Nothing but a Man is remarkable and unusual. Released in 1964, filmed in black and white, set in an unidentified part of the American South, it focuses on a black man named Duff Anderson. He works on a railroad gang laying rails. Nothing but a Man attempts to show what life is for a young black man in the small-town South in the 1960s. Ivan Dixon portrays Duff. He was a relative unknown when the film was made, and his role in this film was the outstanding role of his career.
A number of actors in this film later became significant figures in the American entertainment industry, primarily Yaphet Kotto, who plays Duff’s friend Jocko, and Esther Rolle, who appears briefly in a church service. Abby Lincoln, already known by the time of this film for her beauty, her acting, and her jazz singing, plays Josie Dawson, a young schoolteacher to whom Duff is attracted.
This film is low key and seemingly objective. It displays Duff’s life and problems without preaching about them. It has the style of a documentary, following Duff as he works on the rail line, sits in a bar, attends a church service, and flirts with a young woman selling food outside the church. Her name is Josie and she turns out to be the preacher’s daughter. When Duff asks her to go out with him, she agrees.
The schoolteacher is one of a number of challenges Duff faces in the film. She is part of a respectable middle-class black family in the small Southern town. Her father and mother disapprove of her friendship with a manual laborer. She has gone to college and is a teacher. He lays rails for the railroad. The differences in social class between Josie and Duff pose a problem that he feels more than she does. While she has a stable job, he works as a laborer, and after he quits his job to settle down with Josie, stable employment is an issue for him throughout the film.
Josie as a character stands between Duff and her father the minister, Reverend Dawson. She speaks critically of her father on several occasions, blaming him for not standing up against the whites at crucial moments. Reverend Dawson himself tells Duff that it is difficult to know how to talk to white people—he apparently sees relations with white people as a matter of diplomacy and negotiation. He may have his own welfare and respectability in mind, but he also cares about the welfare of the black community as a whole—that welfare depends on peaceful relations with the whites, and in the community where Duff lives peaceful relations mean a subservient role for African Americans.
Duff contrasts with Reverend Dawson and other black men in the film as well. He is an individual who wants to live by his own terms. He is not comfortable being deferential to whites. He is also not religious, and this distances him from Josie’s father. When he gets a job at a mill, he is bothered by the failure of other black workers to stand up for themselves. He tells them they should not accept mistreatment from the whites. They tell him that they have families to worry about, that they can’t afford to make their employers angry. After one of them tells the white employees that Duff is trying to make trouble, Duff loses his job.
Duff is not insolent or disrespectful or aggressive towards white people. He is simply himself. He isn’t particularly talkative, and his silences are taken for rudeness. He refuses to be subservient and deferential. He refuses to joke around with white men who try to talk down to him. His refusal to play the game causes problems.
After he loses the job at the mill, he tries unsuccessfully to find other work. He considers picking cotton, but refuses to accept the low wage of $2.50 a day. When his father-in-law helps him get a job at a service station owned by a white man, he loses the job after a carload of white boys threaten to burn the station down if the owner doesn’t fire him—when one of them makes a lewd joke about his wife, Duff tells him to watch how he talks, and this leads to trouble. Duff feels that employment that allows him to earn a decent living wage is a key to his hopes for a successful life. It is certainly a key factor in the growing tension between Duff and Josie. He becomes increasingly worried about how he is going to care for her and the baby that is on the way.
A complicating factor is Duff’s conflicted relationship with his father, whom he goes to visit at two important moments in the film—once when he is thinking about asking Josie to marry him and again when he has left Josie to look for work in another city. Duff’s father is a bitter broken man, afflicted by alcoholism, chronic unemployment, depression, and high blood pressure. He hardly recognizes his son during the first visit, and although there are tentative efforts at friendly talk, he ultimately tells his son to leave. In the second visit, he is so drunk that he can hardly stand, and he suffers a stroke, dying in Duff’s car on the way to the hospital. We can infer that Duff’s father was afflicted by the same problems that Duff has encountered—difficulty in finding work, unhappiness with the narrow set of roles and behaviors allowed him in a predominantly white society, chafing at an environment of disrespect and oppression. Duff knows that his father represents one possible future for him.
The father-son issue is further complicated when Duff reveals to Josie that he has a son. He sends the boy’s mother money each month but goes for two years without seeing the boy. When he finally does visit, he discovers that the mother has left town and left the child in a neighbor’s care. He rebuffs Josie’s suggestions that he bring the boy home to live with them. He is therefore replicating the same pattern of absent fatherhood that his own father followed.
Nothing but a Man displays all the reasons why Duff might feel beaten down and why he might turn out like his father—drunk, bitter, estranged. Finally, it is his father’s death that convinces him not to follow the same path. His love for Josie and his desire not to follow that path lead him to return to Josie with his son in tow, intent on the struggle to make a life with her and to hold his head up, to be a black man in a white world, as difficult as that might be. The implication, as the film ends, is that he will try to set an example and stand up against the whites in the town where he and Josie live.
Nothing Bu a Man at moments is slow and awkward, and there are occasional pauses and plodding moments, a few melodramatic moments. But for the most part it is extremely effective in portraying the limiting forces that Duff faces, and that ultimately he refuses to allow to defeat him. Some might find the end of the film too optimistic, an obligatory happy ending. Instead, the conclusion strikes a necessary note of determination and resolve. Facing the problems he faces—of class divisions, broken family histories and difficult parental relationships, the constrictions of a society that refuses to accept him on his own terms—he is presented both as the representative American black man and as the example of hope and resolve that will lead black America forward. But the film is not a call to arms, by any means, but rather a call for understanding and compassion not just of the man of the film’s title but of the society and the forces that oppress and hold him down.
The film makes excellent use of setting—landscapes, cityscapes—to depict the world in which Duff lives. It begins with images of Duff and colleagues driving spikes as they lay new railroad tracks. Several panoramas of junkyards superimposed against the skylines of a large city, further superimposed against Duff’s face, help explain the forces that oppose him. The film never names the part of the South in which it is set. Characters mention the North, and it is clear that the action is taking place somewhere in the South. But the cinematography focuses us on the locations and the places where the characters work and live—the school where Josie works, the cotton field where Duff briefly considers picking cotton, the mill and the gas station and the pharmacy. It therefore evokes a vivid sense of place without specifying where the place is. The film’s “place” is, ultimately, a generic South whose name does not matter. For a low budget black and white film, the cinematography in Nothing but a Man is impressive and highly effective. So too is the low-key soundtrack, drawn from 60s era Motown—it tells us what the characters are listening to, gives us a sense of their emotional states of mind and their musical interests, locates the film in a particular time frame, but it does not dominate the film nor does it, as is the case with some later films about African Americans (Hustle and Flow is an example), in any way become a substitute for the problems the characters grapple with.
The setting of Nothing but a Man emphasizes the world of the industrial white man—of finance, industry, technology—that excludes and oppresses and ultimately challenges Duff to be the “man” that the movie shows him struggling to be.
