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Pierre Garce, Welcome to the projection booth.
I'm your host. Mike White joined me once again as miss Sam Degan.
Hello.
Also back in the booth is mister Andrew Leevold.
Great to be back.
This week, we are looking at Jean Pierre Melville's Two Men in Manhattan from nineteen fifty nine, and you'll never believe what it's about. That's right, Two Men in Manhattan. It's a detective story about a missing member of the un who is being tracked down by a journalist and a photographer, but then it turns into a film about loyalty and ethics. We will be spoiling this film, oh, which used to be very hard to find, but now
it's out on Blu ray and DVD. So if you don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen it. We will still be here. So, Sam, when was the first time you saw Two Men in Manhattan? And what did you think?
I don't know the exact year, but I want to say maybe about ten years ago, maybe a little less. I watched every single Melville film and this was indeed very hard to track down, but I instantly fell in love with it. I got to see it in a theater here in New York last summer as part of this Melville retrospective they coincidentally did for my birthday, not on purpose. It just was wonderful timing, but we can pretend. And I think I loved it even more seeing it
more recently. It's definitely not one of his classics, and I don't think people should necessarily start with it, but I absolutely love it, and it's great to see him in a leading role.
Yeah, that is quite a treaty, isn't it, just to have his presence throughout this entire film. And Andrew, how about yourself?
Four or five years ago, when I binge watched all of the Melville films that I'd never seen before, that I conscientiously tracked down and watched almost chronologically, just so I could see each phase of Melville develop and fade into the next one. I'm not as much of a fan of this film as I am of the classic period from Ledusium Suffla onwards, probably because I get a little bored with the story. I find it a little bit too pic are esque, I guess is the term
that I'm scrappling for. It's just a little too procedural for my taste. But I did find rewatching this film last night that there were so many more factors of interest in the film other than just the narrative. It's the whole linkage to Melville's personal story, his preoccupations with cinema, with even with World War two, the pre war era. It's all in there, and it's a very easy film to slip into his permiabler and inhabit for ninety minutes.
Yeah.
I don't remember the first time I saw this one either, And yeah, it was tough to find for a while. I know who is at Cohen Media eventually put it out. They were the only show in town for a little while with that one. The real hard one for me to find was Magnet of Doom. That one took the longest to find, and.
And when you write this letter, so hard to find shit, Yeah, that one did.
I find a beaches of that one. That one was tough as well. But yeah, magnetive Doom. I just remember when I finally tracked that down, it was looked like it was shot off of a bed sheet that somebody had like projected a really pink print of it. Ont it was awful, and of course no subtitles whatsoever. So yeah, I'm glad things have changed and I'm glad that all fourteen of his films are now fairly easy to see,
which is great. And now people keep putting out box sets of his stuff, and I'm like, yes, please more Melville. He doesn't have that extensive of a filmography. Please just keep putting this out, and keep putting out better and better versions. Because watching the print of Two Men in Manhattan that I watched yesterday, oh my god, it is just crystal clear and it looks so good. And those shots of New York are gorgeous. And the interior shots look a little stagy at times, but also crystal clear
and just looks so good. And I love the use of the black and white, and of course I love the vistas of New York City in nineteen fifty nine or fifty eight, whenever this was shot, and just to have that time capsule of those marquees. Sometimes they almost look fake because they're just so well shot, and I'm just like, Nope, this is location. I can tell this is location. But they just the brightness of the lights and everything just looks Oh, just chef's kiss.
The print that's circulating now, the whites really pop out of the black. You know that this is gorgeous cinematography and like you said, a beautiful, perfectly shot time capsule of nineteen fifty eight New York.
Yeah, and it's so crazy how different it looks based on the bootleg file that I first saw almost a decade ago, which was really muddy and washed out, and like you could tell, it was a beautiful film. But getting to see some of these films properly restored or even partly restored, it's such a treasure. And I think with this one it feels like such a love letter to New York obviously, even though all the interiors are of course shot in France, in Paris, in the studio.
But I think so with this you really start to see the changes coming in his career, because the budget for this is bigger than Bubbla Flamber are still not big at the time by French major studio budgetary standards. To your point Andrew earlier about how the plot doesn't really do it for you, I feel like he was not in this to care about the plot in a way.
It's like he just wanted to be able to shoot in New York and it reminds me a little bit of Bubbla flamber in the sense that it's a movie about a guy hanging out in a city who just loves that city, except he's transplanted.
The perfect place to transplant his main characters would be Manhattan. If Babla Flomberg is his loved letter to Montmartre and Pigal, then he found the perfect place in America, the center of vice, the burlesque houses and the strip joints, the upmarket brothels of Manhattan. You know, he's he's found in America, the perfect place to replicate that demimonde that he celebrates in Bubbla Flamberge.
And we have somewhat of a similar beginning too, with the voiceover and the beautiful shots of the city, and we've got those opening credits which are really nice with there we're both in the backseat of a car and going forward, and then we're also in the front seat of the car and going forward and seeing all those credits, I thought that it was all back, but then I
did notice some from the front as well. And then we go into this voiceover talking about, you know, the old gas lights, and we do have some images of gaslights and this whole thing of the United Nations, and it's interesting that he tells a little story about this Irish boy in Italian and a Jew, and it's like these three coming together. The trio neatly symbolized the great glass building on First Avenue, and I was like, oh, oh, it's their own little United Nations.
That's nice.
