making of Nothing, 4. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Young is referring to an incident that occurred during the filming of Alambrista! when a fight broke out because someone thought his girlfriend had been insulted. Young was attacked at knifepoint.

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Screenplay

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Nothing But a Man (1964) Michael Roemer and Robert Young A crew of African-Americans are laying tracks in rural Alabama. The crane operator is the only white man on the section gang. INT. BUNK CAR  The dormitory of the section gang. The men are through for the day and lounging on their bunkbeds. DUFF ANDERSON plays checkers with FR ANKIE, using bottle tops as pieces. Duff makes the winning move and Frankie, disgusted, turns over the board. He saunters over to JOCKO, who is shaving in a broken mirror. Frankie watches him with a grin. JOCKO  Go to hell, Frankie. FR ANKIE  Man, you sure one ugly cat! He takes the cigarettes Jocko has rolled, sailor-style, into the sleeve of his T-shirt. JOCKO  Why don’t you guys buy your own? FR ANKIE  ’Oughta give up smoking, Jocko. He stops in front of an older man, who is writing a letter. FR ANKIE  How much longer we got on this stretch, Riddick?

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R IDDICK  Five weeks, maybe six. FR ANKIE  Man, what a dump. He circles restlessly past two card players back to Duff, who is clipping his fingernails. FR ANKIE  What you getting’ all pretty for? DUFF  (with a grin) Why don’t you relax, Frankie? R AILROAD TR ACK  Duff, Frankie, and Jocko are riding a track-car, powered by a small engine into the nearest town. The sun is setting. A church bell rings. POOL HALL  Jocko, a cigar in his mouth, is playing a pinball machine. Duff and Frankie stand at the bar. They are joined by DORIS, a sad-looking woman with bad skin. DOR IS  Who’s going to buy me a beer? FR ANKIE  (scornfully) What’s the matter, Doris? Business bad? DOR IS  It sure is. FR ANKIE  Everybody givin’ it away free, huh? DOR IS  You gonna buy me a beer, Frankie? FR ANKIE  See Duff. He’s the money man. DOR IS  What d’you say, Duff? DUFF  (to the bartender) Give her a beer. DOR IS  Thanks, Duff. You’ a nice guy. Not like Frankie.

Nothing But a Man FR ANKIE  You know, Doris – you’d make some guy a swell wife. DOR IS  You think so, Frankie? FR ANKIE  Hell, you got steady work. DUFF  Quit ridin’ her, Frankie. The bartender serves her a bottle of beer. FR ANKIE  I ain’t ridin’ her. Wouldn’t ride her on a bet. Duff pays for the beer and turns to leave. DOR IS  Where’ you goin’? DUFF  Out. DOR IS  Want me to come? DUFF  No thanks. DOR IS  Come on, honey. FR ANKIE  Where’ you goin’? DUFF  ’Round town. FR ANKIE  What’s so hot ’round town? DUFF  (with a grin) Take it easy, Frankie. He leaves. FR ANKIE  Don’t wanna fish you outa no jailhouse.

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STR EET (Night)  Duff is walking along the deserted street in the black part of town. Music from the pool hall fades and we pick up the strains of gospel singing from a nearby church. INT. CHURCH  The choir is singing “Precious Lord.” The women are spirited and the congregation in the small wooden building is alive to the music. Duff appears in the open doorway and stops to listen. When the song ends, R EVER END DAWSON rises from his chair. R EVER END  I’m glad to see this meeting off to a good start. Now we’ll take a break and then come back to hear from our distinguished guest – Reverend Butler of the Morgan Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. See you all in a little while. Reverend Butler compliments him on the choir. CHURCH YARD  Long tables laden with food are lit by strings of lightbulbs. The sound of a gospel piano from inside the church. A smiling middle-aged woman has taken Duff in tow and leads him over to a young woman (JOSIE), who is serving food. WOMAN  Josie – this is Brother Anderson. Now you give him some of that good food. He’s fine young man. (on her way) Ain’t it a wonderful meetin’?! DUFF  Thank you, Ma’am. That’s fine. JOSIE  You must be new in town. DUFF  (with a grin)  I’ll have me some of that punch there, too. She serves the punch. JOSIE  Haven’t seen you around, have I?

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DUFF  No. I’m new in town. JOSIE  (unwilling to give up) You working? DUFF  Yeah. On the section gang. He is sure that this will put a stop to her curiosity. It doesn’t. JOSIE  (interested) Oh yeah? DUFF  You work around town? JOSIE  I’m a teacher. DUFF  Went to college, huh? JOSIE  In Birmingham. DUFF  Oh yeah? That’s my home town. JOSIE  Your folks live there? DUFF  No. My mother’s dead. (after a moment) You goin’ back inside? JOSIE  Yes, aren’t you? DUFF  No. Never had much use for hell-howlers. You goin’? JOSIE  (with a smile) My father’s the preacher. DUFF  (grinning) Oh yeah? Well, I guess you got no choice. JOSIE  That’s right. DUFF  (a bit tentatively) Look, I don’t know what you been told ‘about section gangs, but how ’bout seein’ me sometime?

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JOSIE  (with a non-committal smile) Maybe. INT. CHURCH  The visiting revival preacher is in full swing, preaching and singing. The congregation of women is in a state of high excitement. Josie alone seems out of it, though she sits in their mist. Duff has been standing in the doorway. He turns away. EXT. CHURCH  Duff walks away, past a shack. The singing fades. A dog barks. BUNK CAR (Night)  Duff, Frankie, Jocko, and an older man (POP) are playing cards. While waiting for his turn, Jocko catches a fly and sneaks a look at Frankie’s cards. JOCKO  You got a lousy hand, Frankie. Frankie throws down the cards. FR ANKIE  Yeah, I quit. He gets up. At loose ends, he picks up an old Flit-gun and squirts it at Duff, who is polishing his shoes. DUFF  You got nothin’ on your mind but your hair, Frankie. How ’bout your car, Riddick. R IDDICK  Yean, you can have it. JOCKO  Man, you won’t like that back seat. FR ANKIE  Man, why ’you messin’ around with a gal like that? You won’t get no place. JOCKO  Hell, they’re all after the same thing. POP  Yeah. All a colored woman wants is your money.

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JOCKO  What d’you know about women, Pop? POP  Well, I got married to one of them. JOCKO  Hell, I didn’t know you was married. POP  Sure. Got a sixteen-year-old girl. JOCKO  Is that right? (to Duff) Think you’re gonna make it with her? FR ANKIE  Just get her drunk. DUFF  (to Riddick) How ’bout the key? FR ANKIE  I bet she’s easy jam. DAWSON DINING ROOM (Night)  A middle-class tableau. Dinner is over. Reverend Dawson is reading the paper. Josie, dressed for an evening out, sits across from her step-mother, who is looking at her with pursed lips. MRS. DAWSON  I know you pay no mind to my feelings, but d’you think it’s right for you to go out with him? JOSIE  I’m twenty-six years old, Susan. MRS. DAWSON  Perhaps you ought to tell her, Frank. Reverend Dawson has no stomach for confrontation, but turns to Josie dutifully. R EVER END DAWSON  Well, we have a position in town, Josie. You have to remember that. There’re lots of other young men. MRS. DAWSON  I don’t think your mother would have approved. JOSIE  I do.

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MRS. DAWSON  Well, there’s just one thing you can be looking for in a man like that. JOSIE  I know that’s what you think. R EVER END DAWSON  Hush your mouth, child. The doorbell rings. JOSIE  (leaving the table) Good night, Dad. ROAD HOUSE  On the dimly lit, smoke-hung floor a large crowd is dancing. Josie is having a great time. When the music ends, she and Duff return to their table. DUFF  That’s pretty good for a preacher’s daughter. JOSIE  What d’you expect? DUFF  You know, baby, I can’t figure you out. JOSIE  How d’you mean? DUFF  Why d’you come out with me? You slummin’ or something? JOSIE  No. DUFF  So what you doin’ with a cat like me in a joint like this? JOSIE  You don’t think much of yourself, do you? DUFF  (put off) Well, that’s a funny thing to say. JOSIE  You keep asking me why I’m here.

Nothing But a Man DUFF  Yeah, and you keep not answerin’, too. JOSIE  I like a place with lots of life. DUFF  How about another beer? JOSIE  No thanks. DUFF  Go on – you can have one! His attention is drawn by something off screen. DUFF  Hell! JOSIE  What is it? Frankie and Jocko swagger toward them, beer in hand. FR ANKIE  Well, if it ain’t Duff! JOCKO  How you doin’? (to Josie; with a bit of a leer) Hi there! JOSIE  Hi. JOCKO  Mind if I sit down? DUFF  We was just leavin’, fellows. FR ANKIE  Let’s go, Jocko. The man’s got homework. JOCKO  (leaving) See you, Duff. DUFF  Yeah, see you in hell. Frankie follows Jocko out of the frame.

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JOSIE  They must work on the section gang. DUFF  That’s right. JOSIE  Well, they seem just like everyone else. DUFF  Hell, baby, I bet you think we got tails. FR ANKIE’S VOICE  (off-screen) We do! Frankie and Jocko have occupied the adjoining table and are grinning at them. Duff gets up, camouflaging his irritation. DUFF  Come on, baby. He ushers Josie out. Frankie looks after them. FR ANKIE  School teacher! My nappy head! INT. RIDDICK’S OLD CONVERTIBLE (Night)  Duff has parked on a country road. JOSIE  I guess it’s hard working on the road like that. DUFF  Dam few places you can make eighty bucks a week. JOSIE  I mean, you’re kind of cut off, aren’t you? DUFF  That’s fine with me. Keeps me out of trouble. JOSIE  How d’you mean? DUFF  Well, I don’t get on so well most places. JOSIE  I see. That beer made me dizzy.

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Duff is looking at her. DUFF  You got a lovely face, kid. Ain’t too often I get to meet a girl like you. Hell –  He kisses her, but releases her very quickly. DUFF  Baby, how many times’ you been kissed? Josie takes a moment to collect herself. JOSIE  Well, let’s see now – not counting tonight . . . must be about twenty-eight times. DUFF  (with a grin) You got a problem all right. Someone moves in back of her. A white man in his early twenties has emerged from the dark and looks down at them. WHITE  (with a smile) Hi. The voice of a second white man calls from off screen. SECOND WHITE  They doin’ anything? WHITE  (calling back) Nah, nothin’! DUFF  Get out of here! JOSIE  (frightened) Don’t Duff –  WHITE  Relax, man! SECOND WHITE  What’s goin’ on? He shines his flashlight into Duff’s face.

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DUFF  Cut that out! The white man shines the flashlight across Josie’s breast. DUFF  (very tense) I said: Cut it out! WHITE  Don’t start no trouble, boy! SECOND WHITE  Let’s go! That’s the preacher’s girl. Mess with him and you got old man Johnson on your back. Come on. The white men leave. JOSIE  Let’s go, Duff. DUFF  Take it easy. We see that he has a knife in his hand. He closes and pockets it. The white men drive off, whooping and beating on the side of their car. DUFF  Don’t sound human, do they? INT. MOVING CAR (Night)  Duff is driving through the center of town. DUFF  How come you stay ’round here? JOSIE  Well, my mother was the only good teacher the colored school ever had. Nobody bothers with those kids. DUFF  That’s why you come back, huh? JOSIE  It’s hard to see any change. But I’m going to stay. Another year, anyway. DUFF  You got more guts than me, baby. It’s a no-good town.

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JOSIE  It’s better than it used to be. Eight years ago they still had a lynching here. They tied a man to a car and dragged him to death. My father knew who did it, but he didn’t say anything. DUFF  Scared, huh? The car pulls up in from of the Dawson house and Duff parks. DUFF  Well, good night, baby. He is about to kiss her. JOSIE  Not here, Duff. DUFF  I get it. (with a laugh) Yeah, I can see your old man with a shotgun right now. JOSIE  But I would like to see you again. DUFF  You would, huh? If I was you, baby – I wouldn’t go ’round stickin’ out my jugular vein. JOSIE  What d’you mean? DUFF  You almost got into trouble back there. JOSIE  (with a smile) I wouldn’t have let you. DUFF  Hell, baby, I’m not in the third grade. Well, look – what’ we gonna do next time – have a nice long chat in the parlor? JOSIE  No, on the porch. DUFF  Oh yeah, and then what? JOSIE  What?

