Speaker 1: Oh he is bolt.
Speaker 2: It's showtime.
Speaker 1: People say, good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 4: They are cold sodas, hot popcorn and no monsters.
Speaker 1: In the protection booth.
Speaker 5: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
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Speaker 6: sure to Lenry yank Landry.
Speaker 8: There's not a mess, want a little well and freckles
Speaker 8: to us and all the show.
Speaker 2: Waiting sh men down here.
Speaker 4: Because staff, because gout. You din't party yourself.
Speaker 6: Emili Marco de la Ville music star, you need your
Speaker 6: mond okay, would do SHOs them at hand.
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Speaker 6: Does that town with the prettiest chunder respected the comments.
Speaker 7: Does it will uncomparably diverse?
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Speaker 7: Once there's some dominattanvela.
Speaker 2: Pierre Garce, Welcome to the projection booth.
Speaker 5: I'm your host. Mike White joined me once again as
Speaker 5: miss Sam Degan.
Speaker 9: Hello.
Speaker 5: Also back in the booth is mister Andrew Leevold.
Speaker 9: Great to be back.
Speaker 5: This week, we are looking at Jean Pierre Melville's Two
Speaker 5: Men in Manhattan from nineteen fifty nine, and you'll never
Speaker 5: believe what it's about. That's right, Two Men in Manhattan.
Speaker 5: It's a detective story about a missing member of the
Speaker 5: un who is being tracked down by a journalist and
Speaker 5: a photographer, but then it turns into a film about
Speaker 5: loyalty and ethics. We will be spoiling this film, oh,
Speaker 5: which used to be very hard to find, but now
Speaker 5: it's out on Blu ray and DVD. So if you
Speaker 5: don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and
Speaker 5: come back after you've seen it. We will still be here. So, Sam,
Speaker 5: when was the first time you saw Two Men in Manhattan?
Speaker 5: And what did you think?
Speaker 10: I don't know the exact year, but I want to
Speaker 10: say maybe about ten years ago, maybe a little less.
Speaker 10: I watched every single Melville film and this was indeed
Speaker 10: very hard to track down, but I instantly fell in
Speaker 10: love with it. I got to see it in a
Speaker 10: theater here in New York last summer as part of
Speaker 10: this Melville retrospective they coincidentally did for my birthday, not
Speaker 10: on purpose. It just was wonderful timing, but we can pretend.
Speaker 10: And I think I loved it even more seeing it
Speaker 10: more recently. It's definitely not one of his classics, and
Speaker 10: I don't think people should necessarily start with it, but
Speaker 10: I absolutely love it, and it's great to see him
Speaker 10: in a leading role.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that is quite a treaty, isn't it, just to
Speaker 5: have his presence throughout this entire film. And Andrew, how
Speaker 5: about yourself?
Speaker 9: Four or five years ago, when I binge watched all
Speaker 9: of the Melville films that I'd never seen before, that
Speaker 9: I conscientiously tracked down and watched almost chronologically, just so
Speaker 9: I could see each phase of Melville develop and fade
Speaker 9: into the next one. I'm not as much of a
Speaker 9: fan of this film as I am of the classic
Speaker 9: period from Ledusium Suffla onwards, probably because I get a
Speaker 9: little bored with the story. I find it a little
Speaker 9: bit too pic are esque, I guess is the term
Speaker 9: that I'm scrappling for. It's just a little too procedural
Speaker 9: for my taste. But I did find rewatching this film
Speaker 9: last night that there were so many more factors of
Speaker 9: interest in the film other than just the narrative. It's
Speaker 9: the whole linkage to Melville's personal story, his preoccupations with cinema,
Speaker 9: with even with World War two, the pre war era.
Speaker 9: It's all in there, and it's a very easy film
Speaker 9: to slip into his permiabler and inhabit for ninety minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't remember the first time I saw this one either,
Speaker 5: And yeah, it was tough to find for a while.
Speaker 5: I know who is at Cohen Media eventually put it out.
Speaker 5: They were the only show in town for a little
Speaker 5: while with that one. The real hard one for me
Speaker 5: to find was Magnet of Doom. That one took the
Speaker 5: longest to find, and.
Speaker 10: And when you write this letter, so hard to find shit, Yeah,
Speaker 10: that one did.
Speaker 5: I find a beaches of that one. That one was
Speaker 5: tough as well. But yeah, magnetive Doom. I just remember
Speaker 5: when I finally tracked that down, it was looked like
Speaker 5: it was shot off of a bed sheet that somebody
Speaker 5: had like projected a really pink print of it. Ont
Speaker 5: it was awful, and of course no subtitles whatsoever. So yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm glad things have changed and I'm glad that all
Speaker 5: fourteen of his films are now fairly easy to see,
Speaker 5: which is great. And now people keep putting out box
Speaker 5: sets of his stuff, and I'm like, yes, please more Melville.
Speaker 5: He doesn't have that extensive of a filmography. Please just
Speaker 5: keep putting this out, and keep putting out better and
Speaker 5: better versions. Because watching the print of Two Men in
Speaker 5: Manhattan that I watched yesterday, oh my god, it is
Speaker 5: just crystal clear and it looks so good. And those
Speaker 5: shots of New York are gorgeous. And the interior shots
Speaker 5: look a little stagy at times, but also crystal clear
Speaker 5: and just looks so good. And I love the use
Speaker 5: of the black and white, and of course I love
Speaker 5: the vistas of New York City in nineteen fifty nine
Speaker 5: or fifty eight, whenever this was shot, and just to
Speaker 5: have that time capsule of those marquees. Sometimes they almost
Speaker 5: look fake because they're just so well shot, and I'm
Speaker 5: just like, Nope, this is location. I can tell this
Speaker 5: is location. But they just the brightness of the lights
Speaker 5: and everything just looks Oh, just chef's kiss.
Speaker 9: The print that's circulating now, the whites really pop out
Speaker 9: of the black. You know that this is gorgeous cinematography
Speaker 9: and like you said, a beautiful, perfectly shot time capsule
Speaker 9: of nineteen fifty eight New York.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it's so crazy how different it looks based
Speaker 10: on the bootleg file that I first saw almost a
Speaker 10: decade ago, which was really muddy and washed out, and
Speaker 10: like you could tell, it was a beautiful film. But
Speaker 10: getting to see some of these films properly restored or
Speaker 10: even partly restored, it's such a treasure. And I think
Speaker 10: with this one it feels like such a love letter
Speaker 10: to New York obviously, even though all the interiors are
Speaker 10: of course shot in France, in Paris, in the studio.
Speaker 10: But I think so with this you really start to
Speaker 10: see the changes coming in his career, because the budget
Speaker 10: for this is bigger than Bubbla Flamber are still not
Speaker 10: big at the time by French major studio budgetary standards.
Speaker 10: To your point Andrew earlier about how the plot doesn't
Speaker 10: really do it for you, I feel like he was
Speaker 10: not in this to care about the plot in a way.
Speaker 10: It's like he just wanted to be able to shoot
Speaker 10: in New York and it reminds me a little bit
Speaker 10: of Bubbla flamber in the sense that it's a movie
Speaker 10: about a guy hanging out in a city who just
Speaker 10: loves that city, except he's transplanted.
Speaker 9: The perfect place to transplant his main characters would be Manhattan.
Speaker 9: If Babla Flomberg is his loved letter to Montmartre and Pigal,
Speaker 9: then he found the perfect place in America, the center
Speaker 9: of vice, the burlesque houses and the strip joints, the
Speaker 9: upmarket brothels of Manhattan. You know, he's he's found in America,
Speaker 9: the perfect place to replicate that demimonde that he celebrates
Speaker 9: in Bubbla Flamberge.
