DVD of the Week: “Nothing But a Man”

The director Michael Roemer’s film “Nothing But a Man” was made in 1963; it premièred at the New York Film Festival in September, 1964, just two months after the Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The movie, set mainly in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama (but, as Roemer says in a recent interview, filmed in New Jersey), is a drama about the lives of black people in the South; its protagonist is a railroad-track worker who meets and marries a schoolteacher and settles down in her town but is unaccustomed to the overt hatred and constant threat of violence that blacks experience there. One scene, involving a meeting between the white school-board director and the minister who is the unofficial leader of the black community, results in the decision that a new school will be built for black children—in exchange for the minister’s agreement not to push for integration. There, as in scenes depicting the threat of violence both against blacks and against whites who protect them, I found myself wondering to what extent the involvement of government, by means of law and its enforcement, has been responsible for changing not just practices but also attitudes—and to what extent changing attitudes are due to what I’d call, with all praise, the liberal media. On the other hand, Roemer admits that his movie—like many independent films—had almost no impact at the time of its release. It’s easy to imagine the Internet helping to speed the movie toward its audience and its just acclaim.