Two Men In Manhattan. 1959

I’ve been thinking a lot about this odd little  84 minute Jean Pierre Melville film that I saw the other night that is set in a nocturnal 1958 New York City right before Christmas and where all roads seem to lead to and from Times Square. The story follows two Frenchmen a reporter and a photographer, both old friends, sometimes not in agreement, but here they are on assignment from a French news agency to find a missing French delegate to the United Nations. All they have to work with are photographs of the guy with 4 of his mistresses, a jazz singer, a striper, an actress and a call girl,  performers all, and off they go in their snazzy overcoats into the inky black night of Manhattan to find them and hopefully the missing diplomat. The reporter Moreau who is righteous is played by the director himself with his sad face, dark rimed eyes and bow tie and the photographer Pierre Delmas is played by Pierre Grasset who has a big drinking problem and a steady lack of morals, a paparazzi before the term was invented who thinks nothing of snapping photos of unaware bare breasted strippers in their dressing rooms and attempted suicides in their hospital beds. Melville who is known for his French crime thrillers and love of American movies combines the two in an uneasy but provocative Noir assemblage, with on location footage of Manhattan mixed in with interior scenes later filmed back in Paris. These interiors have the look and feel of Paris (with the exception of Delmas’s dump) more than New York with their baroque and rococo furnishings and cramped spaces, they look like sets in a play and Melville films them head on which adds even more  to the theatrical feel of these scenes, while his beautiful flowing nighttime scenes of the city flow and move. There are scenes on the subway, on 5^th avenue lit up with Christmas lights, and holiday shoppers, skaters in Rockefeller Center, a busy street in Brooklyn also lit up for Christmas and above all Times Sq. We get to view the interviews with the diplomat’s girlfriends along with his lesbian secretary who lives of course in Greenwich Village. All of them are dubbed and this adds to the strangeness of their scenes, which are also strangled by the lousiness of their performances. But so what. These are portraits that you might find in a thrift shop anyway so it doesn’t really matter how bad and mad these ladies are. The actress is performing at the Mercury Theatre (a big hug from Melville to Welles) in a production that looks like something you might see at a summer camp for ambitious young teens who long to act, sing and dance. The Jazz singer who is actually quite good is interviewed at a Capitol Records recording session that looks like it was filmed in a garage, the prostitute hiccupping Marilyn, Jayne and Mamie and works at an Asian themed whore house that Von Sternberg would have killed for, and the stripper who is black, nasty and disliked by the other strippers and does her thing in a flea bag strip joint out in Brooklyn that has a very aggressive bouncer on the payroll. None of them give our Frenchy’s much help but offer the audience some good little works of art compressed in shadow boxes of interiors with wonderful details, a pin up of Liz Taylor tapped to a wall, scandal magazines, cigarette packs, late 50’s decor and furniture, a diner that is said to be an exact replica of the one that James Whitmore hovered over in “The Asphalt Jungle.” Who knows if that’s true but at the counter are some good types, an orthodox Jew, (or so he seemed to me) a cop off duty chowing down his food, a young boy smoking a cigarette who gets hell from the cop and a drunk who is aggressive and comical at the same time, the film is full of stuff like this. And then there are the lit up movie theatres of the Square. Is that me and my Mom crossing Broadway after seeing “Party Girl” at the Loew’s State on our way to our 2^nd Sunday movie of the day “I Want To Live” The city of my youth caught in this movie is of course long gone, the line of phone booths that lined 42street across the street from Grant’s fast food joint, Hector’s a glimpse caught by the camera where I would have many meals after many movies and where Seltzer would come out of fountains instead of water. And then there is the Jazz score by Christian Chevallier and Martial Solal who has a cameo playing the piano at The Pike Slip Inn and seems to have been a real life dive. This might be the first jazz score done for a film. The lush inky black and white cinematography is by Nicholas Hayer and much of it  has a documentary look to it because of the actual New York City footage. This is a city of dark, amazingly dark except for the glowing neon lights of Times Square, this is a deserted place after dark which will surprise many, who only know the city of today which glares and blasts. So what happens with the missing diplomat, I’m not saying but I will say this is a marvelous eccentric little pebble of art, but not for everyone and I can imagine many hating it and saying “Ira Joel Haber is out of his fucking mind” but for me its a keeper a piece of true film brut.