Speaker 5: And we have somewhat of a similar beginning too, with
Speaker 5: the voiceover and the beautiful shots of the city, and
Speaker 5: we've got those opening credits which are really nice with
Speaker 5: there we're both in the backseat of a car and
Speaker 5: going forward, and then we're also in the front seat
Speaker 5: of the car and going forward and seeing all those credits,
Speaker 5: I thought that it was all back, but then I
Speaker 5: did notice some from the front as well. And then
Speaker 5: we go into this voiceover talking about, you know, the
Speaker 5: old gas lights, and we do have some images of
Speaker 5: gaslights and this whole thing of the United Nations, and
Speaker 5: it's interesting that he tells a little story about this
Speaker 5: Irish boy in Italian and a Jew, and it's like
Speaker 5: these three coming together. The trio neatly symbolized the great
Speaker 5: glass building on First Avenue, and I was like, oh, oh,
Speaker 5: it's their own little United Nations.
Speaker 9: That's nice.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, this is very like you're saying, very
Speaker 5: similar to Bob la Flambert, where you're visiting a mam
Speaker 5: matra and going around the streets and then up to
Speaker 5: Bob's place. I'm like, oh, this is a very nice
Speaker 5: way to set the stage. And it takes a while
Speaker 5: before we really get going here. We get this very
Speaker 5: beautiful poetic at least according to the subtitles, this whole
Speaker 5: thing talking about we're at this meeting of the United
Speaker 5: Nations and they're cleverly using some stock footage, and yet
Speaker 5: there's one person that's not there, and there was an
Speaker 5: empty chair there today, And then really becomes this whole
Speaker 5: mystery what happened to this French diplomat and becomes the
Speaker 5: whole that's the whole crux of the story is trying
Speaker 5: to find this guy, and it's interesting how they find
Speaker 5: him and then when they find him, where they find him,
Speaker 5: how they find him, and what they decide to do
Speaker 5: with the information around that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, For as much as it is set in New
Speaker 10: York and does have that great exterior location photography, this
Speaker 10: is a film about France and France's political reputation, and
Speaker 10: I think Melville is often unfairly thought of as being
Speaker 10: a kind of nationalistic conservative filmmaker. Sometimes, probably because he
Speaker 10: served in the war and because of his experiences in
Speaker 10: the resistance and how they show up in his films,
Speaker 10: was associated more with this kind of old world like
Speaker 10: we need to celebrate France's glory type of figure. But
Speaker 10: he's not really and I think you see it nowhere
Speaker 10: more clearly than in this film Army of Shadows. Yes,
Speaker 10: that's a different conversation, but here he's really critical of
Speaker 10: this French tendency to say, we have to sweep certain
Speaker 10: problems under the rug and make it seem like they
Speaker 10: didn't exist, because the most important thing is the reputation
Speaker 10: of France and how France's reputation is reflected in its
Speaker 10: political leaders. And so having this story be focused on
Speaker 10: the UN which, by the way, first Avenue, I was
Speaker 10: there a lot last week, it does not still look
Speaker 10: like this sadly much ugly air. But it's just interesting
Speaker 10: that even though he set this film in New York
Speaker 10: in the US, it's not an American story. It's a
Speaker 10: French story.
Speaker 9: Also, look at the timeline of Melville and where this
Speaker 9: film sits, and this comes out in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 9: the same year as the other key New Wave films
Speaker 9: made by men who are almost twenty years younger than Melville.
Speaker 9: Melville as a young man has memories of that pre
Speaker 9: idealism and the figure of the missing diplomat symbolizes that
Speaker 9: ideal that he would have looked up to as a
Speaker 9: young man. But then twenty years later, after the war
Speaker 9: and with all of the post war cynicism, he also
Speaker 9: can see that figure as being a deeply flawed one.
Speaker 9: As a mature man of late thirties, early forties, he's
Speaker 9: able to say, yes, this man was a great person,
Speaker 9: but he was also a woman, as a liar, etc
Speaker 9: et cetera. So he's able to have a much more
Speaker 9: balanced view of that individual. Whereas the young Turks of
Speaker 9: the New Wave would have been saying, well, let's reject
Speaker 9: all of that World War II bullshit let's completely forge
Speaker 9: a new path, all about modernism and deconstruction and so forth.
Speaker 9: So you can see the schism between Melville's films and
Speaker 9: the New Wave appearing with this movie in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 9: that this is a film that tackles issues that the
Speaker 9: New Wave directors don't really want to touch because it's
Speaker 9: not part of their milieu. It's not part of this
Speaker 9: new path that there wanting to forge well.
Speaker 10: And I think some of that has to do with
Speaker 10: the form and the structure of the film, which is
Speaker 10: much more classical cinema, much more referring back to thirties
Speaker 10: and forties Hollywood, which the New Wave directors did in
Speaker 10: a different way. I don't even think it's just the
Speaker 10: way that he represents the politician. But it also has
Speaker 10: to do with the way the story itself unfolds and
Speaker 10: how the characters are presented as people like these are
Speaker 10: the two protagonists, a journalist and this wonderfully disreputable photographer.
Speaker 10: They're middle aged guys, and so you don't really have
Speaker 10: too many of those early New wave films about middle
Speaker 10: aged people watching too many of the like nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 10: fifty nine, nineteen sixty watching too many of those French
Speaker 10: new wave films in a row. It's like these are
Speaker 10: all about annoying teenagers or like annoying early twenty somethings.
Speaker 10: So the vibe here is very different.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well Melville would have been hanging out with those
Speaker 9: bita jaded photo journalists journalists, and so he's able to
Speaker 9: draw from that rather than having his protagonists to these
Speaker 9: young Brady caricatures.
Speaker 5: Really Melville at this point he's still forming his reputation
Speaker 5: with the Silence of the Sea list if on then yeah,
Speaker 5: The Terrible Children, bab La Filambert and Babla flan Berry
Speaker 5: is a crime movie. And then we go back into
Speaker 5: this one. We've got Lean Moore in Priest, which is
Speaker 5: definitely not a crime movie. Then they do Lo and
Speaker 5: it's just we have this reputation of him being this
Speaker 5: crime director, but there's a really lot of crime in
Speaker 5: this film. There's like an attempted crime, I guess you
Speaker 5: could say with the photographer in the way that he's
Speaker 5: setting up a scene later on, but when you find
Speaker 5: out that there's this diplomat who's missing, you're like, oh, well,
Speaker 5: there's got to be foul play. He must have had
Speaker 5: his fingers in something, but that it ends up spoilers
Speaker 5: being a heart attack that killed him, rather than oh,
Speaker 5: he was trying to keep this secret, or he had
Speaker 5: a stash of Nazi gold or something some sort of
Speaker 5: like crime element to it, because you're following this whole
Speaker 5: story and you're just like, Okay, we're going from this person,
Speaker 5: this person to this person, mostly women. We're just going
Speaker 5: from woman to woman and a woman, and then eventually
Speaker 5: we're going to find the diplomat, and then eventually we're
Speaker 5: going to find No, there was no foul play. No,
Speaker 5: there is no Nazi gold, there is no reason why
Speaker 5: he was killed. There's nothing that's secret other than apparently
Speaker 5: his war record, which than his the one guy has
Speaker 5: to really put out there and just be like, this
Speaker 5: guy's a hero. You cannot touch this guy. You should
Speaker 5: not be saying anything bad about this guy. Reminded me
Speaker 5: a little bit of like when Jose Ferrare talks to
Speaker 5: the guys in The King Mutiny, is just like, oh,
Speaker 5: you guys got your way.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 3: When I was studying the law and mister Keifer here
Speaker 3: was writing his stories and you were tearing up the
Speaker 3: playing fields of your old Princeton, who was standing guard
Speaker 3: over this fat, dumb, happy country ours Eh not us?
Speaker 3: Oh no, we knew you couldn't make any money in
Speaker 3: the service, So who did the dirty work for us?
Speaker 3: Queed did a lot of other.
