With its effervescent jazz score and romanticized panoramas of New York City nightlife, Two Men in Manhattan is Melville’s most unabashed tribute to the American noir and gangster films for which he had such affection. Casting himself as Moreau, the head of a two-man search party enlisted by the French press to locate a missing UN diplomat in the early postwar period, Melville’s low-key charisma and under-rested look (reminiscent at times of George Raft) grounds the procedural narrative with a laid-back charm missing from most of the director’s later work. Accordingly, the narrative mission for Moreau and his alcoholic associate Delmas (Pierre Grasset)—to trace a path to their comrade through his various ex-girlfriends in brothels, lounges and apartments—is decidedly less deadly than the usual Melville plot, though the stakes retain a decisive moral gravity. As the fog around the diplomat’s mysterious disappearance gradually clears, the film’s resolution ultimately hinges on a reckoning with Moreau and Delmas’s differing notions of integrity, a conflict with unmistakable shades of post-Resistance trauma.