And I'm like, this is very like you're saying, very similar to Bob la Flambert, where you're visiting a mam matra and going around the streets and then up to Bob's place. I'm like, oh, this is a very nice way to set the stage. And it takes a while
before we really get going here. We get this very beautiful poetic at least according to the subtitles, this whole thing talking about we're at this meeting of the United Nations and they're cleverly using some stock footage, and yet there's one person that's not there, and there was an empty chair there today, And then really becomes this whole mystery what happened to this French diplomat and becomes the whole that's the whole crux of the story is trying
to find this guy, and it's interesting how they find him and then when they find him, where they find him, how they find him, and what they decide to do with the information around that.
Yeah, For as much as it is set in New York and does have that great exterior location photography, this is a film about France and France's political reputation, and I think Melville is often unfairly thought of as being a kind of nationalistic conservative filmmaker. Sometimes, probably because he served in the war and because of his experiences in the resistance and how they show up in his films, was associated more with this kind of old world like
we need to celebrate France's glory type of figure. But he's not really and I think you see it nowhere more clearly than in this film Army of Shadows. Yes, that's a different conversation, but here he's really critical of this French tendency to say, we have to sweep certain problems under the rug and make it seem like they didn't exist, because the most important thing is the reputation of France and how France's reputation is reflected in its
political leaders. And so having this story be focused on the UN which, by the way, first Avenue, I was there a lot last week, it does not still look like this sadly much ugly air. But it's just interesting that even though he set this film in New York in the US, it's not an American story. It's a French story.
Also, look at the timeline of Melville and where this film sits, and this comes out in nineteen fifty nine, the same year as the other key New Wave films made by men who are almost twenty years younger than Melville. Melville as a young man has memories of that pre idealism and the figure of the missing diplomat symbolizes that ideal that he would have looked up to as a
young man. But then twenty years later, after the war and with all of the post war cynicism, he also can see that figure as being a deeply flawed one. As a mature man of late thirties, early forties, he's able to say, yes, this man was a great person, but he was also a woman, as a liar, etc et cetera. So he's able to have a much more
balanced view of that individual. Whereas the young Turks of the New Wave would have been saying, well, let's reject all of that World War II bullshit let's completely forge a new path, all about modernism and deconstruction and so forth. So you can see the schism between Melville's films and the New Wave appearing with this movie in nineteen fifty nine, that this is a film that tackles issues that the New Wave directors don't really want to touch because it's
not part of their milieu. It's not part of this new path that there wanting to forge well.
And I think some of that has to do with the form and the structure of the film, which is much more classical cinema, much more referring back to thirties and forties Hollywood, which the New Wave directors did in a different way. I don't even think it's just the
way that he represents the politician. But it also has to do with the way the story itself unfolds and how the characters are presented as people like these are the two protagonists, a journalist and this wonderfully disreputable photographer. They're middle aged guys, and so you don't really have too many of those early New wave films about middle aged people watching too many of the like nineteen fifty eight, fifty nine, nineteen sixty watching too many of those French
new wave films in a row. It's like these are all about annoying teenagers or like annoying early twenty somethings. So the vibe here is very different.
Yeah, well Melville would have been hanging out with those bita jaded photo journalists journalists, and so he's able to draw from that rather than having his protagonists to these young Brady caricatures.
Really Melville at this point he's still forming his reputation with the Silence of the Sea list if on then yeah, The Terrible Children, bab La Filambert and Babla flan Berry is a crime movie. And then we go back into this one. We've got Lean Moore in Priest, which is definitely not a crime movie. Then they do Lo and it's just we have this reputation of him being this crime director, but there's a really lot of crime in
this film. There's like an attempted crime, I guess you could say with the photographer in the way that he's setting up a scene later on, but when you find out that there's this diplomat who's missing, you're like, oh, well,
there's got to be foul play. He must have had his fingers in something, but that it ends up spoilers being a heart attack that killed him, rather than oh, he was trying to keep this secret, or he had a stash of Nazi gold or something some sort of like crime element to it, because you're following this whole story and you're just like, Okay, we're going from this person,
this person to this person, mostly women. We're just going from woman to woman and a woman, and then eventually we're going to find the diplomat, and then eventually we're going to find No, there was no foul play. No, there is no Nazi gold, there is no reason why he was killed. There's nothing that's secret other than apparently his war record, which than his the one guy has to really put out there and just be like, this guy's a hero. You cannot touch this guy. You should
not be saying anything bad about this guy. Reminded me a little bit of like when Jose Ferrare talks to the guys in The King Mutiny, is just like, oh, you guys got your way.
Huh.
When I was studying the law and mister Keifer here was writing his stories and you were tearing up the playing fields of your old Princeton, who was standing guard over this fat, dumb, happy country ours Eh not us? Oh no, we knew you couldn't make any money in the service, So who did the dirty work for us? Queed did a lot of other.
Guys just the way he reads those guys the riot act, and it's like shaming them, and it feels like the real thing that happens in this movies. They get shamed into doing the right thing, or at least del Mad the photographer gets shamed because Moreau. Interestingly enough, you're talking about where is Melville, Well, Melville the character doesn't seem to be aligned necessarily with Melville the writer director.
Part of why I think of Bubba Flimberg and Two Men in Manhattan as being this kind of double feature is because they both subvert crime and mystery genre tropes. So much like Bubba Flimber on the surface is a heist film, much like on the surface this is a political murder mystery. But the way that he treats the actual crime in both of them, it's like this part isn't important. We are just here to hang out with
these characters. And even though yes, he is very different from the new wave directors, I think with these two films in particular, you can see how much he influenced them and why they looked up to him him as a sort of godfather, because he is taking again those classic thirties and forties mystery and crime tropes and saying, well, what if we made a film with those tropes but turn them completely on their heads. And that's exactly what
Godar does in Breathless. It's yes, there's a crime, and yes there's this young guy who's maybe going to go on some sort of spree, but that's not really the important focus. It's such a weird period in his career, which, like you pointed out, it pretty much all changes in nineteen sixty two with La Dulos, when he really becomes
much more associated with crime in gangster movies. And I just love this period where he's playing around and figuring things out and is much more interested in the connections between people than the actual plots.
