Nothing But a Man was unique both as an unsentimental yet dignified treatment of blacks on film, and as superbly photographed low-key realism. Ivan Dixon plays a young laborer struggling to maintain a decent life in a small Alabama town. He marries a prim schoolteacher (Abbey Lincoln) despite her family's objections, and is branded a "niggra troublemaker" and blacklisted when he tries to organize his fellow millhands. Nearly thirty years after it was made, Nothing But a Man was re-released to a new generation. As Village Voice critic Amy Taubin wrote in 1993, "When I first saw it at the New York Film Festival in 1964, it seemed to depict a particularity of experience I'd never seen in a movie before and I'm not sure I've seen since..."