Two Men in Manhattan

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Deux hommes dans Manhattan
Two Men in Manhattan (1959) Film Poster.jpg
Film poster
Directed byJean-Pierre Melville
Written byJean-Pierre Melville
Produced byFlorence Melville
Alain Térouanne
StarringJean-Pierre Melville
CinematographyNicolas Hayer
Edited byMonique Bonnot
Music byMartial Solal
Christian Chevallier
Release date
16 October 1959 (France)
Running time
85 min
LanguageFrench / English

Two Men in Manhattan (French: Deux hommes dans Manhattan) is a 1959 French film noir directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The film stars Melville (who also wrote the screenplay) and as two French journalists in New York City searching for a missing United Nations diplomat.

Though Melville occasionally played bit parts in films by other directors (most notably as Parvulesco in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless), Two Men in Manhattan was his only starring role and the only time he acted in one of his own films (he served as the off-screen narrator in Bob le flambeur).

Plot[]

After a hard day's work, the reporter Moreau is asked by his boss to find out why Fèvre-Berthier, the French delegate to the United Nations, has suddenly disappeared. Moreau drags out of bed the unscrupulous photographer Delmas, who knows his way around Manhattan at night. Together they visit women the diplomat knew: an actress in a Broadway play, a jazz singer in a recording studio, a stripper in a burlesque show and a prostitute in an expensive brothel.

Stopping off in a bar, they hear from a news flash that the actress has tried to kill herself and is in a hospital. Bluffing their way into her room, they bully the distressed woman into telling the truth: the ambassador is dead in her apartment, presumably from a heart attack. Taking a photograph of her in bed and stealing her keys, they rush to her apartment to find the corpse fully clothed on a sofa. Delmas removes some clothing and puts the body in the bed for a better picture. Calling his boss to say the search is at an end, Moreau is told to keep it all quiet. Delmas wants the money he can make from his pictures, so he pretends to allow Moreau's boss to destroy the rolls of film, but runs off with the real ones.

All night the two have been trailed by a mysterious car whose driver turns out to be the diplomat's daughter. She is desperate to locate her father, a national hero for his role in the Resistance, and to protect her mother. Joining forces with Moreau, the two go to all the magazines and press agencies to find where Delmas could have sold his films. Then they go looking for him in clubs and bars, eventually at dawn finding him in one asleep. Moreau tells him what he thinks of him, knocks him to the floor and leaves with the girl. Coming to, Delmas staggers out and throws the unsold films down a grating, laughing to himself as he walks away.

Cast[]

  • Jean-Pierre Melville : Moreau, journalist with Agence France-Presse
  • Pierre Grasset : Pierre Delmas, photographer
  • Christiane Eudes : Anne Fèvre-Berthier, the diplomat's daughter
  • Ginger Hall : Judith Nelson, the actress
  • Colette Fleury : Françoise Bonnot, the diplomat's secretary
  • Monique Hennessy : Gloria, the prostitute
  • Jean Lara : Aubert, Moreau's editor at Agence France-Presse
  • Glenda Leigh : Virginia Graham, the jazz singer
  • Michèle Bailly : Bessie Reed, the stripper
  • Paula Dehelly : the diplomat's wife

Production[]

The film was shot between November 1958 and April 1959. After the exterior shots were filmed in New York, the interiors were filmed at the Boulogne-Billancourt Studios in Paris from February to April, with several French actors playing American characters. The film was made for 65 million French francs, a significant increase on the budget for Melville's previous hit film, Bob le flambeur. The film is just one of two made in the United States by Melville, a lifelong Americanophile who incorporated American iconography and filmmaking tropes into his work throughout his career.[1]

Release and reception[]

Two Men in Manhattan was Melville's least successful film at the box office, managing just 308,524 seats sold -- less than half of Bob le Flambeur’s ticket sales three years earlier. The film received a mixed critical reception upon its release; Jean-Luc Godard and Cahiers du Cinéma praised its evocative atmosphere and Melville's direction, while Le Monde and L’Aurore criticized it as a boring, poorly written excuse for Melville to indulge his fascination with America. Some of the criticism reflected an overall antipathy to the film's perceived place in the French New Wave filmmaking movement, which began in the late 1950s.[2]

The film received significant positive critical reappraisal after a DVD release in 2013 followed by numerous re-screenings in New York and elsewhere. New Yorker critic Richard Brody described it as a “snappy and streetwise mystery” constructed around “a politically inspired and rigorously principled conflict pitting journalistic candor against what one character calls ‘the prestige of France.’”[3] In The Dissolve, Scott Tobias wrote the film “feels neither French nor American, but some beguiling combination of both,” while praising the film's black-and-white cinematography and its careful examination of the moral dilemma at its center.[4]

References[]

  1. ^ Vincendeau, Ginette (2003). Jean-Pierre Melville, An American in Paris. London: British Film Institute. p. 231. ISBN 9780851709499. Retrieved 6 September 2021.
  2. ^ Vincendeau, Ginette (2003). Jean-Pierre Melville, An American in Paris. London: British Film Institute. p. 117. ISBN 9780851709499. Retrieved 6 September 2021.
  3. ^ Brody, Richard. "What's New on Streaming: "Two Men in Manhattan," a French Film Noir Set in the Streets of New York". newyorker.com. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  4. ^ Tobias, Scott. "Two Men in Manhattan". The Dissolve. Retrieved 7 September 2021.

External links[]

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