Michael Roemer, Maker of Acclaimed but Little-Seen Films, Dies at 97

New York Times

24-05-2025

Michael Roemer, an independent filmmaker who earned critical praise for his keen understanding of character and his sensitive exploration of relationships in a slender portfolio that included 'Nothing but a Man' and 'The Plot Against Harry,' died on Tuesday at his home in Townshend, Vt. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ruth Sanzari.
Mr. Roemer's interest in moviemaking began at Harvard in the late 1940s. In 1939, when he was 11 and living in Berlin, he and his sister had been among thousands of Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany and sent to England. There he would stay — writing plays to improve his English, he said — until he came to the United States in 1945, at the end of World War II.
His career as a director began when NBC gave him the opportunity to make 'Cortile Cascino,' a 46-minute documentary about slum life in Palermo, Sicily, that he made with Robert M. Young. It was also the start of a pattern in which his films would all but disappear for decades at a time.
'Cortile Cascino' depicted a Sicilian life so grim that NBC executives balked at putting it on the air. It did not reappear until it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993.
Long delay also befell 'Nothing but a Man,' directed by Mr. Roemer and written by him and a frequent collaborator, Robert M. Young. With Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in central roles, it tells the story of a Black railroad worker married to a preacher's daughter who struggles to maintain his dignity in the segregated Alabama of the early 1960s.
Mr. Roemer and Mr. Young traveled through the South interviewing dozens of Black people about segregation's impact. For the actual shooting, however, they used locations in New Jersey, fearing hostility from the Alabama authorities.
The movie had a brief theatrical run when it was released in 1964. Many distributors, Mr. Roemer said in a 2024 interview for this obituary, refused to book it in theaters with principally Black audiences.
Soon enough, 'Nothing but a Man' was gone. It wasn't until 1993 that it was rereleased, this time to wide acclaim. A year later it was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.
In 1969, Mr. Roemer wrote and directed 'The Plot Against Harry,' a comedy about a small-time numbers racketeer (played by Martin Priest) who goes to prison and eventually decides to change his ways and become an upstanding fellow. The only problem was that audiences at private screenings did not laugh.
Two decades later, Mr. Roemer decided to make videotape copies of the film for his children. This time, a technician working on the transfer to tape kept laughing as he watched, and the director decided that maybe he had something after all.
'The Plot Against Harry' enjoyed a new life, a theater run and praise. It was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards. Janet Maslin called it 'a funny, sharply drawn and appealingly modest film' in a 1990 New York Times review.
The film critic J. Hoberman described Mr. Roemer in a 2024 interview as 'an empathetic director of actors and an unsentimental humanist, one of the few American filmmakers who shares those qualities with Jean Renoir.'
Other works by Mr. Roemer included 'Faces of Israel, 'a short 1967 documentary; 'Dying,' a 1976 documentary about people near the end of life; and 'Vengeance Is Mine' (1984), a scripted film about mothers and daughters, originally titled 'Haunted,' starring Brooke Adams and Trish Van Devere. In 2022, Wesley Morris of The Times called 'Vengeance Is Mine' 'a masterpiece of direction, nothing too flashy but everything true.'
Despite being routinely praised by film critics and scholars, Mr. Roemer was well aware that appreciation by a much broader audience eluded him.
'I spent the last 40 years of my life writing scripts not made into movies,' he said in 2024, with a laugh. 'After a while, you kind of take a certain pride in not having been a success. I'm simply not a commercial filmmaker.'
Indeed, he said, his most successful work in terms of dollars was 'A Touch of the Times,' an hourlong silent film he made at Harvard. A fantasy about kite-flying, it ran at a movie house in Cambridge, Mass., and earned well more in ticket sales than the $2,300 he had spent making it.
'If I could have made popular films, I would have,' Mr. Roemer told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2023. 'But I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.'
Michael Roemer was born in Berlin on Jan. 1, 1928, into a family whose shoe business provided a comfortable life. His parents, Gerhardt and Paula (Ettinger) Roemer, divorced when he was an infant, leaving him to be reared mostly by a governess (whom he said he found terrifying). Early on, he said, he came to appreciate life's 'unpredictability.'
After moving to England with his younger sister, Marion, in the rescue effort known in German as the Kindertransport, he attended a school whose students were mainly Jewish refugees like him. Once in the United States, he went to Harvard on a scholarship, graduating in 1949 with a bachelor's degree in English.
Six years after coming to America, he was reunited with his mother, and a few years after that he met his father, who had begun a new life in England.
In 1953, the young filmmaker married Barbara Balze, a schoolteacher. She died in 2007. He is survived by his children, Dr. David Roemer, Ruth Sanzari and Jonathan Roemer, and two grandsons.
Soon after college, Mr. Roemer began an eight-year turn as a film editor and production manager for various companies. He then wrote and directed dozens of educational films for the Ford Foundation. Starting in 1966 he taught film theory and practice at Yale, a professorship that lasted until he retired in 2017. 'I was 89 then,' he said. 'I don't think they realized how old I was.'
In a sense, he said in 2024, 'nothing happened in my life the way it was supposed to.' His films, though praised, were not slam-bang successes. But failure, he said, reveals character.
'The truth is, failure can be a very honorable thing,' he told The Washington Post in 1990. 'It's not that you have a failure. It's what you do with it.'