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DUFF  Well, either we’re gonna hit the hay or get married. Now you don’t want to hit the hay, and I don’t want to get married. JOSIE  You have some very primitive ideas, don’t you? DUFF  (defensively) All right, so I’m primitive. So what d’you want with me? JOSIE  Look, Duff – most of the men I know – they’re kind of sad. When I met you the other day I had a feeling that you’re different. That’s why I went out with you. I thought we might have something to say to each other. DUFF  Hell, baby, I don’t know what to say. JOSIE  Good night, Duff. She gets out of the car and starts toward the house. He looks after her, then drives away. OPEN FIELD  The section hands are hunting rabbits, scaring them up out of the tall grass and then clubbing them with sticks that have a heavy bold fastened to the end. Jocko is fishing from a trestle. Pop fries skinned rabbit in a skillet. Duff is whittling. CLASSROOM  The grade school children, all black, are writing at their desks. The end-of-school bell rings and one of the boys jumps up. JOSIE  Are you finished, Jackie? BOY  Yes, Ma’am. JOSIE  Well, I’m not. Wait till class is dismissed.

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She walks over to close the window. In the yard below, Duff is sitting on one of the swings. Josie smiles and turns to the kids –  JOSIE  All right. Class dismissed. EXT. SCHOOLHOUSE  A bus crowded with noisy kids pulls away to reveal the yard. Duff and Josie are sitting on two swings side by side. DUFF  At first it was real strange. Hell, Japan is a long ways from Alabama. Really got under my skin, though. Almost didn’t come back. JOSIE  Why did you? DUFF  I don’t know. ’Guess I belong here more than there. JOSIE  ’Been up north? DUFF  Yeah. Knocked around for a couple of months after the Army. You been there? JOSIE  No. DUFF  Well, it ain’t that good up there neither. Might as well make it here. ’Course I ain’t really makin’ it now. He gets up and gives her swing a forceful shove. DUFF  Anyway, they can’t get to you if you keep movin’! Josie laughs. FRONT YARD, DAWSON HOUSE  It is raining. Duff and Josie dash up to the front door.

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DAWSON PAR LOR  Duff and Josie barge in out of the rain and find themselves face to face with Reverend Dawson and a middle-aged white man – Superintendent Johnson. JOSIE  Oh, I’m sorry. JOHNSON  Come on in, Josie. We’re all through. JOSIE  Daddy – this is Duff Anderson. R EVER END DAWSON  Hello. DUFF  How are you? R EVER END DAWSON  All right, son. JOSIE  This is Mr. Johnson, our school superintendent. JOHNSON  (with a friendly smile) How are you? JOSIE  I’ll be right back. She leaves. JOHNSON  So you’re courtin’ the preacher’s girl. Well, just watch your step, boy, or he’ll preach you right into hell. (to Reverend Dawson) I’m counting on you, Reverend. R EVER END DAWSON  I understand. JOHNSON  Wouldn’t do for one of your people to sue at a time like this. R EVER END DAWSON  I know. JOHNSON  (on his way out) I’ll talk to the Mayor.

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R EVER END DAWSON  That’ll make the folks very happy. Johnson leaves. Reverend Dawson sits down in a rocker. R EVER END DAWSON  It’s hard to know how to talk to the white folks these days. DUFF  Guess it’s never been easy. R EVER END DAWSON  It’s a changing time. Sit down, son. DUFF  Thank you. He sits down opposite Reverend Dawson. R EVER END DAWSON  Well, it looks like we’ll be getting our new school. DUFF  How come you all ain’t sendin’ them to the same school? R EVER END DAWSON  Well, you’ve got to go easy. We haven’t had any trouble in town for eight years, and we’re not going to have any now. DUFF  Can’t live without trouble, can you? (he sees he is on the wrong track) Nice place you got here. Real nice. R EVER END DAWSON  Yes, the Lord’s been pretty good to us. I guess you’re a church man, aren’t you? DUFF  I guess I ain’t. R EVER END DAWSON  Why? Don’t you believe in the Lord? DUFF  Aw, I do. But ’seems to me us colored folks do a whole lot of church-goin’. It’s the whites that need it real bad.

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R EVER END DAWSON  I think if you tried livin’ in a town like this, instead of running free and easy, you’d soon change your tune. DUFF  I doubt it. R EVER END DAWSON  I see. (rising) Well, I guess we don’t have much to say to each other. DUFF  I guess not. R EVER END DAWSON  And since we’re talking, my wife and I don’t want you hanging around our daughter. DUFF  Well, that figures. (he too stands up) Kind of fits in with everything else, don’t it? DAWSON PORCH  Duff comes out. Josie joins him a moment later. JOSIE  I’m sorry. DUFF  Ain’t your fault. JOSIE  That’s the way he is. DUFF  Yeah. It’s just like I figured. JOSIE  What do you mean? DUFF  Hell, I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’ been thinkin’. JOSIE  Look, Duff – if you’re free, I’m not working tomorrow. DUFF  Sorry, baby. I’m goin’ to Birmingham. JOSIE  Just for the day.

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DUFF  Goin’ to see my kid. JOSIE  I didn’t know you had one. DUFF  Yeah. Well, I do. JOSIE  Are you married? DUFF  No, I ain’t married. (leaving) Well, good-bye. COURTHOUSE SQUAR E (Mor ning sunshine)  A bus has pulled in. INT. BUS  Duff is making his way down the aisle. To his surprise, he comes upon Josie, who is sitting at a window with an empty seat next to her. DUFF  (with a grin) Well, what-do-you-know? JOSIE  Surprised? DUFF  No. Women’re always followin’ me ’round. JOSIE  I’m just going in to do my shopping. DUFF  Yeah, it’s just a coincidence. JOSIE  That’s right. DUFF  (moving on) I’ll see you later. JOSIE  Come here, Duff. No point running away from coincidence. He sits down next to her. DUFF  Baby, you must be crazy. The bus starts up.

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JOSIE  How old is your boy? DUFF  Four. JOSIE  What’s he like? DUFF  I ain’t seen him in a couple of years. ALLEY WAY, BIR MINGHA M  Duff is walking past crowded back-porches in a black section of town. Gospel music. He steps up onto one of the porches and knocks at the screen door. EFFIE’S PAR LOR  Through the screen door we see EFFIE SIMMS, a woman in her twenties. She is sitting on a chair and cradles a sleeping child. DUFF  ’You Effie Sims? EFFIE  (suspiciously) What d’you want? DUFF  Guess you must be lookin’ after my boy. I’m Duff Anderson. EFFIE  ’Bout time you showed. Door’s open. Duff enters. EFFIE  (calling) James Lee, you come in here and meet your daddy. DUFF  Where’s Wilma? EFFIE  She done moved to Detroit. DUFF  Ain’t she goin’ to take the boy? EFFIE  She got herself a husband now. They don’ want his ’round. And I tell you, man, I got no use for him neither. DUFF  I been sendin’ her money.

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EFFIE  Well, she never gave me none. Look, you better find him a place pretty quick. DUFF  Like where? EFFIE  I don’t know. He’s your boy. DUFF  I ain’t so sure of that. If I was, I’d feel different. Effie gives him a scornful look, puts down the child, and opens the curtain that leads into the bedroom. EFFIE  (sharply) James Lee – I said for you to come here. BEDROOM  Two children are playing on the floor. James Lee is on a Castro convertible. Duff appears beside Effie in the doorway. DUFF  How ’you been, boy? James Lee looks at him, scared and silent. EFFIE  Go on. Tell him. She returns to the parlor. DUFF  I got you something. He crouches down and hold out a toy. James Lee approaches, takes the toy, and withdraws. EFFIE’S PAR LOR  Effie is folding diapers. Duff comes out of the bedroom. EFFIE  ’Doctor says he could use some shots. DUFF  Yeah. Look, I’ll be sendin’ you the money from now on.

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EFFIE  Okay. DUFF  Make sure he gets those shots. He looks back at the boy in the bedroom. EFFIE  They say your dad’s ’round town. DUFF  ’That right? I thought he was up North. EFFIE  People seen him ’round. DUFF  Where’s he at? EFFIE  I don’t know. STR EET  Duff is walking through a black section of town. EXT. TENEMENT STAIRS  Duff climbs to the top of the rickety wooden steps. WILL ANDERSON’S ROOM  Duff’s father, big man in his fifties, is reclining on the bed. Duff appears in the open doorway. DUFF  ’You Will Anderson? WILL  Who’re you? DUFF  I’m Duff. WILL  (sitting up, with a faint grin) Wouldn’t have known you. DUFF  Wouldn’t have known you. WILL What’s on your mind?

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DUFF  Nothing. Heard you were in town. WILL  Wanted a look at your old man, huh? DUFF  Yeah, that’s right. Will gets up and crosses the room. WILL  How about a drink? DUFF  Okay. Will pours whiskey into two glasses. Duff sees that Will’s left sleeve hangs empty. DUFF  What happened? WILL  Workin’ a saw mill. (raising his glass) Here’s to. A woman in her late thirties (LEE) comes in with a shopping bag. WILL  Baby – want you to meet Duff. LEE  (flatly) Hi. WILL  He’s my son! She turns and looks at Duff with a glimmer of interest. LEE  Come and have some coffee. (sitting down) I’m Lee. Sit down. He joins her. LEE  Come on, Will. WILL  What’s the matter?! You mad at me?

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LEE  No. Why? WILL  (sitting down) Nothin’. (to Duff) She’s all right. Wouldn’t have made it without her. Christ – haven’t worked in eight months. Right now, I’m waitin’ for some insurance money. And man, when I get it, I got plans to make me some more. (he gets up restlessly) Let’s get out’a here. This place gives me the willies. (to Lee) You got some money? LEE  (she knows what’s coming) Let’s stay here, Will. WILL  (aggressively) What’s the matter?! It’s a celebration! BAR  Will, Lee, and Duff are standing at the bar. Will has been drinking. WILL  So what’s this about a woman? You got woman trouble? DUFF  I said, I come to town with a girl. WILL  Plannin’ on getting married? DUFF  No. WILL  ’Don’t sound so sure. DUFF  Well, matter of fact, I done a lot of bangin’ ’round. WILL  Yeah. That’s how me an’ your mother got started. I’m tellin’ you, boy, you ain’t got a chance without dough. They take it all away from you. He drains his glass and puts it down for Lee to refill. LEE  Pour your own trouble, Will. WILL  Your mother used to lay for her boss, boy. Did you know that?

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LEE  Shut up, Will. WILL  Okay, so what’s a girl supposed to do? Me not workin’ and her cleanin’ house for a white man. I’m tellin’ you, boy, keep away from marriage. Ya gotta stay light on your feet or you won’t make it. He puts his hand on Lee’s bare arm. WILL  Is she good in the hay? No point marrin’ her just to find out. Is there, baby? LEE  If you don’t quit it, Will, I’m leaving. WILL  You’re breaking my heart. (he grabs her neck and shakes her) Got to see a man about a dog. DANCE FLOOR  Duff and Lee are dancing. She looks at him with a touch of sympathy. LEE  Don’t let him get you, Duff. DUFF  How often does he get like that? LEE  Whenever he’s got an edge on. DUFF  How often is that? LEE  He’s been hitting it pretty hard. Got high blood pressure, too. I guess it’s hard on him, having you around. BAR  Will is back and drinking when Duff and Lee come off the dance floor. WILL  (aggressively) Well, what d’you think of her? Duff says nothing.

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WILL  I asked you somethin’, boy! DUFF  I heard you. WILL  Pretty good for a one-armed nigger, huh? DUFF  Great. WILL  What d’you want anyhow? What you come and bother me for? LEE  He’s your son. WILL  Okay, boy, beat it. DUFF  I got the point. He leaves money on the bar. LEE  Come back some other time, will you? DUFF  Yeah, sure. Good luck. DOWNTOWN STR EET (Night)  Duff is walking, lost in thought. INT. BUS DEPOT (Night)  Josie enters with her purchases. She joins Duff at the sandwich counter. JOSIE  Hi. DUFF  (relieved to see her) I thought you wasn’t comin’. She sits down. JOSIE  How did it go? DUFF  What?

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JOSIE  Your boy. DUFF  Okay, I guess. JOSIE  (to off-screen waitress) I’ll have some coffee, please. DUFF  You know, I been thinkin’ – how ’bout us getting’ married? Josie is stunned. JOSIE  (playing for time) What d’you mean? DUFF  Just what I said. Don’t look so scared. The waitress puts down a cup of coffee. JOSIE  Thank you. DUFF  How about it? JOSIE  What happened, Duff? DUFF  Look, baby – I don’t know ’bout you, but it’s the right thing for me. I just know it is. So, what d’you say? JOSIE  Don’t push me, Duff. DUFF  Yeah. Wouldn’t be no picnic for you. I ain’t exactly housebroken. JOSIE  What about that girl? DUFF  She don’t mean nothin’ to me. That’s all over. (after a moment) Hell, baby – I’m askin’ you to marry me. I guess you want a big scene, huh? JOSIE  No. But a small one.

