Sometimes, the most accurate mirrors we face are held up to us by others.
Consider the flood of viral stories about America and those visiting it during the World Cup — the German who sang our praises and found himself coddled by locals who want to believe in a version of the country that has been lost, the Scottish fans who charmed and were charmed wherever they went, the Japanese fans who cleaned up stadiums after their team played, and the shameful tales of our treatment of Iranians and Africans and of many people Black or brown or from the Middle East.
Classic films can also preserve such snapshots of the past, and one of the most intriguing is Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Two Men in Manhattan,” a fairly conventional missing-person-hunted by reporters tale that captures 1959 New York at its Cafe/Cabaret Society-cool jazz peak.
The sunglasses-fetishizing Melville, “Godfather of the French New Wave,” shot on location, with its lurid advertising-lit Manhattan-at-night scenes, and on French soundstage interiors and an almost all-French cast.
It’s a movie of “vibe” and feel, very much in the “nostalgic existentialist” vein of Melville’s most famous films (“Bob le Flambeur,” “Le Samurai”). “Two Men” is also arch and sometimes messy, with imitative but illogical scenes in service of a generic plot, bits of looped sound and interiors and exteriors that don’t match up as neatly as Hollywood productions of the day.
And every so often, there’s a hint of what the man who took American novelist Herman Melville’s name as his alter ego during his days in the WWII French resistance, thinks of this land he visited, took in and pondered, mostly through his viewing of American cinema, especially Hollywood film noir.
A French diplomat goes missing, and no one — journalist, photojournalist or the man’s family — even considers going to the U.S. police. Journalistic “ethics” and morals seem to be something the French mull over before ignoring, reminding us of that “Sweet Smell of Success” age when Americans rarely took such scruples into consideration. “Foreigners” are both exotic and annoying, and a Black stripper is hated by her fellow white dancers.
Melville may take us to a high-end brothel, with geishas and sex workers of many races.
“You can judge a culture by its level of prostitution,” a cynical Frenchman notes.
But the dancer Bessie Reed (Michèle Bailly) is the only character writer-director-star Melville chose to film nude.
All of that is subtext. What Melville was going for here was a cool jazz collision of generations and values. An old school U.N. diplomat of “the classy type,” one with a war record, has gone missing.
The 40ish news agency reporter Moreau (Melville) has to be reminded “of that old French expression” that always pertains to “whenever a man is missing” bythe diplomat’s lesbian secretary (Colette Fleury).
“Cherchez la femmes.” Look for the women.
The posing, lying, bribing and finagling Moreau drags his even less ethical younger freelance photographer/hustler Delmas (Pierre Grasset) out of bed with his latest conquest, sobers him up and off they go into the night.
An actress (Ginger Hall), a singer (Glenda Leigh) and a dancer (Bailly) are the reporting duo’s married and missing quarry’s known paramours. Bars and brothels and a Broadway show backstage will be visited, a flask will be emptied and every time they get in Delmas’ Ford Mainline, a Ford Fairlane cranks up and follows them all through the night.
We can sense that the real “test” of this reporter/photographer collaboration won’t come amid the lies they tell to ambush these women, but when they get closer to “the truth” of what’s happened and how that will play back home in France.
When I refer to “Two Men in Manhattan” as “messy,” I’m talking about things like the seemingly pointless “interrogations” of the three women. Yes, the characters are “introduced.” But Moreau questions them (in English, with much of the dialogue between French men and women in subtitled French), gets less than nothing from them — no admissions or denials, barely a hint of “connection” between them and the diplomat — and are summarily dismissed.
Moreau and Delmas are pretty much frisked and made to “check your coats” at the strip club, when we see other patrons in trench coats.
Some of the performances seem phonetically sounded-out in English, and other bit players can come off as amateurish, something a director more comfortable with English would have caught.
The resolution to the evening’s mystery is conventional. It’s the wildly divergent responses to it from our man-hunting duo and the reporter’s Old School boss (Jean Darconte) that interests Melville and grips the viewer 65 years later.
Cinematographer Nicolas Hayer shoots Manhattan street scenes at night in ways no Hollywood movie of the era did — using the avaiable light from neon signs, marquees and street lamps and little else. It’s dark beyond the neon, not washed out with fill light. “Two Men in Manhattan” is even more striking to look at than the “journalism” noir classic “Sweet Smell of Success.”
And composers Christian Chevallier and Martial Solal give us jazz on the soundtrack, on record players, small combos in clubs and in a Capital Records recording studio, much of seemingly inspired by the brassy, brazen jazz standard “Blues in the Night.”
Whatever its shortcomings, “Two Men in Manhattan” maintains a vibe and a tone that its creator, a French “innocent” abroad in America, never allows to stray. It’s a bracing slice of “as others see us” cinema from an era many Americans look back on as “the good ol’days.”
Melville makes the case that in cinematic terms, at least, the ’50s were a gilded, if monochromatic era. He shows our cultural capital painted in shadowy shades of black and white and a time when our myths were defended and our music was jazz. He shows us the way the world saw us even if we were too distracted by rock’n roll, Technicolor and Cinemascope big screen spectacles and the new TV set in every living room to remember it right.
Rating: TV-14, alcohol abuse, nudity, smoking, profanity
Cast: Jean-Pierre Melville, Pierre Grasset, Ginger Hall, Michèle Bailly, Glenda Leigh, Monique Hennessy, Jean Darconte and Christiane Eudes.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. A Gaumont release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:24
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