Speaker 5: Guys just the way he reads those guys the riot act,
Speaker 5: and it's like shaming them, and it feels like the
Speaker 5: real thing that happens in this movies. They get shamed
Speaker 5: into doing the right thing, or at least del Mad
Speaker 5: the photographer gets shamed because Moreau. Interestingly enough, you're talking
Speaker 5: about where is Melville, Well, Melville the character doesn't seem
Speaker 5: to be aligned necessarily with Melville the writer director.
Speaker 10: Part of why I think of Bubba Flimberg and Two
Speaker 10: Men in Manhattan as being this kind of double feature
Speaker 10: is because they both subvert crime and mystery genre tropes.
Speaker 10: So much like Bubba Flimber on the surface is a
Speaker 10: heist film, much like on the surface this is a
Speaker 10: political murder mystery. But the way that he treats the
Speaker 10: actual crime in both of them, it's like this part
Speaker 10: isn't important. We are just here to hang out with
Speaker 10: these characters. And even though yes, he is very different
Speaker 10: from the new wave directors, I think with these two
Speaker 10: films in particular, you can see how much he influenced
Speaker 10: them and why they looked up to him him as
Speaker 10: a sort of godfather, because he is taking again those
Speaker 10: classic thirties and forties mystery and crime tropes and saying, well,
Speaker 10: what if we made a film with those tropes but
Speaker 10: turn them completely on their heads. And that's exactly what
Speaker 10: Godar does in Breathless. It's yes, there's a crime, and
Speaker 10: yes there's this young guy who's maybe going to go
Speaker 10: on some sort of spree, but that's not really the
Speaker 10: important focus. It's such a weird period in his career, which,
Speaker 10: like you pointed out, it pretty much all changes in
Speaker 10: nineteen sixty two with La Dulos, when he really becomes
Speaker 10: much more associated with crime in gangster movies. And I
Speaker 10: just love this period where he's playing around and figuring
Speaker 10: things out and is much more interested in the connections
Speaker 10: between people than the actual plots.
Speaker 9: I think you could argue that without Bubla Flambeau and
Speaker 9: Two Men in Manhattan there would be no Breathless, that
Speaker 9: those films are so so crucial in the language of
Speaker 9: the New Wave. But where Melville differs from god Art
Speaker 9: is that he is both a formalist and an experimentalist.
Speaker 9: That there is this embracing of commercialism and art of
Speaker 9: American and also European sort of experimentalism. I think that
Speaker 9: embracing of both art and commerce definitely it explains all
Speaker 9: of Melville's films in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I think it connects him the most closely
Speaker 10: to somebody like Claude Chabral, who those new wave whipper
Speaker 10: snappers would be nothing without because he wasn't as old
Speaker 10: as Melville, but he was a couple of years older
Speaker 10: than the rest of them, or with money from the
Speaker 10: family that he married into wisely, he was able to
Speaker 10: help finance a lot of those early new wave films.
Speaker 10: But then I think by the mid sixties they started
Speaker 10: to look down on him because, like Melville, all he
Speaker 10: cared about was making films, and mostly making films the
Speaker 10: way he wanted to make them, Like he wasn't. Neither
Speaker 10: of them were trying to burn the establishment down really,
Speaker 10: not like Godard. They were just trying to go on
Speaker 10: an adventure of their own making and do what they
Speaker 10: wanted to do. And I think they both wound up
Speaker 10: turning to crime films because that was where they were
Speaker 10: able to make money. So it's like you see that
Speaker 10: in both of them. I think you see this really
Speaker 10: fascinating blend of an experimental director making the films they
Speaker 10: want to make that are often passionate projects, but also
Speaker 10: making films like they're not trying to be anti mainstream,
Speaker 10: they're just trying to make the films they want to make.
Speaker 11: The independent film might be because, yeah, especially especially Melville,
Speaker 11: who has to build his own studio just to be
Speaker 11: able to make the kind of films that he wanted
Speaker 11: to make so ballsy, yeah, and ultimately he wanted to
Speaker 11: make films like The Asphalt Jungle, so he venerated John Houston.
Speaker 9: In the way that Chabrol venerated Hitchcock. And it's because
Speaker 9: of that embracing of mainstream Hollywood that put them in
Speaker 9: to do paraeters of the New Waves. They were independent
Speaker 9: of schools of thought such as the New Wave that
Speaker 9: were very didactic in their approach. These guys just wanted
Speaker 9: to make films because they loved cinema, not because they
Speaker 9: wanted to make a political statement.
Speaker 10: The more you watch these films as you age, I
Speaker 10: think it's so easy to see young Godard and Truffau
Speaker 10: as suffering from the typical twenty something problem where you're
Speaker 10: so convinced you're right, whereas I think with Melville and
Speaker 10: Chabral they were just like, yeah, I'm here to make films.
Speaker 10: I don't need to be right. I don't need everyone
Speaker 10: to agree with me. I just want to make something
Speaker 10: beautiful and poetic and also entertaining to watch. And I
Speaker 10: think with Two Men in Manhattan, he's still really reminding
Speaker 10: you that he is an independent filmmaker and was really
Speaker 10: and I think it's easy to forget this, but was
Speaker 10: really the first person making independent films in France outside
Speaker 10: the studio system, and it is frustrating to see them
Speaker 10: push back. And like, the reception to Two Men in
Speaker 10: Manhattan was not great. I think the mainstream French audience thought,
Speaker 10: why is this guy making a movie about Americans who
Speaker 10: cares like we want French films, even though it's clearly
Speaker 10: a story about France and French people, And even the
Speaker 10: New Wave was kind of like, yeah, it's fine. And
Speaker 10: decades later, I think people started to see it for
Speaker 10: being as interesting as it is, but it's like, this
Speaker 10: is still a young independent filmmaker in what is basically
Speaker 10: the first decade of his career. He's having a good time.
Speaker 10: He's in New York to solve a ministery.
Speaker 5: Was that a Ghostbuster's reference?
Speaker 3: We've been going about this all wrong.
Speaker 1: This mister Steve buff is okay, he's a sailor. He's
Speaker 1: in New York.
Speaker 4: We get this guy laid.
Speaker 2: We won't have any trouble.
Speaker 9: He's working things out as any good experimentalist, as any
Speaker 9: true auto would, and he's working with what would appear
Speaker 9: to be competing aesthetics documentary style, handheld footage, more formal
Speaker 9: studio bound sets, and obviously, to some people who were
Speaker 9: bound up in the new rules of the New Waves,
Speaker 9: that was not fitting the rule book. The competing styles
Speaker 9: were not hip enough. That Melville was also embracing American
Speaker 9: culture and all of the signposts and signifies that he
Speaker 9: embraced as a sinophile, he was embracing rather than rejecting
Speaker 9: or deconstructing and reconstructing. Has got outward of I think
Speaker 9: his playfulness was seen as a kind of growing heresy
Speaker 9: among the young turks of the New Wave movement.
Speaker 5: No, he definitely is having a good time and being
Speaker 5: the star of his own movie. I guess he knew
Speaker 5: that he could rely on himself. But he does a
Speaker 5: great job in here, I have to say, And I
Speaker 5: really like him as a protagonist and kind of being
Speaker 5: the good half of this group between him and del Martin.
Speaker 5: But I have to say that the gentleman that plays
Speaker 5: delmat is just spectacular, especially when he has more of
Speaker 5: his crisis of conscience later on.
Speaker 9: But just such a.
Speaker 5: Louse, just the oh, yeah, no, I left my camera
Speaker 5: at home and then he's like, oh, what's this doing
Speaker 5: here in the car? Well it it's got to have
Speaker 5: a camera around, and the way he sneaks in the
Speaker 5: camera and that package later on, and I'm just like, wow,
Speaker 5: this is really a precursor to the paparazzi, where this
Speaker 5: guy is just about having these photographs, And especially when
Speaker 5: he's photographing that poor girl who's changing at the strip club. Oh,
Speaker 5: I'm like, come on, buddy, what the hell are you doing?
Speaker 5: And she doesn't say a word. I think she might
Speaker 5: be the worst actress in this movie, or whoever's dubbing
Speaker 5: her is the worst actress.