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They look at each other. DUFF  It’s yes, huh? INT. BUNK CAR (Day)  Frankie is looking scornfully at Duff, who is lying on his bunk bed. FR ANKIE  I’ll be a monkey’s kid sister! What d’you want to do a thing like that for? JOCKO  ’Musta knocked her up. FR ANKIE  What’re you gonna get out of it, huh? DUFF  (with a smile) A whole lot, Frankie. FR ANKIE  (aggressively) Like what? DUFF  Like a home, for one thing. FR ANKIE  You gonna sit at home the rest of your life? Jesus! DUFF  Well, it’s better than windin’ up like a bum. FR ANKIE  (defensively) What ’you signifyin’? DUFF  I wasn’t thinking about you, Frankie. JOCKO  Ol’ Doris sure goin’ to miss you. FR ANKIE  Just give him a couple of months. A girl like that, she don’t know any tricks. JOCKO  You know what Doris told me? She say: That Duff’s a nice guy. Wouldn’t even charge him nothin’. FR ANKIE  I guess you’ll be quittin’ the railroad, huh, man?

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DUFF  That’s right. FR ANKIE  Man, you must be plumb outa your mind! You’ll be makin’ twen’y bucks a week, if you’re lucky. INT. MOVING CAR  Josie is next to Duff. They are driving past a row of small attached houses in the black section of town. JOSIE  Turn here. There it is! They stop in front of a house. It is barely larger than a shack. DILAPIDATED LIVING ROOM  Duff and Josie come in. The room is full of abandoned, broken furniture and the ceiling and wallpaper hang down in strips. JOSIE  I used to know them. They’ve gone North. DUFF  (with a laugh) I can see why. JOSIE  Well, what d’you think? DUFF  It’s okay with me, baby. How how’ you goin’ to like it? JOSIE  It’ll be fine when we get done with it. EXT. WINDOW OF LIVING ROOM  Duff is looking out through the broken pane of glass. DUFF  Who’s that? NEIGHBORING HOUSE, SEEN FROM WINDOW  A woman is putting laundry into a washing machine on the open porch. Her children are all around her and in the yard below. EXT. WINDOW  Josie has stopped next to Duff and looks out.

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JOSIE  That’s Bessie Hall. Barney works at the mill. DUFF  Yeah? Josie removes a shard of glass from the window; a larger piece falls out. DUFF  Hey, watch out! Guess you want a house full of pickaninnies too, huh? JOSIE  Don’t call them that. DUFF  That’s all right with me. Always liked kids. He moves off to the rear of the room. LIVING ROOM  Josie turns to him. JOSIE  What about your boy? DUFF  (defensively) What about him? JOSIE  He could live with us. DUFF  Let’ just see how the two of us make out first, huh? INT. CHURCH  Duff and Josie are getting married. Duff is waiting near the pulpit. The section hands are seated on one side of the aisle, Josie’s family and friends on the other. The gospel piano segues into the wedding march. Josie is coming down the aisle by herself. She joins Duff and they step forward to face Reverend Dawson. DUFF AND JOSIE’S BEDROOM (Ear ly mor ning) Josie lies in bed with closed eyes. She hears Duff move and turns to him. He is dressed for work. JOSIE  Good luck, baby.

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He sits down beside her for a moment. INT. MOVING CAR  Duff is in the rear seat with his new neighbor, Barney. Joe, a mill hand, sits next to the driver in front. He turns to Duff. JOE  Hard to get up in the morning, huh? DUFF  (with a grin) That’s right. How’ you doin’, Barney? BAR NEY  (not given to saying much) Okay. EXT. SMALL HOUSE  The car drives up and Joe leans out. JOE  Come on, Willie! Willie, a big man, has been fixing his front step. WILLIE  Just a minute, man. JOE  Come on – we’re late! WILLIE  (taking his time) Yazzuh, Boss – ah’s comin’ as fast as ah can. He picks up his lunch box and shuffles toward the car, Stepin’ Fetchit style. JOE  (laughing) Get in the car, man! INT. CAR  Willie climbs in next to Duff. WILLIE  How’ you doing, man? DUFF  Okay. (to the driver) Let’s go. WILLIE  That’s right, Jethro – take us to the plant. And hurry, boy – ah’s got a heavy day. The driver backs up fast, jerking the passengers forward.

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WILLIE  Ah tells you, man – you give these niggers a machine and they go stark-ravin’ wild! Laughter. INT. MILL ENTR ANCE  Duff is among the mill hands punching in on the time clock. VOICE OF FOR EMAN  (off screen) You new here? DUFF  That’s right. MILL YARD  Duff and two other men are working on top of a pile of lumber. A white supervisor on a forklift has been watching them. FOR EMAN  (calling) Hey, Jack! Duff doesn’t respond. FOR EMAN  Hey, boy – I’m talkin’ to you. DUFF  (after a moment) Name’s Duff. FOR EMAN  How ’you doing? DUFF  Okay. FOR EMAN  (genially) Looks like you’re doin’ a good job. DUFF  Thanks. FOR EMAN  Don’t say much, do you? DUFF  Guess I don’t.

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FOR EMAN  Just so you do your work. EXT. MILL SHED  The mill hands are on their lunch break. The only white man among them is looking at Duff with a grin. WHITE  Hell, I bet those black girls really go for you, huh? That’s the best-lookin’ colored girl in town. Duff is eating and says nothing. WHITE  What’s the matter? Still on your honeymoon, huh? Just like you, Barney. ’Been on your honeymoon for twen’y years, huh? BAR NEY  (cautiously) Yeah. The white mill hand helps himself to a piece of Barney’s pie. WHITE  How many kids you got now, Barney? BAR NEY  Four. WHITE  (eating the pie) Hmmm – she can cook, too. Man, it’s no wonder you ’been draggin’ your tail on the job. You ’been doin’ your best work at home. He notices that Duff’s face is set. WHITE  (aggressively) What’s the matter, boy? Never smile? DUFF  I’ll smile when it’s funny. WHITE  So it wasn’t funny, huh? Well, I thought it was. What d’you say, Barney? Wasn’t it funny? BAR NEY  Yeah, it was funny.

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WHITE  Sure. (to the others) What d’you say, boys? Wasn’t it funny? MILL HANDS  Yeah. Sure. WHITE  (to Duff) Trouble with you, boy, you ain’t got no sense of humor. Ought to smile more. DUFF  I know. WHITE  You’ new here, man! (he gets up to leave) See you, boys. JOE  (to Duff after a moment) You know, man, that guy was trying to friendly. DUFF  That ain’t my idea of friendliness. BAR NEY  You got to watch yourself pretty close. WILLIE  Yeah, you want to get along, act the nigger. DUFF  Like hell. You know, if you fellows stuck together ’stead of letting them walk all over you, they might not try it. JOE  Like hell they wouldn’t. WILLIE  They been doin’ it all my life. DUFF  Maybe it’s time you stopped letting them. Jesse, a heavy-set man who has been silent till now, stands up and looks at Duff. JESSE  Man, you sound like a trouble man. EXT. DUFF AND JOSIE’S HOUSE (Dusk)  The lights are on inside.

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DUFF AND JOSIE’S KITCHEN  Duff is finishing is supper at the table. Josie is at the stove pouring coffee. She puts a piece of pie in front of him. He drinks his Coke out of the bottle. JOSIE  Use the glass, honey. That’s what it’s for. DUFF  (with a grin) Is that so? JOSIE  Yeah, that’s so. She returns to the stove. Duff picks up the pie and sniffs it suspiciously. JOSIE  What’s wrong? DUFF  Smells like something crawled in there and died. JOSIE  (innocently) Oh really? I thought it was pretty good. DUFF  Come here, baby. He gets her to sit on his lap. DUFF  Everything you cook is good. JOSIE  Duff – you know those women you used to know  –  He forks a bite of pie into her mouth. DUFF  What about them? JOSIE  (her mouth is full) Am I as good as they? DUFF  (drinking) Hmmm – good coffee. JOSIE  You didn’t answer my question.

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DUFF  Baby, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. JOSIE  You still didn’t answer my question. DUFF  Well, if you don’t know I can’t help you. She elbows him in the stomach. He laughs. BACKYARD (Night)  Duff is helping Josie take in the wash. Music from Barney’s house. JOSIE  You know how to box? DUFF  Uh-huh. Why? JOSIE  My kids want me to teach them. DUFF  Okay. Come on. Put ’em up! She assumes the posture of a boxer. Duff laughs and adjusts her hands. DUFF  Like so. There you go. Okay, hit me! JOSIE  I don’t want to hurt you. DUFF  Go on – hit me! She does. DUFF  Ooh! My, oh my! They spar – briefly in sync with the music. She goes after him, flailing her arms. The music is turned off abruptly and we hear Bessie’s raised voice. She is out on the porch of her house, yelling at Barney.

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BESSIE  Just leave me alone! You can sit out here all night. I don’t care what you do! You’re no good around the house anyway. Barney remains silent. Duff and Josie exchange a look. DUFF AND JOSIE’S BEDROOM (Night) They are in bed. DUFF  (gravely) It sure scares you, a guy like that – settin’ out on his porch, doin’ nothin’. I seen hundreds of them – all my life. JOSIE  My father’s never done a thing for any of them. He touches her face. JOSIE  I’m very happy, Duff. How about you? He smiles. Josie gets up and slips out of her nightgown. Her body merges with the darkness. DUFF AND JOSIE’S LIVING ROOM (Evening)  The place has been painted and simply furnished. Josie has made dinner for the section hands. Pop is the only one who is still eating. FR ANKIE  You sure done a great job, Mrs. Anderson. JOSIE  Thanks, but you haven’t eaten very much. How about it, Frankie? I bet you could eat some more. FR ANKIE  No, thanks. R IDDICK  (to Duff) How’s that job comin’?

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DUFF  Well, it ain’t the railroad. Those guys are scared. Guess they’ve never known nothin’ but takin’ it. JOCKO  (with an edge) They all got families to support. DUFF  (good-naturedly) Yeah. That’s right, Jocko. (to the others) Those white guys sure shoot up at you like a yeast cake if you just cock an eye at them. JOCKO  (sarcastically) I guess you’ll be makin’ some changes ’round here. DUFF  (with a grin) What’s eatin’ you, Jocko? JOCKO  Nothin’. I just figure you were the right man for the job. JOSIE  (changing the subject) I guess you’ll all keep workin’ together, won’t you? FR ANKIE  Heck, no. They’re shippin’ us all over the map. JOSIE  That’s too bad. R IDDICK  If you wan’ ’em, there’s some expert dishwashers here. JOSIE  No, thanks. My kitchen’s too small. Riddick gets up. R IDDICK  Okay, fellows – let’s give the folks some privacy. DOORWAY  The men, on their way out, shake hands with Duff. DUFF  Good-bye, Frankie. FR ANKIE  ’Got a good thing, man.

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POP  See ya. DUFF  Take it easy, Pop. (shaking Riddick’s hand) ’See you before you take off. JOCKO  ’See ya. DUFF  ’Bye, Jocko. BATHROOM (Night)  Duff is washing his face at the sink. Josie comes up behind him. She is in her nightgown. JOSIE  Duff. He turns to her. Instead of speaking, she turns her back to him. JOSIE  My back itches. He scratches her back. JOSIE  How would you like to have a baby, Duff? DUFF  Huh? JOSIE  Don’t look so scared. DUFF  You jivin’ me? JOSIE  Well, I haven’t come around. Duff is taken aback. DUFF  Ain’t that something?! (recovering) That’s just fine, baby. JOSIE  We’ll be all right.

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He kisses her and sits down on the rim of the bathtub. DUFF  Man, we sure hit the jackpot fast around here. JOSIE  What about your boy? DUFF  How come you keep askin’? JOSIE  I keep thinking about him. DUFF  Well, he ain’t mine, so skip it. She gargles. Duff moves over to her with a grin and puts his arms around her –  DUFF  Baby, we’re goin’ to put a whole lot of little kids into this world. Hell, we’ll swamp ’em. LOCK ER ROOM, MILL  The men are done for the day. Duff is putting on his shirt. Willie is under the shower. DUFF  Hell, if they can do it in Birmingham – and that’s a mean town, we oughta do something here. Willie says nothing. His eyes are on a white supervisor, who has stopped in the doorway. SUPERVISOR  ’You Duff Anderson? DUFF  Okay. SUPERVISOR  Want to talk to you. DUFF  Okay. SUPERVISOR  I hear you’re tryin’ to organize this place!