I think you could argue that without Bubla Flambeau and Two Men in Manhattan there would be no Breathless, that those films are so so crucial in the language of the New Wave. But where Melville differs from god Art is that he is both a formalist and an experimentalist. That there is this embracing of commercialism and art of
American and also European sort of experimentalism. I think that embracing of both art and commerce definitely it explains all of Melville's films in the sixties and seventies.
Yeah, and I think it connects him the most closely to somebody like Claude Chabral, who those new wave whipper snappers would be nothing without because he wasn't as old as Melville, but he was a couple of years older than the rest of them, or with money from the family that he married into wisely, he was able to help finance a lot of those early new wave films.
But then I think by the mid sixties they started to look down on him because, like Melville, all he cared about was making films, and mostly making films the way he wanted to make them, Like he wasn't. Neither of them were trying to burn the establishment down really, not like Godard. They were just trying to go on an adventure of their own making and do what they wanted to do. And I think they both wound up turning to crime films because that was where they were
able to make money. So it's like you see that in both of them. I think you see this really fascinating blend of an experimental director making the films they want to make that are often passionate projects, but also making films like they're not trying to be anti mainstream, they're just trying to make the films they want to make.
The independent film might be because, yeah, especially especially Melville, who has to build his own studio just to be able to make the kind of films that he wanted to make so ballsy, yeah, and ultimately he wanted to make films like The Asphalt Jungle, so he venerated John Houston.
In the way that Chabrol venerated Hitchcock. And it's because of that embracing of mainstream Hollywood that put them in to do paraeters of the New Waves. They were independent of schools of thought such as the New Wave that were very didactic in their approach. These guys just wanted to make films because they loved cinema, not because they wanted to make a political statement.
The more you watch these films as you age, I think it's so easy to see young Godard and Truffau as suffering from the typical twenty something problem where you're so convinced you're right, whereas I think with Melville and Chabral they were just like, yeah, I'm here to make films. I don't need to be right. I don't need everyone to agree with me. I just want to make something
beautiful and poetic and also entertaining to watch. And I think with Two Men in Manhattan, he's still really reminding you that he is an independent filmmaker and was really and I think it's easy to forget this, but was really the first person making independent films in France outside the studio system, and it is frustrating to see them push back. And like, the reception to Two Men in
Manhattan was not great. I think the mainstream French audience thought, why is this guy making a movie about Americans who cares like we want French films, even though it's clearly a story about France and French people, And even the New Wave was kind of like, yeah, it's fine. And decades later, I think people started to see it for being as interesting as it is, but it's like, this is still a young independent filmmaker in what is basically
the first decade of his career. He's having a good time. He's in New York to solve a ministery.
Was that a Ghostbuster's reference?
We've been going about this all wrong.
This mister Steve buff is okay, he's a sailor. He's in New York.
We get this guy laid.
We won't have any trouble.
He's working things out as any good experimentalist, as any true auto would, and he's working with what would appear to be competing aesthetics documentary style, handheld footage, more formal studio bound sets, and obviously, to some people who were bound up in the new rules of the New Waves, that was not fitting the rule book. The competing styles
were not hip enough. That Melville was also embracing American culture and all of the signposts and signifies that he embraced as a sinophile, he was embracing rather than rejecting or deconstructing and reconstructing. Has got outward of I think his playfulness was seen as a kind of growing heresy among the young turks of the New Wave movement.
No, he definitely is having a good time and being the star of his own movie. I guess he knew that he could rely on himself. But he does a great job in here, I have to say, And I really like him as a protagonist and kind of being the good half of this group between him and del Martin. But I have to say that the gentleman that plays delmat is just spectacular, especially when he has more of his crisis of conscience later on.
But just such a.
Louse, just the oh, yeah, no, I left my camera at home and then he's like, oh, what's this doing here in the car? Well it it's got to have a camera around, and the way he sneaks in the camera and that package later on, and I'm just like, wow, this is really a precursor to the paparazzi, where this guy is just about having these photographs, And especially when he's photographing that poor girl who's changing at the strip club. Oh, I'm like, come on, buddy, what the hell are you doing?
And she doesn't say a word. I think she might be the worst actress in this movie, or whoever's dubbing her is the worst actress.
But the worst actress is the bordello madam. She is just dreadful, and even she has to be dubbed into French.
Yeah, I don't think the dubbing here is doing it anyone any favors any any of the female actors anyway.
They're just clothes horces. Really, they're signposts for the various vices that the missing person has. Befallen too, the neon signposts for the film. This is burlesque, this is prostitution. Even as secretary as a lesbian, she's involved in kind of vice as well.
Yeah, I noticed that whole lesbianism thing. I was like, whoa, where did this come surprising? And then you've got those weird jokey moments with the nosy neighbor that Delma has and the way that Melville's kind of taunting her a little bit. I'm like, okay, yeah, all right, this works. No, yeah, that was a little clunky, but yeah, I was okay with that. This whole movie, there are different levels of clunkiness.
Like we've brought up. The whole cinematography looks gorgeous. I think everything looks beautiful, but yeah, I think just the pacing and then like you're saying, it's like the women just being these objects that they're trying to get information out of and winding their way along. It's that's a little difficult at times.