Speaker 9: But the worst actress is the bordello madam. She is
Speaker 9: just dreadful, and even she has to be dubbed into French.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I don't think the dubbing here is doing it
Speaker 10: anyone any favors any any of the female actors anyway.
Speaker 9: They're just clothes horces. Really, they're signposts for the various
Speaker 9: vices that the missing person has. Befallen too, the neon
Speaker 9: signposts for the film. This is burlesque, this is prostitution.
Speaker 9: Even as secretary as a lesbian, she's involved in kind
Speaker 9: of vice as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I noticed that whole lesbianism thing. I was like, whoa,
Speaker 5: where did this come surprising? And then you've got those
Speaker 5: weird jokey moments with the nosy neighbor that Delma has
Speaker 5: and the way that Melville's kind of taunting her a
Speaker 5: little bit. I'm like, okay, yeah, all right, this works. No, yeah,
Speaker 5: that was a little clunky, but yeah, I was okay
Speaker 5: with that. This whole movie, there are different levels of clunkiness.
Speaker 5: Like we've brought up. The whole cinematography looks gorgeous. I
Speaker 5: think everything looks beautiful, but yeah, I think just the
Speaker 5: pacing and then like you're saying, it's like the women
Speaker 5: just being these objects that they're trying to get information
Speaker 5: out of and winding their way along. It's that's a
Speaker 5: little difficult at times.
Speaker 10: And I think this is the classic Melville problem that
Speaker 10: a lot of people wring their hands about, is how
Speaker 10: he treats the women characters in his films, which is
Speaker 10: usually their signposts or signifiers that just represent something pointing
Speaker 10: back to a different male character. And I think I'm
Speaker 10: so used to it because I just keep watching his
Speaker 10: films that it maybe doesn't bother me in a way
Speaker 10: that it did at first. And I also think where
Speaker 10: this is placed, it's not like those later films where
Speaker 10: there aren't as many female characters. This is right in
Speaker 10: the same kind of window as Leon Moran Priest, which
Speaker 10: has one of his greatest and most well rounded female characters.
Speaker 10: But it is really interesting that they're basically trying to
Speaker 10: investigate this guy's life. They can't find out too much
Speaker 10: about it because of the nature of his role in politics,
Speaker 10: and so they're going through these snapshots of different women
Speaker 10: he's involved with, and it does remind me of the
Speaker 10: sort of older pulpy novels where you're just you have
Speaker 10: a detective of a reporter surrounded by dames, Like everyone
Speaker 10: in this movie is a dame basically.
Speaker 5: Well, I think there might be a couple broads in
Speaker 5: here as well, and maybe a chick, but definitely, yeah,
Speaker 5: a lot of dames.
Speaker 10: Maybe, except for his daughter, who's the only slightly more
Speaker 10: rounded sympathetic character because she's a little bit she's aware.
Speaker 10: She's not living in the same narrow bubble all the
Speaker 10: other women characters are living in.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Well, the wife is a paragon of virtue. The wife
Speaker 9: is completely clueless, therefore a very one dimensional character. Like
Speaker 9: you said, the daughter has a lot more depth to her.
Speaker 9: But then the rest of the women are all, I
Speaker 9: would suggest, fluosies, even more so than dames. They're floozies.
Speaker 10: There's a variety of flus happening here.
Speaker 5: There's one woman who's a literal prop she's just as
Speaker 5: in Delmar's bed, and that's all.
Speaker 9: She's just in the bed.
Speaker 5: And then there's a part later on where Melville or
Speaker 5: Moreau is coming back to look for del Mob because
Speaker 5: he's got the film. He's taking the compromising photo that
Speaker 5: he's staged of the diplomat after they find him, and
Speaker 5: he's trying to track them down. So instead of it
Speaker 5: being like shoe la femmee. Now suddenly it's lame and
Speaker 5: goes back to his apartment. And I swear the woman's
Speaker 5: still in bed. I could be wrong, but.
Speaker 10: It's like, no, I think she's still in bed.
Speaker 5: Still in bed, Okay, So yeah, she's just there. He
Speaker 5: never interacts with her, We never see her, she never
Speaker 5: stands up or anything. Yeah, it's very very interesting the.
Speaker 10: Way that maybe it's her day off. Let the woman
Speaker 10: lounge in bed. Plus she probably has a hangover.
Speaker 9: They's hung over.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because he throws her a bottle book where he
Speaker 5: takes off and goes out to talk with the landlady
Speaker 5: or the nosy neighbor.
Speaker 9: That's her one act. Yeah, Hair of the Dog and
Speaker 9: this takes place. I have a one night so you know,
Speaker 9: let the woman leap in for God's psych I do
Speaker 9: really like that.
Speaker 2: I like how we start.
Speaker 5: We start with the morning, and then we get that
Speaker 5: transitional shot after they introduce the un and we go
Speaker 5: tonight and then yeah, this whole movie is in darkness
Speaker 5: until the very end of it when we finally come
Speaker 5: out and have the everything looks different in the light
Speaker 5: of day kind of thing. And I also noticed that
Speaker 5: there's a lot of record players in here, and they
Speaker 5: talk about how things are being transferred to vinyl. In
Speaker 5: that un scene when we go into del miles apartment,
Speaker 5: we follow the cord along until we get to the
Speaker 5: record player, and then of course when they finally do
Speaker 5: find the diplomat, you've got that great sound on the
Speaker 5: soundtrack of the record having been run out. I don't
Speaker 5: know if Lynch was a fan or not, but I
Speaker 5: mean it so reminded me of the death of Madeline
Speaker 5: Palmer and just the incredible use of that chunk chunk
Speaker 5: kud chunk as the record has run out.
Speaker 9: It's all part of capturing Melville's various fetishes, one of
Speaker 9: them being American cinema, but also American culture, and a
Speaker 9: big part of that would have been American music.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, the jazz scorer on this, yeah, and jazz.
Speaker 9: Being one of those sort of signifiers of the underworld,
Speaker 9: along with prostitution and burlesque and so on. So I
Speaker 9: think really jazz and all of its various instruments, including
Speaker 9: the record players that it's played upon, are all part
Speaker 9: of the film's DNA, so deeply part. And of course
Speaker 9: you've got the same guy doing the soundtrack, who then
Speaker 9: goes on and is part of Goddard's Breathless God. I
Speaker 9: would have been taking notes, going, who's this guy if
Speaker 9: he didn't know him already.
Speaker 10: Melville's only other real major although I'm putting major in
Speaker 10: air quotes here major acting role is for good Dart.
Speaker 10: So he was clearly worshiping at the altar of Melville
Speaker 10: a little bit here, as he should have been.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then that interesting fact that you've got the
Speaker 5: close up of the cigarettes, and it's like, oh, this
Speaker 5: was Gordaara's cigarette brand, So I'm throwing him a bone here.
Speaker 10: It's cute.
Speaker 2: It is cute.
Speaker 10: He was, Yeah, he was so supportive of them.
Speaker 8: I know.
Speaker 5: And then they turned on him like a bunch of animals.
Speaker 9: Like a bunch of Brady children, after milking him.
Speaker 5: I don't know if I want to think about them
Speaker 5: milking him, And.
Speaker 9: His expression would have been exactly the same as it
Speaker 9: was all the way through this film, a kind of
Speaker 9: dead fish eye stare, but also bemused.
Speaker 10: He's great at having these very subtle expressions, and I
Speaker 10: think part of why he and Pierre Gressey play so
Speaker 10: well off each other is for a lot of the film.
Speaker 10: You're never really sure if Morou Melville's character is the
Speaker 10: same type of person as the photographer, or if they're
Speaker 10: just friends and he's ignoring his friends more questionable morals.
