Pierre Grasset driving in the city at night with Jean-Pierre Melville next to him alr

Two Men in Manhattan
(Deux hommes dans Manhattan)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.
With Jean-Pierre Melville, Pierre Grasset, Christiane Eudes.
France, 1959, DCP, black & white, 84 min.
French and English with English subtitles.
DCP source: Gaumont

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.

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  • 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (24 heures de la vie d’un clown)

    Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.
    France, 1945, DCP, black & white, 19 min.
    French with English subtitles.

Condensing the title’s promise into a lean eighteen minutes, Melville’s debut short is a nifty editing exercise focused more on process than on spectacle, foreshadowing a longstanding formal interest for the director even as it documents a milieu henceforth absent from his oeuvre. Beginning with the finale of one carnival routine and concluding with the next night’s act, the film surveys the daily routines of Beby the clown and his assistant Mr. Maïss, which include backstage prep, savoring evening meals back home, and observing public activity the next day for eventual creative repurposing. Drolly narrated by Melville himself, the film plainly demonstrates the affection of one craftsman towards the work of another, an idea made most evident in a recurring backstage scene capturing the removal and application of makeup in a shot that layers multiple subjects at once.

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