And I think this is the classic Melville problem that a lot of people wring their hands about, is how he treats the women characters in his films, which is usually their signposts or signifiers that just represent something pointing back to a different male character. And I think I'm so used to it because I just keep watching his films that it maybe doesn't bother me in a way that it did at first. And I also think where this is placed, it's not like those later films where
there aren't as many female characters. This is right in the same kind of window as Leon Moran Priest, which has one of his greatest and most well rounded female characters. But it is really interesting that they're basically trying to
investigate this guy's life. They can't find out too much about it because of the nature of his role in politics, and so they're going through these snapshots of different women he's involved with, and it does remind me of the sort of older pulpy novels where you're just you have a detective of a reporter surrounded by dames, Like everyone in this movie is a dame basically.
Well, I think there might be a couple broads in here as well, and maybe a chick, but definitely, yeah, a lot of dames.
Maybe, except for his daughter, who's the only slightly more rounded sympathetic character because she's a little bit she's aware. She's not living in the same narrow bubble all the other women characters are living in.
Yeah.
Well, the wife is a paragon of virtue. The wife is completely clueless, therefore a very one dimensional character. Like you said, the daughter has a lot more depth to her. But then the rest of the women are all, I would suggest, fluosies, even more so than dames. They're floozies.
There's a variety of flus happening here.
There's one woman who's a literal prop she's just as in Delmar's bed, and that's all.
She's just in the bed.
And then there's a part later on where Melville or Moreau is coming back to look for del Mob because he's got the film. He's taking the compromising photo that he's staged of the diplomat after they find him, and he's trying to track them down. So instead of it being like shoe la femmee. Now suddenly it's lame and goes back to his apartment. And I swear the woman's still in bed. I could be wrong, but.
It's like, no, I think she's still in bed.
Still in bed, Okay, So yeah, she's just there. He never interacts with her, We never see her, she never stands up or anything. Yeah, it's very very interesting the.
Way that maybe it's her day off. Let the woman lounge in bed. Plus she probably has a hangover.
They's hung over.
Yeah, because he throws her a bottle book where he takes off and goes out to talk with the landlady or the nosy neighbor.
That's her one act. Yeah, Hair of the Dog and this takes place. I have a one night so you know, let the woman leap in for God's psych I do really like that.
I like how we start.
We start with the morning, and then we get that transitional shot after they introduce the un and we go tonight and then yeah, this whole movie is in darkness until the very end of it when we finally come out and have the everything looks different in the light of day kind of thing. And I also noticed that there's a lot of record players in here, and they
talk about how things are being transferred to vinyl. In that un scene when we go into del miles apartment, we follow the cord along until we get to the record player, and then of course when they finally do find the diplomat, you've got that great sound on the soundtrack of the record having been run out. I don't know if Lynch was a fan or not, but I mean it so reminded me of the death of Madeline Palmer and just the incredible use of that chunk chunk kud chunk as the record has run out.
It's all part of capturing Melville's various fetishes, one of them being American cinema, but also American culture, and a big part of that would have been American music.
Oh yeah, the jazz scorer on this, yeah, and jazz.
Being one of those sort of signifiers of the underworld, along with prostitution and burlesque and so on. So I think really jazz and all of its various instruments, including the record players that it's played upon, are all part of the film's DNA, so deeply part. And of course you've got the same guy doing the soundtrack, who then goes on and is part of Goddard's Breathless God. I would have been taking notes, going, who's this guy if he didn't know him already.
Melville's only other real major although I'm putting major in air quotes here major acting role is for good Dart. So he was clearly worshiping at the altar of Melville a little bit here, as he should have been.
Yeah, and then that interesting fact that you've got the close up of the cigarettes, and it's like, oh, this was Gordaara's cigarette brand, So I'm throwing him a bone here.
It's cute.
It is cute.
He was, Yeah, he was so supportive of them.
I know.
And then they turned on him like a bunch of animals.
Like a bunch of Brady children, after milking him.
I don't know if I want to think about them milking him, And.
His expression would have been exactly the same as it was all the way through this film, a kind of dead fish eye stare, but also bemused.
He's great at having these very subtle expressions, and I think part of why he and Pierre Gressey play so well off each other is for a lot of the film. You're never really sure if Morou Melville's character is the same type of person as the photographer, or if they're just friends and he's ignoring his friends more questionable morals. And I think it comes out the most in the last twenty minutes or so. But just their chemistry together is great, and it's a shame that pure Grasse wasn't
really in that many films. But his first biggest role is in Rafffee, which I assume is why he was cast in this, again playing off that exchange between American crime cinema and literature and French so much back and forth.
Here.
Grasse was also slated to play the main role in a spy film that Melville wanted to make between Bubbla Flomburg and Two Men in Manhattan that didn't happen for one reason or another. So he was very much on Melville's radar, And I think, like he said, I think Melville wished that he had have made Raffefe and probably and wanted that cultural cachet that Grasse would have provided from his his link with Rafffee.
Without Refuffee, you don't get certain scenes in Babbla Flemberg. You don't get certain scenes in Loudulos or Ludusiamsufla like, it's just so incredibly influential. But I also one of my favorite things about Melville is I think, unlike directors in more recent decades, Melville never seemed like he was
trying to squirrel away his influences. He would always happily refer to them in his films, talk about them, and it seems like, especially with Two Men in Manhattan, he gives off this vibe that he's viewing cinema and maybe
even culture as this kind of interconnected web. And even though I think you could call him an auteur director, he just has this kind of flexibility with those influences he's borrowing in this sort of fake universe where France to the United States are meshed and melding together.
It's just I just love him.
He's the best.
Well, they certainly do mesh in Melville's imagination. Yeah, and all of those films that he would have been consuming with a rabid passion while he was in London during the war and catching up on the previous ten years worth of black and white cinema from Hollywood, and then watching the new wave of noir films coming out of Hollywood in the fifties. That's very much his cultural landscape, and so he's picking elements out of that and reconstituting it.