Speaker 10: And I think it comes out the most in the
Speaker 10: last twenty minutes or so. But just their chemistry together
Speaker 10: is great, and it's a shame that pure Grasse wasn't
Speaker 10: really in that many films. But his first biggest role
Speaker 10: is in Rafffee, which I assume is why he was
Speaker 10: cast in this, again playing off that exchange between American
Speaker 10: crime cinema and literature and French so much back and forth.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 9: Grasse was also slated to play the main role in
Speaker 9: a spy film that Melville wanted to make between Bubbla
Speaker 9: Flomburg and Two Men in Manhattan that didn't happen for
Speaker 9: one reason or another. So he was very much on
Speaker 9: Melville's radar, And I think, like he said, I think
Speaker 9: Melville wished that he had have made Raffefe and probably
Speaker 9: and wanted that cultural cachet that Grasse would have provided
Speaker 9: from his his link with Rafffee.
Speaker 10: Without Refuffee, you don't get certain scenes in Babbla Flemberg.
Speaker 10: You don't get certain scenes in Loudulos or Ludusiamsufla like,
Speaker 10: it's just so incredibly influential. But I also one of
Speaker 10: my favorite things about Melville is I think, unlike directors
Speaker 10: in more recent decades, Melville never seemed like he was
Speaker 10: trying to squirrel away his influences. He would always happily
Speaker 10: refer to them in his films, talk about them, and
Speaker 10: it seems like, especially with Two Men in Manhattan, he
Speaker 10: gives off this vibe that he's viewing cinema and maybe
Speaker 10: even culture as this kind of interconnected web. And even
Speaker 10: though I think you could call him an auteur director,
Speaker 10: he just has this kind of flexibility with those influences
Speaker 10: he's borrowing in this sort of fake universe where France
Speaker 10: to the United States are meshed and melding together.
Speaker 9: It's just I just love him.
Speaker 10: He's the best.
Speaker 9: Well, they certainly do mesh in Melville's imagination. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: all of those films that he would have been consuming
Speaker 9: with a rabid passion while he was in London during
Speaker 9: the war and catching up on the previous ten years
Speaker 9: worth of black and white cinema from Hollywood, and then
Speaker 9: watching the new wave of noir films coming out of
Speaker 9: Hollywood in the fifties. That's very much his cultural landscape,
Speaker 9: and so he's picking elements out of that and reconstituting it.
Speaker 9: Melville style cinema for him is just a constant dialogue
Speaker 9: between himself and his influences, and those influences would have
Speaker 9: been cinematic giants Lake John Houston.
Speaker 10: But I think it also connects back to just what's
Speaker 10: going on with film noir more broadly, which is, if
Speaker 10: you think in more classical academic definitions, film noir is
Speaker 10: a distinctly American thing, but so many of the key
Speaker 10: directors were Europeans who were driven there by World War
Speaker 10: One world War Two, and so to me it has
Speaker 10: that very similar thing that you were just talking about,
Speaker 10: this kind of dialogue. He's just picking up the torch
Speaker 10: and continuing on with that, especially in his work in
Speaker 10: the sixties. But I think Two Men of Manhattan really
Speaker 10: looks forward to those films.
Speaker 5: I'm just amazed that they were able to pull off
Speaker 5: this American French co production, and I thought it was
Speaker 5: very clever the way that you mentioned how they exteriors
Speaker 5: are all New York interiors are all set bound inside
Speaker 5: of France and just that blending of those things and
Speaker 5: where your actors are and just having the two men
Speaker 5: just being your main people that are outside and inside.
Speaker 5: We're talking about how kind of useless the women characters are,
Speaker 5: except for maybe the daughter. And yeah, I just found
Speaker 5: that interesting that the name of the movie is just
Speaker 5: Two Men in Manhattan. That's such a simple, simple title.
Speaker 5: Just this is what it is, and we're really paying
Speaker 5: attention to this, these two men and their relationship with
Speaker 5: each other as well as the outside world.
Speaker 10: Well, they're also the only two characters who are able
Speaker 10: to cross into different worlds. Everyone else, both the female
Speaker 10: characters and the other male characters, are generally confined to
Speaker 10: set worlds, whether that's the world of the un and politics,
Speaker 10: whether it's the world of the higher ups like his
Speaker 10: bosses at the newspaper, whether it's the world of the
Speaker 10: diplomat's family who are in this upper middle class, very
Speaker 10: cushy existence. And maybe the daughter knows that these other
Speaker 10: things exist, but she doesn't actually go into those worlds
Speaker 10: in the same way. And so seeing them traverse all
Speaker 10: these different social landscapes, I think is a really fascinating
Speaker 10: part of the script. At least for me.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, it's like we go from the Mercury Theater,
Speaker 5: which I'm wondering if that's supposed to be a Wells reference,
Speaker 5: because really the structure of this seems so Citizen Kane
Speaker 5: to me, with the way that we're investigating this dead man.
Speaker 5: They don't know that he's dead, but they're investigating this
Speaker 5: dead man basically, and rather than finding the sled, they're
Speaker 5: looking for the right woman when it comes to this stuff.
Speaker 5: They go right from that over to the recording studio,
Speaker 5: the Capitol recording studio. We've got the torch song singer
Speaker 5: and her thing that's going on. And then I think
Speaker 5: pretty soon thereafter we go to that brothel that you
Speaker 5: were talking about, and yeah, just the entree. I love
Speaker 5: how Duma is like, oh Victory Virginia Graham, she's going
Speaker 5: to be recording at the Capitol tonight. We need to
Speaker 5: go over there. And then I think it's I think
Speaker 5: it's Melville who is an or is it the other
Speaker 5: actor that calls the the fscale brothel and has they
Speaker 5: have that card, the Eddie card, which they just keep
Speaker 5: showing like you gotta spell it out, say the name
Speaker 5: when you call and that's like the code word in
Speaker 5: order to get into the brothel.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 10: Great slice of all these different little social universes in
Speaker 10: New York and also connects back to that joke at
Speaker 10: the beginning, how these different types of people are coming together.
Speaker 10: They overlap and interact sometimes, but they don't really come
Speaker 10: together that much like this is I think, in some
Speaker 10: ways one of his most political films, just in terms
Speaker 10: of how he's showing these un politicians and these issues
Speaker 10: of class with the New York City and how that
Speaker 10: impacts the French main characters.
Speaker 9: But it's also how it impacts it's his script. It's
Speaker 9: his series of boxes that he's ticking one by one.
Speaker 9: We get to show the Mercury Theater, and I think
Speaker 9: it is a very deliberate reference to Wells as well
Speaker 9: as the script being and not to Citizen Kane. I
Speaker 9: think that he wanted jazz in there. And so you've
Speaker 9: got the jazz studio, you've got the burlesque house, you've
Speaker 9: got the strip show. You you have a whole series
Speaker 9: of checks and Melville is just ticking them off in
Speaker 9: this film, one by one in a very methodical way.
Speaker 9: And I think that's his own personal procedural is making
Speaker 9: sure that you get as many of his obsessions catalogued
Speaker 9: in the film one by one.
Speaker 10: He is a very methodical filmmaker.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that pays off with something like this, where every
Speaker 5: piece fits into another, piece fits into another. It's just
Speaker 5: this is the definition of a procedure of we went here,
Speaker 5: we started to hear, got this information, we moved on
Speaker 5: it here. Even when it comes to the daughter character,
Speaker 5: the way that she's introduced, I thought that was very clever,
Speaker 5: The way that Melville's Moreau character going into the one
Speaker 5: guy's office as she's coming out, and the way that
Speaker 5: she four grounds comes right up towards the camera and
Speaker 5: stops there. So we get a great look at her
Speaker 5: and we know that she's somebody very special, because otherwise
Speaker 5: we would just at the end of the movie we'd
Speaker 5: be like, who the hell's this? They give us that
Speaker 5: nice close up, and she's.
Speaker 9: Also wearing that leopard fur coats. You know you missed her.
Speaker 9: It's practically slapping you in the face.
Speaker 10: Yeah, there are great clothes in here, as there are
Speaker 10: in all of Melville's films. He is very very deliberate,
Speaker 10: very meticulous, very methodical, Like does not have a casual
Speaker 10: detail anywhere.