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DUFF  I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. SUPERVISOR  That’s no way to talk, boy. Now we had one of them union men ’round here coupla years ago. Stirred up a lot of trouble. They’re always after you colored boys. DUFF  I still don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. SUPERVISOR  You a union man? DUFF  Used to be. On the railroad. SUPERVISOR  Uh-huh. Well, this ain’t the railroad. Now what’s all this talk about stickin’ together? DUFF  Well, what d’you know?! He looks over at the other men. They avoid his eyes. SUPERVISOR  Look, boy, we got a smooth operation here, and I aim to keep it that way. Now I got an idea you’re plannin’ trouble. DUFF  No. You got the wrong idea. SUPERVISOR  All right, then. All I want you to do is tell these boys here you didn’t mean what you said about stickin’ together an’ all. Duff says nothing. The mill hands watch him silently. SUPERVISOR  Want to keep your job, boy? DUFF  What d’you think? SUPERVISOR  Then do like I said. (to the men) Men – this boy here’s got something to tell you-all. (to Duff) Well, how about it?

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Duff looks at the supervisor in silence, fully aware that he about to be fired. He turns and opens his locker. SUPERVISOR  Boy, you’re actin’ like a nigger with no sense. All right, go down’ the office and get your pay. Tell them you’re through. DUFF’S CAR  He is driving past Josie’s school and slows down. The kids are out in the yard but Josie is not in sight. He accelerates, his face set. DUFF AND JOSIE’S BEDROOM (Night)  Josie is correcting papers on the bed. Duff is at the mantel, playing with a cat. He puts a small box over its head. The cat cries out and backs up clumsily, trying to free itself. JOSIE  Don’t, Duff. DUFF  Yeah. He sits down. Josie comes over and sits on the arm of the chair. DUFF  I’m jumpy, that’s all. She runs her hand through his hair. JOSIE  Well, you’ve had quite a day. He brushes her off: DUFF  I don’t like bein’ mothered. When she touches him again, he jumps up. DUFF  Jesus, baby – leave me along, will ya? He flings himself down on the bed. JOSIE  (sitting down beside him) Don’t deny me, Duff.

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DUFF  Hell, baby – I met this beautify chick and she’s just dyin’ for me, okay? She takes him by the shoulders and shakes him. JOSIE  Don’t be silly. Duff laughs. DUFF  Yeah. But just how’re we goin’ to make out? I got to get me a job. JOSIE  You will. DUFF  Pay is so damn low. I don’t want my kids to grow up like Barney’s. JOSIE  They won’t. DUFF  I’m telling you, baby, maybe we better get out of here. JOSIE  (gravely) We can always do that, Duff. DUFF  Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m really thinkin’ about it. Anyway, don’t want those white guys laughin’ up their sleeve at me when they see me pull out. EXT. HIRING SHED, MILL YAR D.  Duff waits outside the open window, while the white man in the shed checks his job application. WHITE  Yeah, we can use you. Ever work a saw mill? DUFF  Yeah. WHITE  Where was that?

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DUFF  (after a moment’s hesitation) Walker and Williams. WHITE  What did you say your name is? DUFF  Anderson. The man checks for Duff’s name on a list. WHITE  (turning to Duff) Sorry, boy, there ain’t nothin’ here. INT. R ESTAUR ANT  Duff is sitting at the lunch counter. Joe, the mill hand, comes in. JOE  (to the waitress) Hello, Frances. He sits down next to Duff. JOE  How ’you doing’ man? DUFF  (non-committal) Okay. JOE  (to Frances) Cup of coffee. (to Duff) I ’been meanin’ to talk to you. DUFF  Oh yeah? JOE  You know, over at the mill, there’s just one guy that talked. It’s kinda late to say it, but we shoulda acted different. The waitress brings his coffee. JOE  Been over to the other mill? DUFF  Yeah, I been there. JOE  It’s just that we’re not used to seein’ anyone stand up ’round here. Kinda took us by surprise.

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DUFF  Oh yeah? That’s good. INT. POOL HALL  Duff is at the bar. BARTENDER  Well, if you tried the mills, there ain’t no other industry ’round here. DUFF  How ’bout that furniture plant? BARTENDER  (with a laugh) Man, the darkest thing they got in there is Coca-Cola. DUFF  Yeah. BARTENDER  Now, if you want to work like a real nigger, you can always go out and chop cotton. DUFF  (grimly) They done that too long in my family. BARTENDER  They pay you three bucks a day an’ all the cotton you can eat. Duff laughs. HOTEL LOBBY  Duff faces the white manager, who is behind the registration desk. MANAGER  Yeah, I might have something for you, if you want to put on a uniform. Duff looks over at the one black man in the lobby – a uniformed bellhop emptying ashtrays. DUFF  What’s the pay? MANAGER  Pay’s ten dollars a week, plus tips and lunch.

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DUFF  I see. Ain’t for me, thanks. INT. GENER AL STOR E  The white proprietor has rung up the order for an elderly black woman. PROPR IETOR  Now what about soap? WOMAN  I got enough. PROPR IETOR  (insisting) I got a good buy on soap. You go on over there an’ take a look! (urging her on) Right over there. The woman goes over to look at the soap. The proprietor turns to Duff. PROPR IETOR  Yes? DUFF  I’m lookin’ for work. PROPR IETOR  I got a boy. Thanks. INT. DUFF’S CAR.  He is driving through town at a fast clip. The car rattles. INT. BEAUTY PAR LOR  The staff and clientele are black. Duff enters and sits down close to Josie, who is having her hair done. JOSIE  Hi. DUFF  Don’t ask, baby – huh! (lowering his voice) How much money you got with you? JOSIE  About ten dollars. DUFF  Water pump’s busted. I don’t know if it’s worth fixin’, but I need that car.

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JOSIE  You can have what I’ve got. It’s right there. Duff opens her pocketbook, embarrassed by the women watching him. FLAT BED TRUCK  It rattles over a country road between cotton fields. Duff stands among the field hands on the open flatbed. EXT. COTTON GIN  The white foreman is up on the loading platform. He addresses a group of field hands looking for work. FOR EMAN  Startin’ tomorrow mornin’, we got work for fifteen hands. All we’re gonna pay is two-fifty a day. Can’t pay you three ’cause ain’t gonna be much of a crop this year. Now you all who want to work, step up and we’ll take your name. Duff is among the few who leave. The others surge closer to the platform, ready to work for any wage. DUFF AND JOSIE’S PORCH (Night)  Josie is sewing on the porch. Duff is in the yard a few feet away, using the back of an axe to hammer loose nails into an old chair. JOSIE  It’s not as hard on a girl. They’re not afraid of us. Duff says nothing. JOSIE  You know – we do have enough money. Especially now. DUFF  (grimly) Sure, baby. ’Fact, I don’t ever have to work no more. When that baby comes, I can just stay home and send you back to school. How about that? JOSIE  I’m trying to help, Duff. DUFF  Yeah!

250

Screenplay

JOSIE  (after a moment) I could work even after the baby comes. A few hours a week, anyway. DUFF  What the hell could you do? JOSIE  Day work. DUFF  ’You kiddin’? You ain’t goin’ to no white home. I seen the way they look at you when you go down the street. He jumps up and r aises the a xe –  DUFF  No point fixin’ it! JOSIE  (frightened) What’re you going to do? He smashes the axe into the chair. JOSIE  (jumping up) Don’t jo that! DUFF  Watch out! He smashes the chair to pieces. DUFF  (throwing down the axe) Good kindlin’! He turns to Josie. She is looking at him, deeply upset. DUFF  What’s bitin’ you now?! She turns away. He jumps up onto the porch and grabs her. DUFF  You heard me! JOSIE  I can’t stand to see you like that. I know you can’t help it. DUFF  (darkly) Stop bein’ so damn understandin’.

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DUFF AND JOSIE’S LIVING ROOM (Day)  Duff is on the sofa, looking up at Reverend Dawson. R EVER END DAWSON  I know just how you feel, son. But believe me, you’re going about it the wrong way. DUFF  Don’t look like there’s a right way. R EVER END DAWSON  Well, you have to be reasonable. Now they say you’re a troublemaker. That’s no good. Use a little psychology. Make ’em think you’re going along – and get what you want. DUFF  It ain’t in me. R EVER END DAWSON  You’ll be in trouble, son. (after a moment) Now just how do you intend to support your family? DUFF  I’ll rob a bank. R EVER END DAWSON  Don’t you get smart with me, boy. We hear a dish break. KITCHEN  Josie is on the floor, picking up pieces of broken glass. LIVING ROOM R EVER END DAWSON  Maybe you ought to move. You’d be a lot better off in the North. DUFF  SO I been told. R EVER END DAWSON  It’s for your own good.

252

Screenplay

DUFF  Oh yeah? (he gets up) Seems to me, Reverend, you’ more concerned ’bout your good. Guess it looks kind ’a bad, havin’ me for a son-in-law. R EVER END DAWSON  You can be cocky now, boy. But you won’t make it. You won’t last. I just feel sorry for Josie. I know it wouldn’t work out. DUFF  Well, at least she ain’t married to no white man’s nigger! You been stoopin’ so long, Reverend, you don’t even know how to stand straight no more. You’ just half a man! KITCHEN  Josie has cut her finger on the glass. She is weeping silently. LIVING ROOM  Reverend Dawson turns to leave. His sense of calm superiority is shattered. R EVER END DAWSON  (at the door) Maybe I could talk to Bud Ellis. He might have a job for you at his filling station. DUFF  Oh yeah? R EVER END DAWSON  I’ll be seeing you. Josie has come into the room. JOSIE  (gravely) ’Bye, Dad. DUFF AND JOSIE’S BEDROOM (Night)  Duff watches Josie. She is sitting at her dressing table. DUFF  How come you don’t hate their guts? JOSIE  I don’t know. I guess I’m not afraid of them. DUFF  You were plenty scared that night in the car.

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JOSIE  Just of getting hurt. They can’t touch me inside. DUFF  Like hell they can’t. (he gets up) They can reach right in with their damn white hands and turn you off and on. JOSIE  Not if you see them for what they are, Duff. DUFF  (exploding) Jesus, baby, you’re so full of talk! Well, you ain’t never really been a nigger, have you – livin’ like that in your father’s house! So just shut your mouth. EXT. GAS STATION (Night)  Duff finishes pumping gas into Joe’s car. DUFF  That’s two bucks, Joe. JOE  (paying) Why don’t you come over for a beer when you get through? DUFF  Okay, I will. Brad Ellis, the white owner of the service station, comes out of his office. ELLIS  Hey, Duff! Run the truck down Holly Road. There’s a guy in the ditch. CAB OF TOW TRUCK (Night)  Duff is driving along a wooded country road. Shreds of fog drift across the headlights. A ditched car comes into view, its front end crushed against a tree. A tubby white man stands beside it, waving to Duff with a flashlight. Duff passes him and backs up to the car. COUNTRY ROAD  The owner comes toward him eagerly. OWNER  Sure glad to see you, boy.

254

Screenplay

Duff gets out of the tow truck to inspect the damaged car. The owner follows him, nervous and garrulous. OWNER  Guess I was kinda lucky, huh? My wife’s going to give me hell. Duff lowers the hoist on the truck. OWNER  (anxiously) How you doin’, boy? DUFF  Okay. He gets under the car to attach the chain. OWNER  Want me to hold the light for you? DUFF  No, thanks. OWNER  Just tryin’ to be helpful. He continues talking, though Duff can’t hear him. OWNER  Most folks around here got no use for nigrahs. Got to understand them, that’s all. How you doin’, boy? DUFF  (emerging from under the car) Okay. The owner tests the rig with his foot. OWNER  Seems a little loose! DUFF  (with a grin) She’ll do. He starts raising the car. OWNER  She ain’t comin’ up even!

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Duff ignores him. The chain slips and the car drops to the ground with a bang. OWNER  (jumping back) Jesus, I told you to watch it! DUFF  Sorry. He gets back under the car. OWNER  That’s the trouble with you boys! Don’t listen when a man tells you something. DUFF  She don’t look no worse to me. OWNER  Don’t do her no good to banged like that. DUFF  (under the car) Don’t do her no good to go into a tree. OWNER  (enraged) What did you say, boy?! DUFF  I said, she’s in great shape. OWNER  I heard you! Now ’stead of bein’ smart, you just get that car out of here. GAS STATION (Night)  Duff is changing a tire outside the repair bay. A car shoots out of the dark with its horn blaring, and screeches to a stop at the pump. Brad Ellis steps up to the driver. ELLIS  Can I help you? The driver is the white mill hand who gave Duff a hard time at the mill. DR IVER  (indicating Duff) Like some service from that boy there. Like the way he takes care of us.

256

Screenplay

ELLIS  Okay Duff has come over. He is aware of impending trouble. One of the men in the car is the owner of the ditched vehicle. DUFF  Fill her up? DR IVER  No, boy. Thirty-eight cents worth of gas. And watch you don’t make it thirty-nine. Duff starts the pump. DR IVER  Didn’t hear you say “Yessir!” Don’t they say “Yessir” where you come from? Duff finishes pumping and puts the nozzle back onto the pump. DR IVER  Boy – you hear me?! DUFF  That’ll be thirty-eight cents. DR IVER  Goddamnit, nigger – you must think you’re white! Who d’you think you are – king of Harlem. SECOND WHITE  How ’bout this windshield, boy? Like a little service. Duff takes a moment before moving to the windshield and wiping it. The men inside the car watch him through the glass. THIR D WHITE  Hell, they’re getting too big for their britches. SECOND WHITE  Yeah, his wife’s the same way, struttin’ through town like she owns the place – shakin’ that little rear end. THIR D WHITE  It’s all that education they’re getting.

