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| Abbey Lincoln + Ivan Dixon |
Nothing But a Man: The Understated Genius of Ivan Dixon
by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
It would be easy to think of the late Ivan Dixon, as just another brilliant black actor or actress who never received the recognition that they deserved. Indeed if you placed Dixon’s career alongside those such as Rosalind Cash, Roscoe Lee Browne, Gloria Foster and Calvin Lockhart, you’d have just an inkling of a level of genius that was tragically underutilized and overlooked. But Dixon, distinguished himself even among those stellar talents, by playing critical roles—as an actor and director—in two films that will forever serve as the most evocative examples of black masculinity and black radicalism in mainstream American cinema.
For many, Ivan Dixon was simply the black guy on the 1960’s sitcom Hogan's Heroes. Set in a Nazi internment camp, the show poked fun at the very idea of Nazi imperialism at a historical moment, the 1960s, when the United States was the most resonant example of such imperialism. A critique of America’s own imperialistic desire, was the not-so-deep meaning beyond the clowning of Colonel Klink—the hapless face of Hitler’s ambition. Dixon’s Sgt. James Kinchloe, though, offered the only so-called “black” perspective on Nazi imperialism that could be easily accessed in mainstream American culture in the 1960s. It’s not like Band of Brothers gave any inkling of what the brothers were doing in Europe during World War II. For better or worse, Dixon’s Kinchloe also presented one of the first African-American television characters who was defined by a more global perspective, an aspect of his career that frames his early success as the Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai in the original stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun.
Dixon’s most stirring role though, would be much closer to home, geographically and politically. Nothing But a Man (1964) directed by then 35-year-old German-born director Michael Roemer, depicts the life of Duff Anderson (portrayed by Dixon), a wandering day laborer, seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood in the poverty stricken American south. Dixon’s wife in the film was portrayed by the legendary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Critic John Nickel suggests that Roemer’s film anticipated the infamous Moynihan Report on the black family, which argues that black families needed to embrace mainstream patriarchy in order be fully integrated into American society. In essence, future US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that black communities were hamstrung by the overarching influence of black women.
Nothing But a Man’s power comes from also locating the impact of joblessness on the lives of black men (Roemer used NAACP field workers to help do research for the film), who felt as though they couldn’t be men in their own households, if they weren’t the primary financial providers in those households. Dixon brought a depth of humanity to this situation, particularly as he seeks out his own absentee father. Though Nothing But a Man lacks much of the nuance that three decades of black feminist scholarship has brought to bear on the dynamics of black gender relationships, the film remains a visual testament to the struggles of black men in the south, just as the Black Power Movement was about to erupt.
The Black Power Movement is full blown, by the time Ivan Dixon made the move to work behind the camera instead of in front of it. Though Dixon had begun to direct television episodes, including The Bill Cosby Show (1970), his first job directing a full-length feature was the little regarded blaxploitation flick Trouble Man (1972), which starred Robert Hooks and featured a now-timeless soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. For his next film, Dixon partnered with novelist Sam Greenlee for a cinematic version of Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which told the fictional tale of the first black FBI agent. In the film, the mild-mannered college-educated Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook), spends five years working at the FBI, essentially making photocopies. When he decides the leave after five years, he uses the expertise he learned in the FBI to equip black and Latino street gangs with the tools to mount insurrections in American cities. Freeman’s mild-mannered radicalism is likely—along with Huey Newton—an inspiration behind Aaron McGruder’s “Huey Freeman.”
The Spook Who Sat by the Door opened in 1973 and was gone from theaters within a week—the film’s distributors United Artist perhaps a little too concerned about Spook’s incendiary message. On the occasion of the DVD release of the film in 2003, Dixon, who also produced the film (raising nearly all of its $1million budget from black investors) told The Crisis that he was blacklisted for about a year after the film’s release—he would later direct several episodes of The Waltons, which in 1974 was akin to Obama winning the Iowa caucus. But he added that the film, “expressed everything that I felt about race.” According to Tim Reid, who with his partner Daphne Maxwell Reid procured the DVD rights to Spook, “we felt this movie was ahead of its time and deserved a wider audience. Even now, it stands out from the crowd in Black cinema.”
Though far too many people will only remember Ivan Dixon for his role on Hogan’s Heroes, Nothing But a Man and The Spook Who Sat by the Door will remain as testaments to Dixon’s critical role in two of the signature moments in African-American cinema.