The actor Ivan Dixon died on March 16 in Charlotte, NC, while the media were buzzing about the need for more "dialogue about race.
We don't need any more of that. We need a 21st-century version of Nothing But a Man , the quiet, eloquent film starring Mr. Dixon as a working man who marries a preacher's daughter Abbey Lincoln and insists on being treated respectfully by everyone he meets.
That's it. But for a long time after I first saw it in the s, it was my favorite film and, I gather, Malcolm X's. Nothing But a Man is available on DVD, and from the first black-and-white frame I am referring to the film stock , you will see that it is of a different era. But if you stay with it, you will also see that some treatments of race do not grow tiresome, because they are simply, straightforwardly human. That's why I remember Ivan Dixon. Posted by mbayles at AM. The title of this entry does not refer to my own confession, but Leo Tolstoy's.
I recently watched Sean Penn's Into the Wild , based on the eponymous best-seller by Jon Krakauer, about Chris McCandless, a young man who "dropped out," as they used to say in the sixties, only without then "tuning in" to any movement or "turning on" with any known drug. What McCandless did do was abandon family, friends, future prospects, and affluent lifestyle, to embark on a quest without definition that, to judge by the film I have not read the book , acquired definition as it went along.
After two years of living as a voluntary hobo he renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp" , hippie he bonded with a counter-cultural tribe living in RVs , and latter-day alms-seeking monk, he trekked alone into the Alaskan wilderness, where after days of foraging for food and living in an abandoned bus, he died of starvation. In the wrong hands, this story could be unbearable, especially in today's acrimonious social and cultural atmosphere. But he is one of the major talents in Hollywood, if not THE major talent.