Melville style cinema for him is just a constant dialogue between himself and his influences, and those influences would have been cinematic giants Lake John Houston.
But I think it also connects back to just what's going on with film noir more broadly, which is, if you think in more classical academic definitions, film noir is a distinctly American thing, but so many of the key directors were Europeans who were driven there by World War One world War Two, and so to me it has that very similar thing that you were just talking about, this kind of dialogue. He's just picking up the torch and continuing on with that, especially in his work in
the sixties. But I think Two Men of Manhattan really looks forward to those films.
I'm just amazed that they were able to pull off this American French co production, and I thought it was very clever the way that you mentioned how they exteriors are all New York interiors are all set bound inside of France and just that blending of those things and where your actors are and just having the two men just being your main people that are outside and inside. We're talking about how kind of useless the women characters are,
except for maybe the daughter. And yeah, I just found that interesting that the name of the movie is just Two Men in Manhattan. That's such a simple, simple title. Just this is what it is, and we're really paying attention to this, these two men and their relationship with each other as well as the outside world.
Well, they're also the only two characters who are able to cross into different worlds. Everyone else, both the female characters and the other male characters, are generally confined to set worlds, whether that's the world of the un and politics, whether it's the world of the higher ups like his bosses at the newspaper, whether it's the world of the diplomat's family who are in this upper middle class, very
cushy existence. And maybe the daughter knows that these other things exist, but she doesn't actually go into those worlds in the same way. And so seeing them traverse all these different social landscapes, I think is a really fascinating part of the script. At least for me.
Well, yeah, it's like we go from the Mercury Theater, which I'm wondering if that's supposed to be a Wells reference, because really the structure of this seems so Citizen Kane to me, with the way that we're investigating this dead man. They don't know that he's dead, but they're investigating this dead man basically, and rather than finding the sled, they're looking for the right woman when it comes to this stuff. They go right from that over to the recording studio,
the Capitol recording studio. We've got the torch song singer and her thing that's going on. And then I think pretty soon thereafter we go to that brothel that you were talking about, and yeah, just the entree. I love how Duma is like, oh Victory Virginia Graham, she's going to be recording at the Capitol tonight. We need to
go over there. And then I think it's I think it's Melville who is an or is it the other actor that calls the the fscale brothel and has they have that card, the Eddie card, which they just keep showing like you gotta spell it out, say the name when you call and that's like the code word in order to get into the brothel.
Yeah, it's a.
Great slice of all these different little social universes in New York and also connects back to that joke at the beginning, how these different types of people are coming together. They overlap and interact sometimes, but they don't really come together that much like this is I think, in some ways one of his most political films, just in terms of how he's showing these un politicians and these issues of class with the New York City and how that impacts the French main characters.
But it's also how it impacts it's his script. It's his series of boxes that he's ticking one by one. We get to show the Mercury Theater, and I think it is a very deliberate reference to Wells as well as the script being and not to Citizen Kane. I think that he wanted jazz in there. And so you've got the jazz studio, you've got the burlesque house, you've
got the strip show. You you have a whole series of checks and Melville is just ticking them off in this film, one by one in a very methodical way. And I think that's his own personal procedural is making sure that you get as many of his obsessions catalogued in the film one by one.
He is a very methodical filmmaker.
Yeah, that pays off with something like this, where every piece fits into another, piece fits into another. It's just this is the definition of a procedure of we went here, we started to hear, got this information, we moved on
it here. Even when it comes to the daughter character, the way that she's introduced, I thought that was very clever, The way that Melville's Moreau character going into the one guy's office as she's coming out, and the way that she four grounds comes right up towards the camera and stops there. So we get a great look at her and we know that she's somebody very special, because otherwise we would just at the end of the movie we'd
be like, who the hell's this? They give us that nice close up, and she's.
Also wearing that leopard fur coats. You know you missed her. It's practically slapping you in the face.
Yeah, there are great clothes in here, as there are in all of Melville's films. He is very very deliberate, very meticulous, very methodical, Like does not have a casual detail anywhere.
He's wearing a piece in this right, I think, so he's gotta be I would think, because this is right before Breathless and he doesn't have that much hair and Breathless.
Yeah, maybe those two years made it, or that year made a big difference.
Maybe the savaging by the critics made him tear all his hair out.
And I don't understand why there was so negative about this. It's just like, Okay, I didn't think it was terrible. I didn't think it was the best Melville I've ever seen. But I would rather have middling Melville compared to some great buildings by other filmmakers, because his garbage is better than other people's classics.
Totally agreed. It's the critics, by and large don't like things that are new or different, don't really like things that are experimental, and this does have a very casual attitude to its crime story. And so I think if you go into this thinking, oh, we're going to watch a crime film about this reporter investigating a missing diplomat, Melville's like, actually, we're just here to chill. There's no scandal twist at the end. This guy's just a regular CD politician.
Nothing special about him. He's just yet another womanizer.
And yet critics say that lackadaisical approach to the material as amateursh and he was coold and am which is so frustrating.
The thing that I dislike or I feel bad for Melville is that he really seemed to take it personally. Like the interviews about this, he seems very very guarded and very quiet about this film, where it's like, no, be proud of your work. But I think he ties everything to the critical and box office. Those are your scorecards right when you are a director. But it's like, no, it should be the satisfaction of making these things rather than it just being about the money or the critical reaction.