Speaker 5: He's wearing a piece in this right, I think, so
Speaker 5: he's gotta be I would think, because this is right
Speaker 5: before Breathless and he doesn't have that much hair and Breathless.
Speaker 10: Yeah, maybe those two years made it, or that year
Speaker 10: made a big difference.
Speaker 9: Maybe the savaging by the critics made him tear all
Speaker 9: his hair out.
Speaker 5: And I don't understand why there was so negative about this.
Speaker 5: It's just like, Okay, I didn't think it was terrible.
Speaker 5: I didn't think it was the best Melville I've ever seen.
Speaker 5: But I would rather have middling Melville compared to some
Speaker 5: great buildings by other filmmakers, because his garbage is better
Speaker 5: than other people's classics.
Speaker 10: Totally agreed. It's the critics, by and large don't like
Speaker 10: things that are new or different, don't really like things
Speaker 10: that are experimental, and this does have a very casual
Speaker 10: attitude to its crime story. And so I think if
Speaker 10: you go into this thinking, oh, we're going to watch
Speaker 10: a crime film about this reporter investigating a missing diplomat,
Speaker 10: Melville's like, actually, we're just here to chill. There's no
Speaker 10: scandal twist at the end. This guy's just a regular
Speaker 10: CD politician.
Speaker 5: Nothing special about him. He's just yet another womanizer.
Speaker 9: And yet critics say that lackadaisical approach to the material
Speaker 9: as amateursh and he was coold and am which is
Speaker 9: so frustrating.
Speaker 5: The thing that I dislike or I feel bad for
Speaker 5: Melville is that he really seemed to take it personally.
Speaker 5: Like the interviews about this, he seems very very guarded
Speaker 5: and very quiet about this film, where it's like, no,
Speaker 5: be proud of your work. But I think he ties
Speaker 5: everything to the critical and box office. Those are your
Speaker 5: scorecards right when you are a director. But it's like, no,
Speaker 5: it should be the satisfaction of making these things rather
Speaker 5: than it just being about the money or the critical reaction.
Speaker 10: Because of where this comes in his career, he has
Speaker 10: to care about the money because bab La Flambert does
Speaker 10: really well in the box office and has a smaller
Speaker 10: budget than Two Men in Manhattan, and because that does
Speaker 10: so well, it allows him to get a bigger budget.
Speaker 10: And so I think he saw the critical failure of
Speaker 10: this film and the lower box office receipts as the
Speaker 10: sort of panic inducing like what if I don't get
Speaker 10: to make more films? So I understand it, but it
Speaker 10: is frustrating. But of course it led to The Amoran
Speaker 10: Priest and Ludulos after this, which are two of his
Speaker 10: greatest films.
Speaker 5: All right, we're going to take a break and we'll
Speaker 5: be back with an interview with Jennette Vincent Due, the
Speaker 5: author of Jean Pierre Melville and American in Paris. Right
Speaker 5: after these brief messages.
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Speaker 5: I figured let's start with some familiar territory, because we've
Speaker 5: talked about Jean Pierre Melville many times, and I would
Speaker 5: love to get kind of your thoughts on where Two
Speaker 5: Men and Manhattan really fits into his filmography.
Speaker 13: I want to say thank you for asking me to
Speaker 13: talk about this film, because I realized I hadn't seen
Speaker 13: it for a very long time, and so I watched
Speaker 13: it last night and what an interesting and very odd
Speaker 13: film it is. I think that the best way to
Speaker 13: place it in Melville's career is to say it's a
Speaker 13: kind of hybrid and transitional film because he made it
Speaker 13: in nineteen fifty nine. Fifty eight came out in fifty nine,
Speaker 13: so in French cinema were in the middle of the
Speaker 13: arrival of the New Wave, and the films that Melville
Speaker 13: had done previously, especially Bobb Loflamberg in nineteen fifty six
Speaker 13: his gangster movie, were very much admired by new wave filmmakers,
Speaker 13: and so he was a kind of model for the
Speaker 13: new wave in that respect as somebody who worked as
Speaker 13: an independent filmmaker and didn't belong to the mainstream. When
Speaker 13: we look at Two Men in Manhattan, what struck me
Speaker 13: particularly looking at it last night is in many ways
Speaker 13: it is a new wave film because it's shot on location.
Speaker 13: There's a lot of location shooting in Manhattan, as the
Speaker 13: title announcers. There are of course indoor scenes which are
Speaker 13: shot in studio. But nevertheless, what is striking from the
Speaker 13: very first image of the film the credit sequence, is
Speaker 13: kind of night shots of Manhattan and traveling through the city,
Speaker 13: the darkness, the lights, the cars, the taxis, and the
Speaker 13: kind of New York iconography of the buildings, the taxis
Speaker 13: and so on. And then the end of the film
Speaker 13: again we are also on the streets of New York
Speaker 13: in the morning. So the film has taken us through
Speaker 13: a whole night where there's two characters, one of them
Speaker 13: played by Jean Pierre Melville himself, looking to sort of
Speaker 13: a particular mystery, the disappearance of a French diplomat. It's
Speaker 13: very much like we are in the city of New
Speaker 13: York in Manhattan, and Melville really indulges in a way
Speaker 13: in a sort of love letter to New York. It's
Speaker 13: a film with a lot of jazz music. It's a
Speaker 13: film that really adores the city of New York and
Speaker 13: takes us through it. At the same time, it has
Speaker 13: a lot of indoor shooting, but also on this kind
Speaker 13: of love letter to Manhattan, to American culture, diners, restaurants,
Speaker 13: jazz clubs, taxis and so on. The theater we've taken through, theater, nightclubs,
Speaker 13: kind of a lot of cultural icons of New York.
Speaker 13: And then in the middle of it, Melville puts a
Speaker 13: story that has to do with the French resistance during
Speaker 13: the Second World War, and that in a way is
Speaker 13: very much important to Melville's interests me in a sense,
Speaker 13: American culture and the resistance. You might say, oh, the
Speaker 13: two things he was most interested in, and American cultural
Speaker 13: and American cinema. Of course, so he manages in that
Speaker 13: film to combine the two. But it's by no means
Speaker 13: an obvious mixture. And when the film came out, it
Speaker 13: was didn't do very well. People very puzzled by it
Speaker 13: and didn't like it, and even the people who had
Speaker 13: worshiped me little before, like go down and reference on there,
Speaker 13: suddenly they lost interest and people thought the film was odd,
Speaker 13: was awkward, was badly made, was a kind of too
Speaker 13: hybrid in a way. So I think it's it's that today.
Speaker 13: To me seeing it today, it's fascinating precisely because of
Speaker 13: those different corners of the culture that come together. But
Speaker 13: certainly at the time it didn't do very well, and
Speaker 13: I think it's for that reason, and it's because the
Speaker 13: film did very badly at the box office and critically
Speaker 13: as well, that Melville decided to change his filmmaking And
Speaker 13: after that film he decided to make films that would
Speaker 13: be more mainstream, to use big stars, and he made
Speaker 13: a film with Jean Paul Bernmondeau, for example, Leon moo
Speaker 13: En Pretre, and then started that the series of films
Speaker 13: that have made him very famous, of those great film
Speaker 13: noir and thrillers that he made in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 13: Too Many in Manhattan is, if you like, is the
Speaker 13: transition between the work he did in late forties and
Speaker 13: fifties or kind of experimenting with different kinds of films,
Speaker 13: different kind of projects as an independent filmmaker, and then
Speaker 13: in the sixties moving on to films that do are
Speaker 13: extremely innovative and original but fitted within the genre of
Speaker 13: mostly the police film or the thriller. So that film
Speaker 13: Too Many in Manhattan is really it's a kind of
Speaker 13: pivotal moment between those two main phases of his career.