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DR IVER  Real cool, ain’t he! Just like we’re not here. Duff moves over to the driver. DUFF  That’ll be thirty-eight cents. DR IVER  You in a big hurry, boy? SECOND WHITE  Yeah, he’s tryin’ to get home! DR IVER  Bet she’s pretty hot, huh? DUFF  (very tense) You watch your mouth, man! The driver has finally found a way of getting to Duff and a grin spreads over his face. DR IVER  I bet she’s a sly little nigger, that girl. Wouldn’t mind a piece of her myself! DUFF  All right, you get out of here, man! DR IVER  (exploding) Who’re you tellin’ to get, boy?! You watch it or there’ll be some dyin’ done ’round here! DUFF  That dyin’s gonna be done two ways. He steps away from the car, a hand on the rear pocket where he keeps his knife. In the backseat, the owner of the ditched car looks nervous. OWNER  Let’s go, Al. He ain’t worth it. DR IVER  (turning on him) Now you stay out of it! Brad Ellis has come over.

258

Screenplay

ELLIS  What’s goin’ on? DR IVER  You better get rid of this white-eyed nigger! ELLIS  (to Duff) What happened? DR IVER  Never mind! You keep him workin’ here and this place won’t be around. And I ain’t kiddin’! He guns the engine and shoots out of the service station in a cloud of dust. Duff looks at Ellis, whose next move is predictable, and leaves the frame to run a water hose over the back of his neck. Ellis stops next to him. ELLIS  Guess we got trouble. DUFF  (blowing up) You ain’t got none, Mister! ELLIS  I’m sorry, Duff. DUFF  (tossing down the hose) Don’t tell me. I know. DUFF AND JOSIE’S LIVING ROOM (Night)  Josie comes out of the bedroom in her nightgown. She has been waiting up. JOSIE  I called the gas station. I’ve been worried. Duff slumps down on the sofa, utterly discouraged. DUFF  Hell, if they don’t blow up his place, they’ll get him some other way. Don’t make no difference no-how. JOSIE  (anxiously) What d’you mean? DUFF  Nothin’. Quit lookin’ at me like that!

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He gets up. JOSIE  (approaching him) Duff, I love you. DUFF  Well, that don’t do me one bit of good! She touches him. JOSIE  Come on, Duff – let’s go to bed. He gives her a sudden, violent shove. It sends her sprawling to the floor. She picks herself up, weeping. DUFF  I never should have married you in the first place. He stares at her. DUFF  Ain’t you goin’ to say something? JOSIE  There’s nothing to say. DUFF  Well, that’ll be the first time. He leaves the room. DUFF AND JOSIE’S BEDROOM (Night)  Duff is packing his things. Josie is on the bed. JOSIE  Where’re you going to go? DUFF  When I get set, I’ll send for you. JOSIE  I don’t think that’ll happen. DUFF  You’ll be better off without me. I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynchin’. Maybe they don’t use a knife on you, but they got other ways.

260

Screenplay

JOSIE  You’re not a man because of your job, Duff. DUFF  You don’ know nothin’ ’bout it, baby. Nothin’! And don’t kid yourself – you did your bit. He closes his bag. DUFF  Okay. JOSIE  Duff –  DUFF  (at the door) Like I said, baby – I’ll write you. INT. DUFF’S CAR (Dawn)  He is driving across a bridge into Birmingham. DOWNTOWN STR EET  Duff stands on a deserted corner. EXT. TENEMENT STAIRS  Duff climbs up to Will Anderson’s room. WILL’S ROOM  Will is sitting at the table in a drunken stupor. There is a knock at the door. WILL  Who is it? LEE  It’s your son. Duff enters. WILL  My son? I ain’t got no son. You Duff? DUFF  That’s right. WILL  Beat it! He gets up and staggers toward Duff.

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DUFF  Take it easy, Pop. WILL  What’s the matter? Don’t smell so good, huh? Must’a broken some records. He pushes Duff away and pours himself a glass of whiskey. His hands are shaking. DUFF  (trying to restrain him) Come on, Pop. LEE  Nothing you can do. Been like this for days. WILL  Got no use for nobody. He raises the glass to his mouth, but drops it and puts his hand on the back of his head. DUFF  What is it? What’s the matter? Lee grabs Will and pushes him onto the bed. LEE  (at the end of her rope) Now you lay down and get some sleep! Will grabs her blindly and pulls her down onto the bed. LEE  (freeing herself, furious) You let go! She starts picking up the broken glass. Will sits up again. He is dazed. LEE  Now you stay put! WILL  (leaving the bed) I ain’t drunk, honey. He sits down at the table and touches the back of his head. WILL  Got a thick feelin’ here.

262

Screenplay

LEE  What’s the matter now? WILL  Better now. (closing his eyes) Where ’you at? LEE  (concerned) Right here. She puts her hand on his forehead. WILL  Couldn’t get the words out before. DUFF  Better get him to a hospital. WILL  Didn’t I tell you to beat it – huh? LEE  (taking Will’s arm) Let’s go. WILL  Anything you say, baby. With Duff’s help, Lee raises Will out of the chair. EXT. TENEMENT, R AIN  Duff has helped Lee get Will into the backseat of his car. Through the window we see him grope blindly for Lee’s breast. INT. MOVING CAR  Duff, in the driver’s seat, is lost in thought. LEE  (off-screen) Duff. Duff turns to her. Will’s head is in her lap. LEE  He stopped breathin’. Duff stops the car.

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INT. FUNER AL PAR LOR  The undertaker sits down behind his desk. He lays out Will’s watch and few other belongings for Duff and Lee, who are standing in front of him. UNDERTAKER  We thought you might want these. DUFF  Thanks. UNDERTAKER  Would you like me to say anything tomorrow? DUFF  Guess so. UNDERTAKER  Have anything in mind? DUFF  No. What you usually say, I guess. UNDERTAKER  Where was your father born? DUFF  I don’t know. He looks at Lee. She shakes her head. UNDERTAKER  His profession? DUFF  Well, he worked around. UNDERTAKER  And his age? DUFF  I don’t know. Forty-eight, I guess. UNDERTAKER  Any other family? DUFF  No. Just me. (he includes Lee) Me an’ her. UNDERTAKER  Well, I guess that’s all till tomorrow.

264

Screenplay

DUFF  Okay, thanks very much. UR BAN CEMETERY, BIR MINGHA M  The mechanical arm of a backhoe opens up a new grave. Duff and Lee walk away from the burial site. The camera moves with them. LEE  What’re you going to do? Duff says nothing. LEE  Want to come up to the house? You can stay there till you get on your feet. There’s no point paying a hotel. DUFF  No thanks, Lee. LEE  It’s just that I hate empty rooms. DUFF  Sure. LEE  Well, what’re you going to do? DUFF  I guess I’ll make me some trouble in town. LEE  Going back, huh? DUFF  That’s right. LEE  They’ll run you out. DUFF  No, they won’t. LEE  How’ you gonna live? DUFF  I can always chop cotton if I have to. (he stops) If you want a ride, I’ll take you home.

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LEE  No, thanks. I’ll take the bus. DUFF  Okay. LEE  Don’t be too hard on him. DUFF  Hell, I’m just like him. LEE  I know he wasn’t much of a father. DUFF  Who is?! LEE  Good-bye, Duff. She walks away. BIR MINGHA M ALLEY WAY (Night)  From the interior of Duff’s car we see Duff come out of Effie Simms’ house, carrying James Lee through the rain. He deposits the scared-looking boy in the front seat and gets in on the driver’s side. James Lee shrinks as far away from Duff as the seat allows. DUFF  (with a kindly grin) That window’s broke, boy. You stay over there, you’re gonna get awful wet. INT. MOVING CAR (Dawn)  The sun is coming up through the trees. James Lee is asleep on the front seat. DUFF AND JOSIE’S LIVING ROOM  Duff brings in the sleeping boy and puts him down on the sofa. Then he leaves to get his belongings. Josie has woken up and comes in from the bedroom in her nightgown. She sees James Lee and leans over him. JOSIE  (softly) Hi. James Lee opens his eyes.

266

Screenplay

Josie hears Duff enter and turns to him. They come together and hold each other for a long moment. DUFF  Ain’t gonna be easy, baby – but it’s gonna be all right. Josie is weeping. DUFF  Baby, I feel so free inside.

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

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NOTHING BUT A MAN

CAST

DUFF ANDERSON

IVAN diXON

Jos I £ LEE/. WILL ANDERSON DRiVER FRANK re JOCKO REVEREND DAWSON EFFIE SIMMS DOR is CAR OWNER POP RIDOICK

.,. ABBEYLINCOLN GLORIA FOSTER JULIUS HARRIS MART IN PR IEST LEONARD PARKER YAPHET KOTTO STANLEY GREENE HELEN LOUNCK HELENE ARRINDELL WALTER WILSON MILTONWILLIAMS HELVIN STEWART

PRODUCED BY

ROBERT YOUNG, MICHAEL ROEMER, ROBERT RUBIN

DIRECTED ev

MICHAEL ROEMER

SCREENPLAY BY

MICHAEL ROEMER AND ROBERT YOUNG

PHOTOGRAPHY

ROBERT YOUNG

EDiTOR

LUKE BENNETT

SOUND

ROBERT RUBIN

A

CINEMA

V

PRESENTATION

RUNNING TIME: 92 MINUTES WARNING: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

269

270

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

DUFF ANDERSON (IVAN QIXQN) is A NEGRO WORKS* ON THE RAILROAD IN A SMALL SOUTHERN TOWN.

H£ HAS NO ROOTS, NO R E S P O N S I B I L I T I E S ,

THEN HE MEETS

AN A T T R A C T I V E SCHOOL TEACHER, J O S I E (ABBEY LINCOLN ) AT A CHURCH SOCIAL,

THE NEGRO CHURCH OF WHICH HER FATHER is MINISTER. THE WORLDS THEY LIVE I K A R E V E R Y D I F F E R E N T , A N D H E R FATHER I S A G A I N S T , I T , B U T S H E FALLS I N L O V E W I T H H I M A N D HE, ALMOST U N W I L L I N G L Y , FALLS I N L O V E W I T H HER.

HE IS

U N A B L E TO ACCEPT THE R E S P O N S t B l L \ T Y OF THE R E L A T I O N S H I P U N T I L ONE DAY WHEN HE TAKES A BUS T R I P TO A N E A R B Y TOWN, W I T H J O S I E A C C O M P A N Y I N G H I M . ONCE THERE, THEY GO T H E I R SEPARATE WAYS, HE TO V I S I T HIS FATHER, W l L L

{JULIUS HARRIS), FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS. HE FINOS H I S FATHER S I C K , A L C O H O L I C , R E B E L L I O U S A G A I N S T H I M A N D E V E R Y O N E , A N D ONLY STILL S U R V I V I N G B E C A U S E OF THE D E V O T I O N OF THE S T R O N G W O M A N , LEE (GLORIA FOSTER) WHO L I V E S W I T H H I M *

DUFF ALSO V I S I T S A L I T T L E BOY, H I S S O N O U T O F

WEDLOCK, WHO HAS BEEN DESERTED BY H I S MOTHER A N D LEFT W t T H A N O T H E R WOMAN WHO IS R E L U C T A N T L Y C A R I N G FOR H I M . FRIGHTENED.

THE C H I L D IS LONELY, DISTRUSTFUL,

DUFF THEN R E T U R N S TO MEET J O S I E AT THE BUS STATION TO R E T U R N

HOME, A N D H E PROPOSES M A R R I A G E .

THEY MARRY, AND ALTHOUGH Joste WANTS TO BRING HIS CHILD TO LIVE WITH THEM, DUFF ISN'T READY TO oo so, HE NOW TRIES A STEADY JOB IN A FACTORY, 8UT HE FINDS THAT IT IS A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD FROM THE ONE HE LEFT, HERE THE NEGROES ARE SUBSERVIENT AND SUBMISSIVE BEFORE THE W H I T E PEOPLE.

ALL THEY W A N T tS TO K E E P THE PEACE, BUT HE C A N N O T BE T H I S

(more) WARNING: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

WAY.

271

He STANDS UP TO THE WHITE MEN WHEN PROVOKED, BUT HE STANDS ALONE.

NONE OF H I S CO-WORKERS WtUL COME TO HIS A I D AND HE IS FORCED TO LEAVE.