Because of where this comes in his career, he has to care about the money because bab La Flambert does really well in the box office and has a smaller budget than Two Men in Manhattan, and because that does so well, it allows him to get a bigger budget. And so I think he saw the critical failure of this film and the lower box office receipts as the sort of panic inducing like what if I don't get to make more films? So I understand it, but it
is frustrating. But of course it led to The Amoran Priest and Ludulos after this, which are two of his greatest films.
All right, we're going to take a break and we'll be back with an interview with Jennette Vincent Due, the author of Jean Pierre Melville and American in Paris. Right after these brief messages.
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I figured let's start with some familiar territory, because we've talked about Jean Pierre Melville many times, and I would love to get kind of your thoughts on where Two Men and Manhattan really fits into his filmography.
I want to say thank you for asking me to talk about this film, because I realized I hadn't seen it for a very long time, and so I watched it last night and what an interesting and very odd film it is. I think that the best way to place it in Melville's career is to say it's a kind of hybrid and transitional film because he made it
in nineteen fifty nine. Fifty eight came out in fifty nine, so in French cinema were in the middle of the arrival of the New Wave, and the films that Melville had done previously, especially Bobb Loflamberg in nineteen fifty six his gangster movie, were very much admired by new wave filmmakers, and so he was a kind of model for the new wave in that respect as somebody who worked as
an independent filmmaker and didn't belong to the mainstream. When we look at Two Men in Manhattan, what struck me particularly looking at it last night is in many ways it is a new wave film because it's shot on location. There's a lot of location shooting in Manhattan, as the title announcers. There are of course indoor scenes which are
shot in studio. But nevertheless, what is striking from the very first image of the film the credit sequence, is kind of night shots of Manhattan and traveling through the city, the darkness, the lights, the cars, the taxis, and the kind of New York iconography of the buildings, the taxis and so on. And then the end of the film again we are also on the streets of New York
in the morning. So the film has taken us through a whole night where there's two characters, one of them played by Jean Pierre Melville himself, looking to sort of a particular mystery, the disappearance of a French diplomat. It's very much like we are in the city of New York in Manhattan, and Melville really indulges in a way in a sort of love letter to New York. It's a film with a lot of jazz music. It's a film that really adores the city of New York and
takes us through it. At the same time, it has a lot of indoor shooting, but also on this kind of love letter to Manhattan, to American culture, diners, restaurants, jazz clubs, taxis and so on. The theater we've taken through, theater, nightclubs, kind of a lot of cultural icons of New York. And then in the middle of it, Melville puts a story that has to do with the French resistance during the Second World War, and that in a way is very much important to Melville's interests me in a sense,
American culture and the resistance. You might say, oh, the two things he was most interested in, and American cultural and American cinema. Of course, so he manages in that film to combine the two. But it's by no means an obvious mixture. And when the film came out, it
was didn't do very well. People very puzzled by it and didn't like it, and even the people who had worshiped me little before, like go down and reference on there, suddenly they lost interest and people thought the film was odd, was awkward, was badly made, was a kind of too hybrid in a way. So I think it's it's that today. To me seeing it today, it's fascinating precisely because of
those different corners of the culture that come together. But certainly at the time it didn't do very well, and I think it's for that reason, and it's because the film did very badly at the box office and critically as well, that Melville decided to change his filmmaking And after that film he decided to make films that would be more mainstream, to use big stars, and he made a film with Jean Paul Bernmondeau, for example, Leon moo En Pretre, and then started that the series of films
that have made him very famous, of those great film noir and thrillers that he made in the nineteen sixties. Too Many in Manhattan is, if you like, is the transition between the work he did in late forties and fifties or kind of experimenting with different kinds of films, different kind of projects as an independent filmmaker, and then in the sixties moving on to films that do are extremely innovative and original but fitted within the genre of
mostly the police film or the thriller. So that film Too Many in Manhattan is really it's a kind of pivotal moment between those two main phases of his career.
Last time we taught, we discussed Army of Shadows, and we've talked in the past about the role of women in Melville films and the importance of Siemontaigneur and Army of Shadows. Not very many important women are really well portrayed women, I would say, in Two Men in Manhattan, but maybe the exception of the daughter character.
You're absolutely right in one sense. You might say this is true of his films in general, and as you pointed out, films like I'm in a Shadow and so on. His of course, his thrillers like The Samurai or Le Circle Rouge the Red Circle, women are even more marginalized. In Too Many in Manhattan. A Melville plays a journalists called Moro who works for a Jean Franz Press for
the French news agency in New York. They discover Diplomatis disappeared, so they're looking for him, and he takes as his acolyte a photographer, but a photographer who works as a kind of scandal sheet and is out looking for a scandal, and they decide to pursue their quest for this man whose disappear through meeting women who've been associated with him, who were his mistresses. So one is an actress in the theater, one is a singer, and so on, and one was in is an escort prostitute.
And there is.
A mysterious car that follows them through the night, and we only realize at the end that it is the disappeared man's daughter. So yes, she's important, but on the other hand, she's hardly seen most of the time, so she she has an important role narratively, but actually on the screen what you see all those men and when they have interaction with the theater actress, perhaps the most important one, they're fairly brutal with her, especially the photographer.
You know, in a way, it fits within Melvie's kind of hyper masculine universe, and and that kind of true whether you're talking about the army in the shadow, so a resistance movie, or or you're talking about films about contract killers like Samurai or etc. The only there is one exception in Melville's work where a woman has an important role, and that is Leon moreen Prete, which he made after Two Men in Manhattan, and that is because it's based on a novel written by women who it
is mostly autobiographical. And although the priest is of course the title of the film, and he's played by jap Paul Belmondeau, who's obviously is big star at the time, she the woman who's played by Eminela, she also has very important She has a much more important role than
any woman in any other Melville film. But in Two Men in Manhattan we are in that kind of fill noir territory where the narrative is driven by men and the women are in a way, you know, there is a sort of fan fatale element, but it's very muwe and really marginal to the film.