Speaker 5: Last time we taught, we discussed Army of Shadows, and
Speaker 5: we've talked in the past about the role of women
Speaker 5: in Melville films and the importance of Siemontaigneur and Army
Speaker 5: of Shadows. Not very many important women are really well
Speaker 5: portrayed women, I would say, in Two Men in Manhattan,
Speaker 5: but maybe the exception of the daughter character.
Speaker 13: You're absolutely right in one sense. You might say this
Speaker 13: is true of his films in general, and as you
Speaker 13: pointed out, films like I'm in a Shadow and so on.
Speaker 13: His of course, his thrillers like The Samurai or Le
Speaker 13: Circle Rouge the Red Circle, women are even more marginalized.
Speaker 13: In Too Many in Manhattan. A Melville plays a journalists
Speaker 13: called Moro who works for a Jean Franz Press for
Speaker 13: the French news agency in New York. They discover Diplomatis disappeared,
Speaker 13: so they're looking for him, and he takes as his
Speaker 13: acolyte a photographer, but a photographer who works as a
Speaker 13: kind of scandal sheet and is out looking for a scandal,
Speaker 13: and they decide to pursue their quest for this man
Speaker 13: whose disappear through meeting women who've been associated with him,
Speaker 13: who were his mistresses. So one is an actress in
Speaker 13: the theater, one is a singer, and so on, and
Speaker 13: one was in is an escort prostitute.
Speaker 10: And there is.
Speaker 13: A mysterious car that follows them through the night, and
Speaker 13: we only realize at the end that it is the
Speaker 13: disappeared man's daughter. So yes, she's important, but on the
Speaker 13: other hand, she's hardly seen most of the time, so
Speaker 13: she she has an important role narratively, but actually on
Speaker 13: the screen what you see all those men and when
Speaker 13: they have interaction with the theater actress, perhaps the most
Speaker 13: important one, they're fairly brutal with her, especially the photographer.
Speaker 13: You know, in a way, it fits within Melvie's kind
Speaker 13: of hyper masculine universe, and and that kind of true
Speaker 13: whether you're talking about the army in the shadow, so
Speaker 13: a resistance movie, or or you're talking about films about
Speaker 13: contract killers like Samurai or etc. The only there is
Speaker 13: one exception in Melville's work where a woman has an
Speaker 13: important role, and that is Leon moreen Prete, which he
Speaker 13: made after Two Men in Manhattan, and that is because
Speaker 13: it's based on a novel written by women who it
Speaker 13: is mostly autobiographical. And although the priest is of course
Speaker 13: the title of the film, and he's played by jap
Speaker 13: Paul Belmondeau, who's obviously is big star at the time,
Speaker 13: she the woman who's played by Eminela, she also has
Speaker 13: very important She has a much more important role than
Speaker 13: any woman in any other Melville film. But in Two
Speaker 13: Men in Manhattan we are in that kind of fill
Speaker 13: noir territory where the narrative is driven by men and
Speaker 13: the women are in a way, you know, there is
Speaker 13: a sort of fan fatale element, but it's very muwe
Speaker 13: and really marginal to the film.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of talk of the past and too
Speaker 5: many in Manhattan. They you know, obviously it's coming out
Speaker 5: in fifty nine shot and fifty eight. They talk a
Speaker 5: lot about the war and the resistance. But then there's
Speaker 5: discussion kind of towards the beginning where they're talking about
Speaker 5: longing for nineteen twenty five and the warring twenties. What
Speaker 5: was going on at that point in French history that
Speaker 5: they would long for that was it just because it
Speaker 5: was the time before the war?
Speaker 9: Yes?
Speaker 13: Probably, I think so. I mean I think there is
Speaker 13: that line, but it applies to be the photographer, who
Speaker 13: we given to understand is a kind of fairly dis character.
Speaker 13: I think to me, the film is more looking back
Speaker 13: at the war and the resistance and what it does
Speaker 13: with it. I think, like the Army in the Shadows
Speaker 13: in a much more major way, is to present the
Speaker 13: resistance kind of great ideal, a kind of a mythology,
Speaker 13: is really a very much idealistic and it fits within
Speaker 13: what French historians have called the resistentialist myth that the
Speaker 13: idea that what characterized French people during the German occupation
Speaker 13: was resistant. Whereas, of course we know and we certainly
Speaker 13: has been very well documented now that you know, the
Speaker 13: majority of people were not in the resistance, know whether
Speaker 13: necessarily fascist or Nazis, but the kind ofway in the
Speaker 13: middle and didn't do very much. But a film made
Speaker 13: in nineteen fifty eight fifty nine is just after the
Speaker 13: return of General de Goal in power on the French
Speaker 13: political scene, and sas he came back in fifty eight
Speaker 13: and so he was the president, and his return is
Speaker 13: often seen as rekindling, if you like, the interest in
Speaker 13: the resistant, because the Goal really embodied the resistance and
Speaker 13: when at the end of Two Men in Manhattan, when
Speaker 13: we are the head of the French news agency and says,
Speaker 13: you know, you cannot show this man. So we learn
Speaker 13: that he has died in his mistress's flat, but this
Speaker 13: must not be shown because he's a great hero and
Speaker 13: you cannot debase his memory by showing him dying in
Speaker 13: this kind of vulgar way. In a way, this is
Speaker 13: Melville also showing that this great myth of the resistance
Speaker 13: is also a manufactured thing, that it is an invention
Speaker 13: to some extent, or a great construction by the media,
Speaker 13: and so and what his film does is to demonstrate
Speaker 13: that kind of construction, that yes, this man was a
Speaker 13: great hero, but this heroism must be maintained at all costs,
Speaker 13: and he mustn't be shown to be just an ordinary
Speaker 13: man who dies in his mistress's flat. So I think
Speaker 13: Melvin is very aware of all that, and he to
Speaker 13: me he's torn between loving that myth and loving the
Speaker 13: past and himself having been in the resistance, and at
Speaker 13: the same time being fully aware that it is a construction.
Speaker 13: And that is what the film does. And I think
Speaker 13: possibly the very negative this is something we can see
Speaker 13: better with a greater hindsight and possibly in nineteen fifty
Speaker 13: nine when the film came out, the kind of generally
Speaker 13: the negative reaction was so to people not understanding why
Speaker 13: he was bringing that back into the picture.
Speaker 5: Well, to see those New York scenes, kind of like
Speaker 5: with Magnet of Doom, to see America, to have Columbia
Speaker 5: the logo come up at the beginning, it was like, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm not used to this with a Melville film.
Speaker 13: Yes, so Columbia distributed the film. Obviously, you mentioned Magnet
Speaker 13: of Doom, La Felle Liney de fair Show, which was
Speaker 13: like a love letter to a different kind of America.
Speaker 13: And then this is New York and he was looking
Speaker 13: at an interview Merrill gave about it and saying, this,
Speaker 13: it's very dark, because that was the reality of New
Speaker 13: York at the time. This is, you know, in Paris
Speaker 13: was much lighter. It's more light about and and it
Speaker 13: is very dark, but it's very evocative. I think it.
Speaker 13: I really enjoyed watching it. I think those scenes are
Speaker 13: very beautiful, you know, and and the music and everything
Speaker 13: it's it's I was quite surprised looking at the reviews
Speaker 13: at the time, which tend to make it sound like Oh,
Speaker 13: it's a very dull film, I thought.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 13: I really don't think it's dark. I think it's it's
Speaker 13: we can tell that they're taking their time over this.
Speaker 13: There's not a great urgency to find this man. It's
Speaker 13: just like an excuse to take us through all these
Speaker 13: different cultural places, so we you know, from the United
Speaker 13: Nations to the Mercury Theater, which you know, every place
Speaker 13: that he chooses is is culturally coded. It's it's it's
Speaker 13: not just any theater or you know, and and of
Speaker 13: course his great love of American cinema and jazz music,
Speaker 13: so it's kind of all comes together really.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 5: We were back and we were talking about two Men
Speaker 5: in Manhattan, and between this actually being a Christmas movie,
Speaker 5: which is barely mentioned, they have the shots of the
Speaker 5: ice skaters at thirty Rock, and they've got some neon stuff,
Speaker 5: and then you see the Salvation Army people out there,
Speaker 5: and there's a little is it God Bless you marry
Speaker 5: gentlemen I think comes up on the soundtrack very quickly.
