Nigel’s introduction to the screening, in memory of Leslie Brent (1924 - 2019)
As I’m sure you all know we are showing tonight’s film Nothing But a Man in memory of our friend Leslie Brent.
Leslie was one of our most dedicated and loyal members, sitting with his wife Carol in the front row week after week no matter what we were showing. He was a very special person and we miss him enormously.
We’re very pleased that Carol is with us this evening along with some other friends and family.
Leslie lived a remarkable life and we're also raising funds for two charities that he was involved with, the Holocaust Education Trust and the Association for Jewish Refugees.
Thank you very much to those who’ve already donated. If you’d like to help us raise some money in Leslie’s memory you can still donate online.
The reason we’re showing Nothing But a Man is that a few years while we were having dinner together before a film, Leslie asked us if we’d heard of a director called Michael Roemer and his film Nothing But as Man. Leslie told us he’d been to school with Roemer and as we soon learned it wasn’t any old school.
Both Leslie and Michael Roemer were Jewish refugee children who came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport.
Here, they went to the Bunce Court School in Kent which had relocated from Ulm, Germany in 1933 by its founder, an incredible woman called Anna Essinger.
We are also delighted to welcome here this evening Ruth Danson, one of Leslie’s schoolmates at Bunce Court. Who I must say is looking incredibly well aged 95.
Hearing Leslie talk about his childhood led to a Wayne moment I will never forget when he bluntly asked him, “So Brent’s not your real name then?”
Leslie opened up to us more about his personal history and told us that he’d been born in what’s now Poland and his original name was Lothar Baruch.
When Leslie came to film club the following week he gave us a copy of his memoir, ‘Sunday’s Child?’. In it we learned that Leslie’s new English name was actually half-inspired by the movies.
This is from Leslie’s book, writing about when he decided to change his name when he joined the army in 1944.
“I wanted to keep my initials, and there weren’t many first names starting with L that appealed to me. As the actor Leslie Howard was all the rage at the time I settled for that. But what about a surname? I frantically searched through the London telephone directory and came up with Brent; and thus Leslie Brent was born.”
In the book there’s a transcript of Leslie’s contributions to a 1939 radio programme about Bunce Court School in which he says, “Sometimes we go to a picturehouse in Dovercourt. We have seen the good film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. We were all delighted”.
So we know that Leslie had an early appreciation for film.
We did consider showing Snow White instead of Nothing But a Man but thought we’d get a better crowd for this.
By happy coincidence not long after Leslie told us about his schoolboy friendship with Michael Roemer Nothing But a Man was screened at the BFI so Wayne and I both went with Leslie and Carol to watch it. It’s one of many fond memories we both have of spending time with Leslie.
So, to the film...
Michael Romer left Britain after the war, aged 17 and moved to Boston where his mother had escaped and was living with his sister.
He went to Harvard where he became friends with his future Nothing But a Man collaborator Robert M Young.
The film was made in 1963. That’s the same year as John Kennedy sent the Civil Rights Bill to Congress, Martin Luther King led the March on Washington and gave his I Have a Dream speech and four schoolgirls were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
So we are talking about febrile times during the civil rights movement.
And it’s obviously a notable point that we’re about to watch a film that feels so authentic to African-American experience of that time but is written and directed not by black filmmakers but by two Jewish Ivy Leaguers. The truth is that very few films at all were being made by black filmmakers in the early 60s. No one was telling these stories.
It was well-received by the black audiences who saw the film. Malcolm X declared it a favourite and the Nation of Islam newspaper called it a “you-must-see, don’t dare-miss movie… A blood and guts movie of black life as it is, without apology.”
After Harvard Roemer and Robert M Young became documentary makers, often working together. In 1960 they made a documentary called Sit In about the attempts to integrate lunch counters in Nashville.
Jewish people were very visible allies to African-Americans during the civil rights movement. If you know pictures of Martin Luther King on the Selma march you’ll see him arm in arm with rabbis. And Jewish people were also killed alongside blacks in the South by the Ku Klux Klan.
To research what became Nothing But a Man Roemer and Young spent two and a half months travelling and meeting people in the South.
For Roemer, the story he was telling resonated with his own personal history. In an interview about the film he said:
"It was showing how the economic system, the social system, destroyed the most intimate relationships. I saw it happen. It happened to Jews. It happened to my grandfather. He came from a very assimilated family, and they were interrelated with the Prussian aristocracy. Nonetheless, my grandfather was destroyed by everything he had taken away from him. He was a wonderful man. He shrivelled up and lost his identity."
It was impossible to make a film like this in the South with a multi-racial cast and crew so the film was shot in New Jersey.
Roemer gets very low-key, naturalistic performances from the cast. Apparently James Earl Jones auditioned and was dismissed as too bombastic.
It’s a great cast though who all had long careers. Ivan Dixon who plays Duff had a role for years on the American TV show Hogan's Heroes. Abbey Lincoln who plays Josie was a successful jazz singer as well as an actor. The most recognisable face is probably Yaphet Kotto who we last saw in Blue Collar, but you’ll also know from Live and Let Die, Alien and if you have the same excellent taste as me, the greatest TV show of all time Homicide: Life on the Street.
One of the joys of the film is, considering the film’s low-budget indie feel, its remarkable Motown soundtrack which they managed to clear because Motown boss Berry Gordy’s lawyer was a college friend of Young’s.
A bit like Little Fugitive that we showed here last week, this is a wonderful American indie movie that relatively few people have seen.
It’s a deeply humanistic film. Once you’ve watched it, I am sure that those of you who knew Leslie will see why he liked it. “A remarkable film” I think was his review when we saw it together. I hope you all enjoy it too.
