Filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert Young (Short Eyes, Alambrista) saw Nothing But a Man as a “humanist” endeavor, straddling the gulf between social realism and Hollywood melodrama. After its New York and Venice Film Festival successes, the film continued to receive a great deal of praise as a rare, unsentimental treatment of blacks on film--neither patronizing nor idealizing--and as a low-key presentation of undramatic yet dignified individuals. Ivan Dixon plays a young black laborer struggling to maintain a decent life in a small Alabama town. He falls in love with a prim schoolteacher (Abbey Lincoln) and marries her despite her family's objections. Joining the critics in hailing the “semi-documentary brilliance” of the film's photography, Albert Johnson, writing in a 1965 Film Quarterly article, “The Negro in Films,” nevertheless finds Nothing But a Man a bit too undramatic to ring true: “The film is...exceptionally tame, chiefly because...the civil-rights movement has not really affected (the hero) personally.... For all the vigor and fascination of Nothing But a Man, one cannot deny its major flaw of not being truly Southern in feeling.... One is confounded by (characters who) never mention the upheaval which has torn the South apart. It is impossible to make a timeless film about Southern Negroes at present....”