There's a lot of talk of the past and too many in Manhattan. They you know, obviously it's coming out in fifty nine shot and fifty eight. They talk a lot about the war and the resistance. But then there's discussion kind of towards the beginning where they're talking about longing for nineteen twenty five and the warring twenties. What was going on at that point in French history that they would long for that was it just because it was the time before the war?
Yes?
Probably, I think so. I mean I think there is that line, but it applies to be the photographer, who we given to understand is a kind of fairly dis character. I think to me, the film is more looking back at the war and the resistance and what it does
with it. I think, like the Army in the Shadows in a much more major way, is to present the resistance kind of great ideal, a kind of a mythology, is really a very much idealistic and it fits within what French historians have called the resistentialist myth that the idea that what characterized French people during the German occupation
was resistant. Whereas, of course we know and we certainly has been very well documented now that you know, the majority of people were not in the resistance, know whether necessarily fascist or Nazis, but the kind ofway in the
middle and didn't do very much. But a film made in nineteen fifty eight fifty nine is just after the return of General de Goal in power on the French political scene, and sas he came back in fifty eight and so he was the president, and his return is often seen as rekindling, if you like, the interest in the resistant, because the Goal really embodied the resistance and when at the end of Two Men in Manhattan, when we are the head of the French news agency and says,
you know, you cannot show this man. So we learn that he has died in his mistress's flat, but this must not be shown because he's a great hero and you cannot debase his memory by showing him dying in
this kind of vulgar way. In a way, this is Melville also showing that this great myth of the resistance is also a manufactured thing, that it is an invention to some extent, or a great construction by the media, and so and what his film does is to demonstrate that kind of construction, that yes, this man was a great hero, but this heroism must be maintained at all costs, and he mustn't be shown to be just an ordinary
man who dies in his mistress's flat. So I think Melvin is very aware of all that, and he to me he's torn between loving that myth and loving the past and himself having been in the resistance, and at the same time being fully aware that it is a construction.
And that is what the film does. And I think possibly the very negative this is something we can see better with a greater hindsight and possibly in nineteen fifty nine when the film came out, the kind of generally the negative reaction was so to people not understanding why he was bringing that back into the picture.
Well, to see those New York scenes, kind of like with Magnet of Doom, to see America, to have Columbia the logo come up at the beginning, it was like, oh, I'm not used to this with a Melville film.
Yes, so Columbia distributed the film. Obviously, you mentioned Magnet of Doom, La Felle Liney de fair Show, which was like a love letter to a different kind of America. And then this is New York and he was looking at an interview Merrill gave about it and saying, this, it's very dark, because that was the reality of New York at the time. This is, you know, in Paris was much lighter. It's more light about and and it is very dark, but it's very evocative. I think it.
I really enjoyed watching it. I think those scenes are very beautiful, you know, and and the music and everything it's it's I was quite surprised looking at the reviews at the time, which tend to make it sound like Oh, it's a very dull film, I thought.
I was.
I really don't think it's dark. I think it's it's we can tell that they're taking their time over this. There's not a great urgency to find this man. It's just like an excuse to take us through all these different cultural places, so we you know, from the United Nations to the Mercury Theater, which you know, every place
that he chooses is is culturally coded. It's it's it's not just any theater or you know, and and of course his great love of American cinema and jazz music, so it's kind of all comes together really.
All right.
We were back and we were talking about two Men in Manhattan, and between this actually being a Christmas movie, which is barely mentioned, they have the shots of the ice skaters at thirty Rock, and they've got some neon stuff, and then you see the Salvation Army people out there, and there's a little is it God Bless you marry gentlemen I think comes up on the soundtrack very quickly.
I kept thinking, and especially with all of the beautiful shots of Manhattan, I kept think of Alan Barn's Blast of Silence, which is more in that crime you but it's so fascinating, and I think it's just two years after this, and it's like, if you want to see beautiful shots of New York City in the late fifties early sixties, and double feature of those two films would really scratch that itch.
Yeah, that's such a wonderful film. I got to see that on thirty five millimeter in November early December that and the screening was this is at the beginning of the Christmas season, and I definitely have a love for movies that are incidentally Christmas films where it's not part of the plot, but it's clearly taking place during the Christmas holiday. And that one I think is way more grim than this.
Oh yeah, just thinking about Larry Tucker and his bird and all that, it's interesting that it's that one is much more for me anyway, a story about men and just like how men are supposed to be in the way that men act. And it is interesting though that it's also about the way that men fuck each other over.
And then you have that whole thing and two men in Manhattan, which you know I mentioned at the beginning, like a whole The whole thing comes down at the end to this photo that del Mat takes, and then it's trying to find him, trying to get the film. But it's really interesting how they just suddenly changed the narrative to now del Ma is that person who's being pursued and the person you now need to convince you're going to be doing the wrong thing if you publish this photograph.
Yeah, but it seems like he genuinely cares about Moreau's regard and even though like there's something about their relationship that makes it hard for me not to create a backstory in my head about how maybe they served in the war together or something like the way that they go about their jobs and the way that they work together makes it seem like they have a kind of rapport and maybe even the way of working together that doesn't quite fit into the context of where and how
they're working while the actual narrative of the film is happening. I think I've seen Moreau as reminding Delma like, we are in civilized society now, and there is a way to behave and not to behave, Like this is not the resistance anymore, and if you have actual moral codes and stick to them, your life will be better, and
so will the lives of the people around you. But while I agree that Blast of Silence is much more about these male characters, I think even in that film, their masculinity is defined, especially the protagonists, defined by his interactions with women and what he sees are maybe his failed interactions or discipline pointed interactions, and seeing that level of frustration, I think is what makes it feel a lot darker than two men in Manhattan where they're just
hanging out living their lives. They're not going through like the two main characters are not going through any kind of crisis. They're just trying to solve a mystery because it's their job.
