Two Men in Manhattan is as uniquely New York as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon; it just happens to made by the French. Opening with a brassy jazz score — as American an art form as any — un film de Jean-Pierre Melville captures the Big Apple on the brink of Christmas, aka the most wonderful time of the year … unless you happen to be France’s United Nations delegate Fèvre-Berthier.
Absent without explanation for an otherwise unmemorable U.N. vote, Fèvre-Berthier is nowhere to be found, so night-owl journalist Moreau (Melville himself) is tasked with finding him. Taking sleazy photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset, Rififi) as a booze-soaked sidekick, Moreau presumes that Fèvre-Berthier can be located with ease if they can find the man’s mistress, whomever she may be.
One of the most vital artists of cinema’s French New Wave, Melville (Le Samouraï) shoots the black-and-white film with a tourist’s eye — a focused, determined one vs. easily distracted. On the night of Dec. 23, his Moreau and Delmas run all over the City That Never Sleeps, from tavern to bordello, from the warm studio of Capitol Records to the bustling heart of Times Square. Two Men in Manhattan makes for a pleasurable whirlwind of a roundabout, to a point that the picture’s noir mystery seems almost incidental — an excuse to showcase the still-nascent metropolis. It just so happens that our guide, Melville/Moreau, calibrates audiences’ collective moral compass during the excursion. —Rod Lott
I caught this New York-based Melville movie on the web and was impressed. It’s always interesting how Europeans view American cities. They see our society in ways that American filmmakers never capture. Give a camera to an American and to a Frenchman or an Italian, tell them to shoot the same thing, and they will turn in completely different films.
Nicely put! And I wholeheartedly agree.