IT IS UNBELIEVABLE TO HIM THAT THESE MEN CAN LOSE THEIR S£L^-RESPECT THIS WAY; HE CANNOT ACCEPT THIS FOR HIMSELF*

HE TRIES TO GET OTHER WORK BUT

THE WORD HAS BEEN SPREAD THAT HE I S A TROUBLEMAKER. FINALLY HE GETS WORK AT A F I L L I N G S T A T I O N W I T H THE HELP OF H I S FATHER-IN-LAW.

BUT HERE, TOO,

HE R U N S I N T O THE SAME K I N D OF T R O U B L E . NOW H£ FEELS HE tS C O M P L E T E L Y A L O N E - HIS FATHER-!M-LAW HAS A L W A Y S Y I E L D E D , A N D W I L L 00 A N Y T H I N G TO A V O I D TROUBLE.

JoSlE, HE SAYS, HAS NEVER

R E A L L Y K N O W N WHAT IT M E A N S TO 8E A N E G R O ; SHE HAS N E V E R H A D TO L I V E L I K E

ONE, THESE ts NOWHERE FOR HIM TO TURN*

He ts ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS EVEN

H I S P R E G N A N T W t F E , AND NOW HE MUST ESCAPE. HER AND FLEES FROM TH£ TOWN.

HE TELLS JOS!E HE 18 L E A V I N G

O N C E A G A I N H E V I S I T S H I S FATHER, A N D N O W HE

SEES H I S FATHER D I E , AND SEES THE T E R R I B L E L O N E L I N E S S OF THE W O M A N WHO CARED FOR HIM.

F I N A L L Y , H E GETS H I S S O N A N D W I T H H I M R E T U R N S HOME, T O A T

LAST ACCEPT HtS SON, THE C H I L D WHO IS YET TO BE, THE L O V E OF H I S W I F E , AND HOST OF ALL, H I S OWN O t G N l T Y AS A M A N ,

# # #

WARNING: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

272

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

axrrppis FROM TH£ UNANIMOUS RAVU5 FOR " EOT! I !MG BUT A KAN". "A GREAT MOVlii! ALREADY THE F I L M HAS JUSTLY SCOOPED UP ITS SHARE OF RAVES AND AWARDS, A COOL HONESTY THAT L I F T S IT FAR A D O V E I T S R A C I A L THEME AND MAKES IT A GREAT M O V I E . A R E V O L U T I O N IN THE C I N T M A . A CLASSIC!" «BP)AN (^DOHERTY

LIFE MAGAZINE "ONE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN MOVIES. !

SETS A TO.WERING STANDARD. T H I S YEAR'S

DAV|0 A N D L t S A M YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO M i S3 IT* M O V I N G A N D NOT TO BE KISSED."

OUTSTANDING,

DEEPLY

-JUDITH CRIST HERALD T R I B U N E "A MARVELOUSLY TENDER AND TOUCHING FILM ABOUT HUMAN D I G N I T Y AND THE E N D U R I N G POWER OF LOVE* RANKS W I T H THE VERY BEST, ALL THE PERFORMANCES ARE SUPERB." -MCCALL'S

"NOTHING BUT A MAN PROVED WORTHY OF THE INTEREST IT EXCITED AT THIS YEAR'S VENICE FESTIVAL. THE SPLENDID THING ABOUT THIS PICTURE is THE SIMPLICITY A N D HONESTY W I T H W H I C H THE C O N F L I C T IS DRAWN, THE C L A R I T Y AND NATURALNESS OF THE P E R F O R M A N C E S I N THE STARK D O C U M E N T A T I O N OF THE R E L A T I O N S BETWEEN THE HERO A N D HIS WfFE. AN OFF-BEAT V E N T U R E OF W H I C H T H I S COUNTRY CAN BE PROUD,"

-BOSLEY CROWTHER NEW YORK TIMES

"NOTHING BUT A MAN TRIUMPHANTLY SKIRTS THE CONVENTIONAL PITFALLS THAT BESET MOVIES. THE LEAST I CAN DO ts TO HONOR SUCH AN ACHIEVEMENT. I WAMT TO COMMEND THE P I C T U R E ON (TS M E R I T S , W H I C H ARE M A N Y .

FLAWLESSLY ENACTED BY

IVAN DIXON. STILL, I SUPPOSE THE TRUE STARS OF THE OCCASION ARE MICHAEL RQEMER AND ROBERT YOUNS^ WHO NOT ONLY PROVIDED THE SCREENPLAY BUT HAVE SERVED AS, RESPECTIVELY, THE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE PICTURE, AND WHO SHARE WITH ROBERT RUBIN, THE SOUND ENGINEER, THE SATISFACTION OF BEING ITS PRODUCERS*'* -BRENDAN G l L L

THE NEW YORKER

"THE AUDIENCE BURST INTO THE K I N D OF APPLAUSE THAT USUALLY GREETS A POLITICAL CONVENTION. SIMPLE* HONEST, VASTLY TOUCHING* WELL ACTED, WELL WRITTEN^ WELL DIRECTED. A D E D I C A T E D EFFORT Sf C 1 F T E O Y O U N G PEOPLE. A C H I E V E M E N T OF S J f i N I F f C A N C E , "

ABSORBING!

AN

-MOLLis ALPERT THE SATURDAY R E V I E W "DESERVES TO ee S I N G L E D OUT FOR SPECIAL PRAISE.

THIS ONE: is HONORABLE,

M O V I N G A N D MEMORABLE." -NEWSWEEK

"ONE or THE TEN BEST PICTURES OF 1964! ITS W I N N I N G or TWO PRIZES AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL AND tTS success AT THE NEW YORK AND LONDON FILM FESTIVALS IS NOT S U F F I C I E N T R E W A R D * AMONG THE V I T A L PICTURES OF THE YEAR. T A K I N G I EXCELLENT! E X T R A O R D I N A R Y ! -ARCHEft W l N S T E N

NEW YORK POST

(MORE) WARNING: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

BREATH-

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

273

"THE SAME APPEAL AS 'MARTY,1 IN THE CSCM, f>WL:£;'STAKES IT SHOULD BE A STRONG CONTENDER FOR AM ACADEMY AWARD IN ALL rtAJOR CATEGORIES, IT 13 FIRST Or ALL A WORK OF AFTTj A MJNOR MASTIFF I £CE ,T> -KEVIN THOMAS Lcs ANGELES TIMES "A F f L M THAT SEEMS C E R T A I N TO BE T H I S YEAR'S SLEEKER. DEEPLY M O V I N G . "

C O M P A S S I O N A T E AND

-ERNEST SCH PER PHILADELPHIA BULLETIN

"WONDERFUL! THE BEST FILM 1 HAVE EVER SEEN ON THE SUBJECT. THE DIRECTOR OF THIS LOVE AFFAIR JS MICHAEL ROEMER." -KENNETH TYNAN LONDON OBSERVER "FOUR STARS (HtGHEST R A T I N f l ) A M O V I N G FILM."

-KATHLEEN CARROLL DAILY MEWS

"THE A C T I N G IS B R I L L I A N T , AND I N THE MA I f« RILES 1 VAN D f X O M AND ABBEY L I N C O L N G I V E THE S I - R E AND R I C H L Y I M A G I N E D f'F.KFOflt-iANCES THAT MOV i E STARS NO L O N G E R

UNDERSTAND. MARVELOUS!

THE PRESENCE OF TSMTH SUFFUSES THE SCENE WITH BEAUTY." -VOGUE MAGAZINE

"A MEMORABLE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE I"

-AITON COOK ML!ff YORK WORLD TELEGRAM & SUM

"WORTH CHEERING TO THE RAFTERS! AeB£v I iricoLN is APPEALING AND EXPERT, IVAN Dixow is SUPERB. MICHAEL RQEMER, WHO WROTE THE SCREENPLAY WITH ROBERT YOUNG> PROVIOEO SENSITIVE, iNTiMATE DIRECTION. 1 b -WILLIAM WOLF CUE MAGAZINE

"YOU ARE GRIPPED, CONVINCED, AND MOVED FROM START TO FINISH." -NEW YORK POST

"ADO TO YOUR MUST SEE L1ST\ I PREDICT THE SAME SUCCESS AS 'DAVID AND LlSA* 1 " -SHEILAH GRAHAM NEW YORK JOURNAL A M E R I C A N (SYNDICATED)

"FlNE, COMPELLING DRAMA,"

-SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE

"THE MOST SENSITIVE EXPLORATION TO DATE OF THE PROBLCM, DIRECTED IN A TIGHT, UNDERSTATED MANNER*" -ROBERT BRUSTEIM NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS "ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR. ALL THE MORE ELOQUENT BECAUSE OF ITS SIMPLICITY AND GREAT HONESTY. A« OVERPOWERING REALISM. " -RED&OOK M A G A Z I N E

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Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

"ONE OF THE TEN BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR.': -OWIGHT HACDOHALD OF ESQU' 1VF

"THE HIT OF THE MEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL! THE FILM RINGS TRUE. ARE SUPERB.1' -MARGUERITE LAMKIN CLAMOUR MAGAZINE "THE MOST ELOQUENT AND THE BEST! ONE.

THE ACTORS

IT !S, ABOVE ALL, A LOVE STORY, AND A GOOD

To ALL C O N C E R N E D GOES C R E D I T FOR A C H I E V I N G A PICTURE WITH A R O B U S T

HEARTBEAT SO MUCH ITS OWN BECAUSE IT HAS CAUGHT THE PULSE OF REAL LIFE." -WAYNE ROBINSON PHILADELPHIA BULLETIN "REMARKABLE.1

-ALBERT BERMEL HARPER'S

"IT JS A LOVE STORY V.M TH RESTRAINT, PASS! ON AMD RESPECT FOR CHARACTER. AN ENGROSSING DRAMA.. Tli 1S F \ LM MANAO.E^ TO T^LL A RAW* ANSRY.t HUMANLY I KOI VI DUAL '-'i i C STOR\ i3Y CREATING ^i'JS; .-V.!-.OftBI MG CHARACTERS AND CASTING THEM WITH SUPERB ACTORS." -KuudifcT HATCH THE NATION "WITH IMPRESSIVE INSIGHT, NOTHING BUT A MAN GOES STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

FORCEFUL A N D S E N S I T I V E !

M: X. '.CULOUS AND L U M I N O U S J"

-IiMK MAGAZINE

"THE FILM NEVER STAKES A FALSE NOTE. THE CHARACTERS ARE FLESH AND BLOOD PEOPLE WHO TOUCH THE HEART. A MEMORABLE FILM." -SANDRA SAUNQERS PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS "ORCHIDS*

COMPLIMENT IONS..,THE PRIZE W I N N I N G FILM NOTHING BUT A MAN." -WALTER WiNCHELL JOURNAL AMERICAN (SYNDICATED)

"WH^M 1965 CLOSES ITS RECORDS FOR THE YEAR, IT IS OUR CONVICTION THAT NOTHING BUT A MAN WILL REMAIN FIRMLY ENCASED IN THE MEMORY, ITS BUDGET ts LOW, AS WAS LAST YEAR ! S 'DAVID AND LlSA 1 AND 'ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO1 AND THE RESULTS ARE SUPERIOR TO THOSE TWO EXCELLENT ADVENTURES, I T IS A FILM WHICH

TAKES HOLD OF THE HEART AND NEVER LETS CO UNTIL ITS FINAL UPSURGE FRAME." -HENRY MURDOCH PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

"Owe: OF THE FINEST, ENORMOUS DRAMATIC IMPACT. A DUALITY OF UNIVERSALITY," -PAUL V, BECKLEY CHANNEL 13, WNDT-TV "THE SLEEPER OF THE YEAR."

-HOLLYWOOD REPORTER (MORE) WARNING: This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing (1965)

275

"AN IMPORTANT F I L M * A DOUBLE P R I Z E WINNER AT VENICE, NO'lHING BUT A MAN W I L L C O N T I N U E T O B E H O N O R E D I N T H E U N t T E Q STATES. M t C H A Z L ROEMER H A S D I R E C T E D IT WITH D I S T I N C T I O N * THE P E R F O R M A N C E S * ESPECIALLY THOSE OF ABBEY L I N C O L N

AND IVAN OIXON, ARE AMONG THE YEAR'S FINEST, IT is HOPED THEY WILL BE HONORED WHEN THE OSCARS AR£ HANDED OUT NEXT SPRING BY THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES IN HOLLYWOOD." -REVEREND MALCOLM BOYO PITTSBURGH COURIER '"NOTHING BUT A MAN 1 SENT CRITICS SCURRYING FOR NEW SUPERLATIVES. ITS STORY OF A SEARCH FOR LOVE AND IDENTITY IS UN'VrTtfjAL. (T GOT UNANIMOUS RAVES, IT IS THE VERY BEST USE OF THE MOTION PICTURE ART. j HAVENJT R E A D I N M A N Y YEARS A RECEPTION AS FANTASTIC AS THAT fiiVEH THfS SUPERB HOTfON. PJCTUgE^ ^HUGH DOWNS ""NBC-TV TODAY SHOW

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Filmographies

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Selected Filmography: Michael Roemer

1962 Cortile Cascino. Written and directed by Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young. New York: NBC. Unbroadcasted documentary. 16 mm.

