Although he only made two fiction features, filmmaker Michael Roemer benefited greatly from an early rediscovery in the 1990s, thanks to the fortuitous unearthing of a film he made in 1969, The Plot Against Harry, a wry, dry comedy starring Martin Priest. His other film, 1964’s Nothing But a Man, is often compared by critics to the slicker, middle-America-friendly films that Sidney Poitier was making during the same era. Almost without exception, film about the minority experience in ’60s America were smoothed-over paeans to “the triumph of the human spirit,” starring or co-starring whites whose presence is required as witnesses, arbiters, and the final, thankful beneficiaries of growth and change. Bland but well-meaning, films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and A Patch of Blue, seeking to instruct the white moviegoer by giving them a diagrammatic path to sociopolitical enlightenment, had a funny habit of discounting, even nullifying, the Black experience.
- 2/22/2024
- by Jaime N. Christley
- Slant Magazine
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