The way that the main character and Blasts of Silence interacts with women and can't really get a grip on things, I can really see Ham informing like a Travis Pickle again with great, totally great shots of New York. Another one where it's just like a love letter to the seedier side. Gosh, like you can feel the dirt of when you watch Taxi Driver, and I feel like you can get that dirt under your nails too when you're watching Blasts of Silence.
Absolutely in a way that you don't through two men in Manhattan.
No, No, it's a very clean world. Even though they're in the brothels, the burlesque theaters and all those, it does and feel like we're in a used world that feels like Mola, feels like sets, and it feels like we are in a very very clean place.
That's how Bubbla Flember is too.
Though.
Even though you see some of those grungy characters on the periphery of the film, Bob is the one who very much sets the moral tone and who polices the morality. And he is at heart a gentleman. And even though he's staying up until eight in the morning gambling and has.
That fucking slot machine supartment best best thing in any movie, he still is he himself is not grungey in that way, like he has this very clear moral code.
Well not only does he have a moral code, but he's got a moral compass through the police inspector. So the way that you're talking about Moreau and del Matt reminds me of Ledrux and Montague, the way that he's that Jimmy Crickett on his shoulder kind of thing, just like hey stand in the street, oh, yeah, like, and that's very much del mont Moreau to Duma, where it's
just like, what are you doing? And then yeah, you kind of get that little maybe it's a little heavy handed later on in the film, where it's just like.
Do you know what kind of guy this is?
And how he parachuted into Paris and or parachuted into France and he got a broken leg and then they had to parachute again blind a couple months later, And I'm like, this is basically the main character from Memory of Shadows that we're talking about here. This is the Leno Ventura character. But talking about him all these.
Years before that is funny to think about that different versions of characters that appear throughout his films, because there are a couple of recurring ones, and it feels like, I think this is what we were talking about earlier about how he's so deliberate and meticulous and formalist. I think because he's working through these obsessions and these fascinations and these character types, you can see how they change over time as he ages and the further he gets away from.
The war and the further he masters his craft. I don't think that the Jean Pierre Melville of nineteen seventy three would be making Two Men in Manhattan look anything like this, or even concentrate on the same things. When it comes to the script, I really feel like this is that entry point. Entry point. I think Andrew, you brought up the whole idea of like, don't make this one of your first ones watch. I completely agree with that.
This is much more of a It's like for people like us that we want to watch every single one of these films and we hit this one where she's like, oh, yeah, really good. But I don't think that a normal person would come to this movie and be like, oh, I have to see everything that this guy has done. Maybe they can see what we see, but I don't know. I don't know if a brand new person to Melville comes in and sees this and goes, oh, this guy
has something really important and really necessary to say. For us, yes, we definitely see that and hear that and can compare it see it within the whole body of work. But yeah, I don't know how a new would handle a movie.
This like this.
Well, maybe if we strap them to a chair and tape their eyelids open and make them watch it a couple a dozen times, and the.
Next time they hear jazz, they'll just plots.
Or even the scraping of a needle at the end of a record Avlovian response.
Immediately, all right, we're going to take another break and play a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
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On the Beach so powerful, so bold, so vividly realistic, only these great talents can do just to its shattering them. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, and a sensational news star Donna Anderson, five stars under the aegis of producer director Stanley Kramer. Together they give you On the Beach, a motion picture milestone.
If you never see another motion picture in your life, you must see On the Beach.
That's right, We'll be back next week with a look at Stanley Kauffman's On the Beach. Until then, they want to my co host Sam and Andrew. So, Andrew, what is the latest with you?
Sir.
Two weeks ago. I got back from West Africa after making a feature film, not a documentary but a Feach film, this time about an Australian jerk going to West Africa to make a Kung Fu remake of the Heart. They come with little people. So I'll be touring that around North America and you're probably second for twenty twenty five. Hope to see you there.
Oh wow, I didn't realize there was going to be that soon. That's fantastic.
Oh, we're madly editing right now and we're looking at the premiere in August twenty twenty five, so I'll be running around banging the can very very soon after that.
Well, I will be sure to set up a special episode where we get you on and have you talk about the movie.
Oh, Mat, I can't wait to show you because, like I was saying before, you and Stam are pretty much my audience.
I think we'll have a lot to talk about. And Sam, what's going on in your world?
Nothing nearly as exciting as Andrews. I guess I should shout out my podcast ersplus Massacre, which I took a little bit of a break because I dealing with wintertime burnout, but I am back. Things I've worked on that have been announced recently, Arrow did this Japanese v cinema box that is for pre order right now. I contributed a video essay to that. It's really, really an amazing labor of love that you should check out. Also, Radiance recently
put out Sasian Suzuki's Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. I contributed a commentary to that. And all I do is work, So we could be here for a while with me listing commentaries, but I'll stop at those two.
Sam, when is our commentary? And the release of the Seventh Curse coming out?
That should be out soon. It has been announced it's Seventh Curse and which from DePaul as a double feature from Vineger Syndrome. Yeah, that should be out soon. I'm always the last person to know when things have actually been officially announced. Often I know because people on Instagram tag me and things and I'm like, oh, good to know this is finally out.
Well, thank you so much folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on there. All available at weirdingwemedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over the world.
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To Okay, I'll be back in a minute