1984 Vengeance Is Mine (originally broadcast as Haunted.) Written by Michael Roemer. Directed by Michael Roemer. Arlington, VA: PBS. Television broadcast.

1964 Nothing But a Man. Written by Michael Roemer and Robert Young. Directed by Michael Roemer. New York: DuArt, Nothing But a Man Co. Film. 35 mm.

1989 The Plot against Harry. Written by Michael Roemer. Directed by Michael Roemer. Seattle: King Screen Productions. Film. 35 mm.

1982 Pilgrim Farewell. Written by Michael Roemer. Directed by Michael Roemer. Arlington, VA: PBS. Television broadcast.

1993 Children of Fate: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family. Directed by Michael Roemer, Susan Todd, Andrew Young and Robert M. Young. Croton on Hudson, NY: Archipelago Films. Documentary. 16 mm.

279

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Selected Filmography: Robert Young

1962 Cortile Cascino. Written and directed by Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young. New York: NBC. Unbroadcast documentary. 16 mm. 1964 Nothing But a Man. Written by Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young. Cinematography by Robert M. Young. Directed by Michael Roemer. New York: DuArt, Nothing But a Man Company. Film. 35 mm. 1969 J.T. Written by Jane Wagner. Directed by Robert M. Young. New York: CBS. Television broadcast. 1972 National Geographic Special: The Last Tribes of Mindanao. Written by Dennis Azzarella and Bud Wiser. Directed by Robert M. Young. Arlington, VA: PBS. Documentary. Television broadcast. National Geographic Special: Man of Serengeti. Written by Bud Wiser. Directed by Robert M. Young. Arlington, VA: PBS. Documentary. Television broadcast.

1974 National Geographic Special: Bushmen of the Kalahari. Written by Bud Wiser. Directed by Robert M. Young. Arlington, VA: PBS. Documentary. Television broadcast. 1976 National Geographic Special: Search for the Great Apes. Written by Bud Wiser. Directed by Robert M. Young. Arlington, VA: PBS. Documentary. Television broadcast. 1977 Alambrista. Written by Robert M. Young. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: Filmhaus. Film. 35 mm. Short Eyes. Written by Miguel Pinero. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: Film League; Hollywood, CA: Paramount. Film. 35 mm. 1979 Rich Kids. Written by Judith Ross. Directed by Robert M. Young. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Films. Film. 35 mm.

281

282 1980 One Trick Pony. Written by Paul Simon. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers. Film. 35 mm. 1982 American Playhouse: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. Written by Americo Paredes, Victor Villaseñor, Robert M. Young. Directed by Robert M. Young. Arlington, VA: PBS. Television broadcast. 1986 Extremities. Written by William Mastrosimone. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: Atlantic Entertainment Group. Film. 35 mm. Saving Grace. Written by Richard Kramer. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: Embassy Films; Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures Corporation. Film. 35 mm. 1988 Dominick and Eugene. Written by Corey Blechman and Alvin Sargent. Directed by Robert M. Young. Los Angeles: Orion Pictures. Film. 35 mm. 1989 Triumph of the Spirit. Written by Andrzej Krakowski and Laurence Heath. Directed by Robert M. Young. New York: Nova International Films. Film. 35 mm. 1993 Children of Fate: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family. Directed by Michael Roemer, Susan Todd, Andrew Young, and Robert M. Young. Croton on Hudson, NY: Archipelago Films. Documentary. 16 mm. Roosters. Written by Milcha SanchezScott. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: American Playhouse; Los Angeles: KCET; Studio City, CA: Olmos

Filmographies Productions; n.p.: WMG. Television broadcast. Talent for the Game. Written by David Himmelstein, Thomas Michael Donnelly, and Larry Ferguson. Directed by Robert M. Young. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures. Film. 16 mm. 1995 Slave of Dreams. Written by Ron Hutchinson. Directed by Robert M. Young. Beverly Hills, CA: Dino De Laurentiis Company; New York: Showtime Entertainment. TV movie. 35 mm. Solomon and Sheba. Written by Ronni Kern. Directed by Robert M. Young. Beverly Hills, CA: Dino De Laurentiis Company. TV movie. 35 mm. 1996 Caught. Written by Edward Pomerantz. Directed by Robert M. Young. New York: Cinehaus; n.d.: Circle Films; New York: DuArt. Film. 35 mm. 1997 “Calling.” Nothing Sacred. Written by Jason Cahill. Directed by Robert M. Young. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Television. Television broadcast. 1998 “Kindred Spirits.” Nothing Sacred. Written by Marlane Meyer and Gary Reick. Directed by Robert M. Young. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Television. Television broadcast. 2001 China: The Panda Adventure. Written by Paul Anderson, John Wilcox, and Jeanne Rosenberg. Directed by Robert M. Young. San Diego, CA: San Diego Zoo; n.p.: Trane; Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund. Film. 70 mm.

Young 2004 Human Error. Written by Richard Dresser. Directed by Robert M. Young. N.p.: New Deal Pictures. Film. 35 mm. “Six Degrees of Separation.” Battlestar Galactica. Written by Michael Angeli. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA: David Eick Productions; n.p.: R&D TV; New York: Sci-Fi Channel. Television broadcast. 2005 “Final Cut.” Battlestar Galactica. Written by Mark Verheiden. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA: David Eick Productions; n.p.: R&D TV; New York: Sci-Fi Channel. Television broadcast. 2006 “Unfinished Business.” Battlestar Galactica. Written by Michael Taylor. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA:

283 David Eick Productions; n.p.: R&D TV; New York: Sci-Fi Channel. Television broadcast. 2007 “The Son Also Rises.” Battlestar Galactica. Written by Michael Angeli. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA: David Eick Productions; n.p.: R&D TV; New York: Sci-Fi Channel. Television broadcast. 2009 “Deadlock.” Battlestar Galactica. Written by Jane Espenson. Directed by Robert M. Young. Burbank, CA: David Eick Productions; n.p.: R&D TV; New York: Sci-Fi Channel. Television broadcast. 2011 The Maze. Directed by Robert M. Young. Canada/USA. Documentary.

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Selected Bibliography

Alexander, Lisa Doris. “Nothing But a Man Revisited.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 41, no. 3 (2013): 136–144. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 1973; repr., New York: Continuum Publishing, 1992. Brody, Richard. “Critic’s Notebook about Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man.” New Yorker, January 16, 2012, 15–16. Butte, George. “Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film.” Poetics Today 29, no. 2 (2008): 277–308. Carroll, Noel. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Christley, Jaime N. “Nothing But a Man.” Slant, November 9, 2012. http://www .slantmagazine.com/film/review /nothing-but-a-man/6675. Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Davidson, Jim. “The Making of Nothing But A Man.“ CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black/Jewish Relations 3 (1998): 1–14. George, Nelson. Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Greco, John. “Nothing But a Man,“ October 14, 2011. http://twentyfourframes .wordpress.com/2011/10/14/nothing -but-a-man-1964-michael-roemer/. Howe, Desson. “Nothing But a Man.“ Washington Post, July 9, 1993. Johnson, Albert. “The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works.” Film Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1965): 14–30. Lewis, Leon. Robert M. Young: Essays on the Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2005. Manchel, Frank. Exits and Entrances: Interviews with Seven Who Reshaped AfricanAmerican Images in Movies. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2013. McMillan, Stephen. “Classic Soul Cinema: Nothing But a Man,“ April 4, 2012. http://soultrain.com/2012/04/04 /classic-soul-cinema-nothing-but-a -man/. Mudede, Charles. “Nothing but a Man: How Can a White Director Understand Black Anger?,” February 20, 2013. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle /art-house/Content?oid=16050716. Nickel, John. “Disabling African American Men: Liberalism and Race Message Films.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 25–48. Norton, Chris. “Black Independent Cinema and the Influence of Neo-Realism:

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Selected Bibliography

Futility, Struggle, and Hope in the Face beyond.com/2009/11/20/nothing-but-a of Reality.” Images: A Journal of Film and -man-putney-swope/. Popular Culture 5 (1997): 1–4. http:// Smock, William H. “Nothing But a Man.” www.imagesjournal.com/issue05 Harvard Crimson, March 1, 1965. /features/black.htm. Taubin, Amy. “Rights of Way.” Artforum, Pinkerton, Nick. “Nothing But a Man: This November 9, 2012. http://artforum.com Is(n’t) a Man’s World.” The Village Voice, /film/id=37100. November 7, 2012. Taylor, Clyde. The Mask of Art: Breaking Sieving, Christopher. Soul Searching: the Aesthetic Contract – Film and LiteraBlack-Themed Cinema from the March on ture. Bloomington: Indiana University Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation. Press, 1998. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Yearwood, Gladstone. Black Film as SigPress, 2011. nifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and Smith, Matthew Aeldun. “Indivisible Man: the African American Aesthetic Tradition. Nothing But a Man and Putney Swope,“ Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000. November 20, 2009. http://onefilm

Contributors

K ar en Bowdr e is an independent scholar, who has published on African American media and romantic comedies in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Cinema Journal, and the edited collection, Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy. Her research interests include race and representation, gender, early African American theater history, adaptation, romantic comedies, telefantasy, and telenovelas. Her book Shades of Love: African Americans and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is also the coeditor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Critical Perspectives on Tyler Perry, which is forthcoming with University of Mississippi Press. Thomas Cr ipps was Professor of History at Morgan State University. He is one of the foundational scholars in the study of African American film and over a long and distinguished career, he published widely including the books Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900–1942 (1977), Black Film as Genre (1978), Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (1993), and Hollywood’s High Noon: Moviemaking and Society before Television (1996). The Thomas Cripps Papers collection is held at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. Bruce Allen Dick is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. He publishes in African American, Latino, and film studies. His

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Contributors

most recent book (cowritten with Gregory Reck) is American Soccer: History, Culture, Class (2015). He lives in Boone, North Carolina. Ter r i Fr ancis is a scholar of African Diaspora cinemas, particularly nontheatrical and experimental film. Her interdisciplinary courses on media and representation cover critical race theory and black film. Professor Francis guest edited a collection of essays on “Unexpected Archives: More Locations of Caribbean Film” forsx salon in autumn 2014. She served as guest editor for a close-up on “Afrosurrealism in Film and Video” for Black Camera in autumn 2013. She is the author ofJosephine Baker’s Animated Burlesque: Deconstructing Dialectics forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Currently, Professor Francis works atIndiana University in the Media School. Michael T. Martin is Director of the Black Film Center/Archives and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the editor/coeditor of five books including Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies (Duke University Press) and Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality (Wayne State University Press). His articles and interviews have appeared in Film Quarterly, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Third World Quarterly, Framework. More recent publications include an essay on Gillo Pontecorvo and Haile Gerima in Third Text (23, no. 6), interviews with filmmakers Julie Dash, Cinema Journal (49, no. 2), Joseph Gai Ramaka, Research in African Literatures (40, no. 3), Charles Burnett, Black Camera (1, no. 1), Yoruba Richen, Quarterly Review of Film and Video (28, no. 2), Amy Serrano, Camera Obscura (25, no. 2), and most recently, Ava DuVernay, Black Camera (6, no. 1). He also directed and coproduced the award-winning feature documentary on Nicaragua, In the Absence of Peace. Khalil Gibr an Muhammad is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Rutgers University and is a former Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. He is a contributing author of a 2014 National Research

Contributors

289

Council study, “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences,” and is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies. His research focuses on racial criminalization in modern U.S. history. Khalil’s scholarship has been featured in a number of national print and broadcast media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC. He is a former Associate Editor of The Journal of American History and prior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his commitment to public engagement, including Crain Business Magazine‘s 40 under 40 (2011), Ebony Power 100 (2013), and The Root 100 of Black Influencers (2012–2014). He also holds two honorary doctorates from The New School (2013) and Bloomfield College (2014). He serves on the board of The Barnes Foundation, and the editorial boards of Transition magazine and the North Star Series of John Hopkins Press. Michael Roemer is a filmmaker, writer, and producer. He was was born in Berlin, Germany, and educated at Harvard University where he completed his first film, A Touch of the Times (1949). He directed and coproduced with Robert M. Young the seminal, Nothing But a Man (1964), which won awards at the Venice Film Festival, The Plot Against Harry (1969), also coproduced with Young, and Vengeance Is Mine (1984). His documentaries include Cortile Cascino (1962), Faces of Israel (1967), and Dying (1976) and for television, Pilgrim, Farewell (1980), and Haunted (1984). Adjunct Professor at Yale School of Art, Roemer is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and author of four books, including the two-volume Film Stories (2001). Judith Smith is Professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses on history of media, America on screen from 1932 to 1964, and U.S. culture since 1945. Her writings on postwar film, stage, radio, and television have appeared in various published essays and in Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (2004). Her new book Becoming

290

Contributors

Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (2014) includes a discussion of Belafonte’s production of film and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Her essay on Nothing But a Man draws on research for her next book project, provisionally titled “Alternative Freedom Dreams: the Black Popular Front and Film Representations of Multi-Racial Citizenship, 1945–1970.” M ar k Vogel has published articles on adolescent literacy, young adult and American literature, and teaching writing in English Journal, The New Advocate, and many other journals. Recently, he has focused on writing poetry and fiction as well. Stories have appeared in Cities and Roads, Knight Literary Journal, Whimperbang, SN Review, and Our Stories. Poems have appeared in Cape Rock, Dark Sky, Cold Mountain Review, and thirty other journals. He has served as Codirector of The Appalachian Writing Project, and is currently Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. David C. Wall is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media studies at Utah State University. His research concentrates on representations of race in visual culture, and he has published widely on art and film in journals such as Nineteenth Century Studies, Journal of American Studies, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Journal of Popular Culture, and Oxford Art Journal. His article “It Is and It Isn’t: Stereotypes, Advertising and Narrative” has been anthologized in the twelfth edition of Longman’s The Conscious Reader. He is currently working on a book project titled Space, Place, and Empire: Art, Film, Culture and Crisis in Postwar Britain. Robert M. Young was born in New York City in 1924 and is a graduate of Harvard University. He is a director, cinematographer, producer, and screenwriter and has collaborated on several films with Michael Roemer. Films he has directed include Alambrista! (1977), Short Eyes (1977), Saving Grace (1986), Extremities (1986), Dominick and Eugene (1988), and Triumph of the Spirit (1989). Among his many awards are the Primo San Georgio (Venice Film Festival), Camera d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Best Feature at the San Sebastian Film Festival, an Emmy Award, and a Peabody Award.

Index

Abernathy, Ralph, 35 AFL-CIO, 149 Alambrista!, 173–174, 182, 184, 197, 198, 199n13 American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, 149 Andrews, Geoff, 17 Angola: Journey to a War, 45, 68, 118 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The, 73, 74, 102 Baker, Ella, 153 Baldwin, James, 36 Ballard of Gregorio Cortez, The, 182 Bandung Conference, 144 Bennett, Luke, 28 Best Years of Our Lives, The, 122 Bevel, James, 26, 36, 118, 120 Bibliography, 185–186 Birmingham, 68, 76, 79, 93, 111, 116, 122, 124, 125–126, 157 Birth of a Nation, 2 black archetypes: hero, 72–73 black film: 1; definitions, 4–7, 18–19; genre, 5, 72, 107–108, 115, 122–123; pastoral, 73–74; signifying practice, 5 Black Filmmakers Foundation, 136 Black Panther Party, 90, 144–145 Black Power Movement, 90 Bland, Ed, 10 blaxploitation, 72

Bogle, Donald, 70, 177 Book of Numbers, The, 73 Bowdre, Karen, 14, 82–98 Boyz n the Hood, 4 Brandon, Tom, 136 Brandon Films, 136 Brecht, Bertolt, 36 Bringing Up Baby, 10 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 125 Brown decision, 126, 143 Burnett, Charles, 4 Bush Mama, 5 Cabin in the Sky, 84, 88 Carmichael, Stokely, 145 Carroll, Noel, 188 Cassavetes, John, 10 Castro, Fidel, 146 Caught, 198 Chaney, James, 147, 169n4 Chavez, Cesar, 174 Childress, Alice, 135 Chirine, Luigi, 176 Citizen Kane, 10 Civil Rights Act 1964, 130 Clarke, Shirley, 10, 138 Cold War, 41–42, 143–144 Come Back Africa, 10 Congress of Racial Equality, 26, 120 Connor, Bull, 12, 47, 51 Conrack, 73–74

291

292 Cool World, The, 10, 131, 134, 188 Cortile Cascino, 56, 119, 178, 181 Cripps, Thomas, 5, 13–14, 70, 72–81, 158, 186 Crist, Judith, 17, 69 Cry of Jazz, The, 10 Cuba, 145–146 Dash, Julie, 5 Daughters of the Dust, 5 Davidson, Jim, 180, 195 Dick, Bruce, 13, 55–71 Dickerson, Ernest, 5 Dixon, Ivan, 27, 29, 31–33, 37–38, 40, 55, 102, 114, 115, 121, 131, 133, 175, 197 Dolci, Danilo, 45, 119, 178 Dorkin, Charles, 118 Du Art Film, 41, 42 Duff (Anderson), 13–14, 26–30, 33–36, 38, 47, 55, 57–58, 70, 77; relationship with father, 62–63, 68, 78, 80, 86–87, 193–194; relationship with Josie, 47–51, 58–61, 66–67, 76–77, 82, 88–91; workplace, 64–66, 78 Eyes on the Prize, 7 Ferro, Mark, 3 film history, 109–112 Flanagan, Martin, 18 Ford, John, 122 Foster, Gloria, 37, 62, 115, 187. See also Lee Foster Photoplay Company. 2 Francis, Terri, 15, 101–113 Freedom Riders, 115, 143 Fuller, Hoyt, 17 Gaye, Marvin, 169 Gelmes, Joseph, 70–71 Gerima, Haile, 5 Gilmore, Glenda, 143 Goodman, Andrew, 147, 169n4 Gordone, Charles, 30, 115, 121 Great Migration, 156 Grier, Bill, 27 Griffith, D. W., 2

Index Hallelujah!, 73, 84, 88, 97 Harder They Come, The, 5 Harris, Julius, 62, 115, 121, 135, 193 Hearts of Dixie, 73 Heat Wave, 123–124, 169 Heath, Stephen, 8 Henderson, Vivian, 118 Henry, John, 114 Henzell, Perry, 5 Hinson, Hal, 69–70 Hollywood, 2–3, 9, 97, 118, 133, 177 Hughes, Langston, 73 Huntley, Chet, 43 Hurston, Zora Neal, 97 I Have a Dream, 13, 69 Inferno, The. See also Cortile Cascino Italian neorealism, 50, 122, 132 Jim Crow, 55, 125 John Shaft, 72 Johnson, Albert, 133 Jones, James Earl, 29, 121 Josie, 12, 32–37, 47–51, 58–60, 67, 82–85, 98n1. See also Duff (Anderson) Kapó, 188–189 Kelly, Robin, 167–168 Killer of Sheep, 4 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 12–13, 35, 47, 55, 69, 92, 114, 120, 126, 145, 147, 151, 172–173, 186 Ku Klux Klan, 87 Lafayette, Bernard, 118 Lauretis, Teresa de, 9 Leaks, Sylvester, 71 Learning Tree, The, 73 Lee, 62, 68, 83–84, 92, 93, 126, 127, 158, 187. See also Gloria Foster Lee, Spike, 4 Legal Defense Education Fund, 147 Lewis, John, 118 Lilies of the Field, 129 Lilith, 176

Index Lincoln, Abbey, 28, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 40, 55, 102, 114, 115, 121, 122, 131, 133, 136, 166, 171–172, 175, 180, 197. See also Josie Lincoln Motion Picture Company, 2, 73 Lomax, John, 184 Malcolm X, 4, 90, 135, 145 Martin, Michael T., 1–21, 143–169, 171, 199 Matthiessen, Peter, 174 Meredith, James, 47 Micheaux, Oscar, 2–3, 10 minimalist realism, 102 Mississippi Burning, 7 Moby Dick, 183 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 143 Morris, Gary, 10 Moses, Bob, 36 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 158, 164–165 Muhammad, Khalil, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 32–35, 94, 98n1 Muse, Clarence, 73 Nash, Diane, 26, 36, 98n1, 118, 120, 166 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 25, 44, 143, 153, 168 National Film Registry, 136 National Urban League, 143 Native Son, 183 New Left, 146 Norman, Richard E., 3 Nothing But a Man: 1, 55, 74; awards, 129; black church, 151–153, 167–168; cinematic style, 101, 104, 106, 123; class relations, 84–85, 166–167, 185, 194–195; conditions of production, 3–4, 5–19, 20n17, 27, 30, 32–34, 36–39, 46–47, 57, 74, 123, 183–184; cost of production, 41, 128–129, 182; defining moments, 49, 51, 68, 79–80, 91, 110, 189–190, 191–192; distribution, 9, 20n17, 40–41, 69, 97, 130–131; family, 67, 158–162; gender, 127–128; historical context, 41–42, 47, 75, 90, 96, 102, 114–116, 117, 143–148; labor politics, 75–76, 78– 79, 114, 124–125, 148–150, 154–155; politics, 152–154, 165–166; press kit, 267–275;

293 promotion, 131–132, 171; reception, 129–136, 137n2, 139n46, 163–165, 171–172, 174–177, 272–275; representational strategies, 48–49, 50–51, 70, 102–106, 112; rural/urban settings, 75, 76–77, 80, 156; screenplay, 21n30, 120–121, 201–266; script, 120, 172, 187; sexual violence, 103–105, 148–149; sonic, 108, 123–124, 168–169, 185–186, 194–195, 196–197; story origins, 45–46, 56, 115; thematic address, 69–71, 116, 173–174 On the Waterfront, 128 Operation Dixie, 149 Parker, Alan, 7 Parks, Gordon, Jr., 73, 144 pastoral hero, 80–81. See also black film, pastoral Peregini, Frank, 3 Plot Against Harry, The, 37–38 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 189 Porter, Edwin S., 1 Prad, Paul La, 118 Precious, 97 race movies, 2–3, 88, 96 race relations. See segregation Raisin in the Sun, A, 97, 125 Randolph, Philip A., 125 Realization of a Negro’s Ambition, The, 73, 74 Reeves, Martha, 169 Reid, Mark, 4–5, 7 Report from Palermo, 45 Reverend Dawson, 59, 61–62, 67, 75, 77, 79, 85, 174 Riley, Clayton, 121–122 Robeson, Paul, 144 Rochemont, Louis de, 118, 180 Roemer, Michael, 1–6, 12, 16, 40, 45–46, 55, 82, 96; biographical, 42; blacklisted, 46, 115, 117–121; filmmaker statement, 25–39; filmography, 279 Rogosin, Lionel, 10 Rossellini, Roberto, 6, 50

294 Rossen, Robert, 176 Rubin, Bob, 38, 121, 197 Salt of the Earth, 127 Sayles, John, 5 Scar of Shame, The, 3 Schwerner, Michael, 147, 169n4 segregation, 43–45, 46–47, 55, 57, 75, 87–88, 119–120 “Segregation Now,” 13 Seiving, Christopher, 10 Shadows, 10 Shaft, 14 Shohat, Ella, 6 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 92, 126, 151 Sica, Vittorio de, 6, 50 Simone, Nina, 169 Singleton, John, 4 Sit-In, 6, 11, 25, 44–45, 47, 57, 69, 118, 151, 177, 189 Smith, Judith, 16, 114–139 Snead, James, 2 Sounder, 73 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 120, 121, 153 Spook Who Sat By the Door, The, 14, 40 St. Jacques, Raymond, 73 Stam, Robert, 6 Starkman, David, 3 Stormy Weather, 88 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 120, 145 Students for a Democratic Society, 146 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 14

Index Taylor, Clyde, 2 Terrell, Tammy, 169 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 97 Third Cinema, 163 Thompson, Jim, 16–17 Till, Emmett, 126 To Kill a Mockingbird, 129 Tompkin, Marshal, 174 Triumph of the Spirit, 188 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1 Van Dyke, 118 Venice Film Festival, 40, 97, 129, 176 Vietnam, 116, 145–146 Vivian, C. T., 118 Vogel, Mark, 13, 55–71 Walker, Wyatt Tee, 120, 135, 151 Wall, David C., 1–21, 143–169, 171–199 Wallace, George, 13, 47, 55 Way Down South, 73 Wells, Orson, 122 White Paper, 43, 45, 56, 118, 172, 180, 181 Wilkins, Roy, 145 Within Our Gates, 3, 10, 20n22 Wright, Richard, 183 Wyler, William, 122 Yamacraw, 73 Yearwood, Gladstone, 5 Young, Irwin, 38, 41 Young, Robert M, 1–6, 11–13, 16, 25–30, 37, 38, 56, 82, 83, 95, 96–97; biographical, 42–43; blacklisted, 46; filmmaker statement, 40–51; filmography, 181–183; Sicily, 45–46, 56