Speaker 5: I kept thinking, and especially with all of the beautiful
Speaker 5: shots of Manhattan, I kept think of Alan Barn's Blast
Speaker 5: of Silence, which is more in that crime you but
Speaker 5: it's so fascinating, and I think it's just two years
Speaker 5: after this, and it's like, if you want to see
Speaker 5: beautiful shots of New York City in the late fifties
Speaker 5: early sixties, and double feature of those two films would
Speaker 5: really scratch that itch.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's such a wonderful film. I got to see
Speaker 10: that on thirty five millimeter in November early December that
Speaker 10: and the screening was this is at the beginning of
Speaker 10: the Christmas season, and I definitely have a love for
Speaker 10: movies that are incidentally Christmas films where it's not part
Speaker 10: of the plot, but it's clearly taking place during the
Speaker 10: Christmas holiday. And that one I think is way more
Speaker 10: grim than this.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, just thinking about Larry Tucker and his bird
Speaker 5: and all that, it's interesting that it's that one is
Speaker 5: much more for me anyway, a story about men and
Speaker 5: just like how men are supposed to be in the
Speaker 5: way that men act. And it is interesting though that
Speaker 5: it's also about the way that men fuck each other over.
Speaker 5: And then you have that whole thing and two men
Speaker 5: in Manhattan, which you know I mentioned at the beginning,
Speaker 5: like a whole The whole thing comes down at the
Speaker 5: end to this photo that del Mat takes, and then
Speaker 5: it's trying to find him, trying to get the film.
Speaker 5: But it's really interesting how they just suddenly changed the
Speaker 5: narrative to now del Ma is that person who's being
Speaker 5: pursued and the person you now need to convince you're
Speaker 5: going to be doing the wrong thing if you publish
Speaker 5: this photograph.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but it seems like he genuinely cares about Moreau's
Speaker 10: regard and even though like there's something about their relationship
Speaker 10: that makes it hard for me not to create a
Speaker 10: backstory in my head about how maybe they served in
Speaker 10: the war together or something like the way that they
Speaker 10: go about their jobs and the way that they work
Speaker 10: together makes it seem like they have a kind of
Speaker 10: rapport and maybe even the way of working together that
Speaker 10: doesn't quite fit into the context of where and how
Speaker 10: they're working while the actual narrative of the film is happening.
Speaker 10: I think I've seen Moreau as reminding Delma like, we
Speaker 10: are in civilized society now, and there is a way
Speaker 10: to behave and not to behave, Like this is not
Speaker 10: the resistance anymore, and if you have actual moral codes
Speaker 10: and stick to them, your life will be better, and
Speaker 10: so will the lives of the people around you. But
Speaker 10: while I agree that Blast of Silence is much more
Speaker 10: about these male characters, I think even in that film,
Speaker 10: their masculinity is defined, especially the protagonists, defined by his
Speaker 10: interactions with women and what he sees are maybe his
Speaker 10: failed interactions or discipline pointed interactions, and seeing that level
Speaker 10: of frustration, I think is what makes it feel a
Speaker 10: lot darker than two men in Manhattan where they're just
Speaker 10: hanging out living their lives. They're not going through like
Speaker 10: the two main characters are not going through any kind
Speaker 10: of crisis. They're just trying to solve a mystery because
Speaker 10: it's their job.
Speaker 5: The way that the main character and Blasts of Silence
Speaker 5: interacts with women and can't really get a grip on things,
Speaker 5: I can really see Ham informing like a Travis Pickle
Speaker 5: again with great, totally great shots of New York. Another
Speaker 5: one where it's just like a love letter to the
Speaker 5: seedier side. Gosh, like you can feel the dirt of
Speaker 5: when you watch Taxi Driver, and I feel like you
Speaker 5: can get that dirt under your nails too when you're
Speaker 5: watching Blasts of Silence.
Speaker 10: Absolutely in a way that you don't through two men
Speaker 10: in Manhattan.
Speaker 5: No, No, it's a very clean world. Even though they're
Speaker 5: in the brothels, the burlesque theaters and all those, it
Speaker 5: does and feel like we're in a used world that
Speaker 5: feels like Mola, feels like sets, and it feels like
Speaker 5: we are in a very very clean place.
Speaker 10: That's how Bubbla Flember is too.
Speaker 14: Though.
Speaker 10: Even though you see some of those grungy characters on
Speaker 10: the periphery of the film, Bob is the one who
Speaker 10: very much sets the moral tone and who polices the morality.
Speaker 10: And he is at heart a gentleman. And even though
Speaker 10: he's staying up until eight in the morning gambling and has.
Speaker 15: That fucking slot machine supartment best best thing in any movie,
Speaker 15: he still is he himself is not grungey in that way,
Speaker 15: like he has this very clear moral code.
Speaker 5: Well not only does he have a moral code, but
Speaker 5: he's got a moral compass through the police inspector. So
Speaker 5: the way that you're talking about Moreau and del Matt
Speaker 5: reminds me of Ledrux and Montague, the way that he's
Speaker 5: that Jimmy Crickett on his shoulder kind of thing, just
Speaker 5: like hey stand in the street, oh, yeah, like, and
Speaker 5: that's very much del mont Moreau to Duma, where it's
Speaker 5: just like, what are you doing? And then yeah, you
Speaker 5: kind of get that little maybe it's a little heavy
Speaker 5: handed later on in the film, where it's just like.
Speaker 2: Do you know what kind of guy this is?
Speaker 5: And how he parachuted into Paris and or parachuted into
Speaker 5: France and he got a broken leg and then they
Speaker 5: had to parachute again blind a couple months later, And
Speaker 5: I'm like, this is basically the main character from Memory
Speaker 5: of Shadows that we're talking about here. This is the
Speaker 5: Leno Ventura character. But talking about him all these.
Speaker 10: Years before that is funny to think about that different
Speaker 10: versions of characters that appear throughout his films, because there
Speaker 10: are a couple of recurring ones, and it feels like,
Speaker 10: I think this is what we were talking about earlier
Speaker 10: about how he's so deliberate and meticulous and formalist. I
Speaker 10: think because he's working through these obsessions and these fascinations
Speaker 10: and these character types, you can see how they change
Speaker 10: over time as he ages and the further he gets
Speaker 10: away from.
Speaker 5: The war and the further he masters his craft. I
Speaker 5: don't think that the Jean Pierre Melville of nineteen seventy
Speaker 5: three would be making Two Men in Manhattan look anything
Speaker 5: like this, or even concentrate on the same things. When
Speaker 5: it comes to the script, I really feel like this
Speaker 5: is that entry point. Entry point. I think Andrew, you
Speaker 5: brought up the whole idea of like, don't make this
Speaker 5: one of your first ones watch. I completely agree with that.
Speaker 5: This is much more of a It's like for people
Speaker 5: like us that we want to watch every single one
Speaker 5: of these films and we hit this one where she's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: really good. But I don't think that a normal person
Speaker 5: would come to this movie and be like, oh, I
Speaker 5: have to see everything that this guy has done. Maybe
Speaker 5: they can see what we see, but I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't know if a brand new person to Melville
Speaker 5: comes in and sees this and goes, oh, this guy
Speaker 5: has something really important and really necessary to say. For us, yes,
Speaker 5: we definitely see that and hear that and can compare
Speaker 5: it see it within the whole body of work. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know how a new would handle a movie.
Speaker 3: This like this.
Speaker 10: Well, maybe if we strap them to a chair and
Speaker 10: tape their eyelids open and make them watch it a
Speaker 10: couple a dozen times, and the.
Speaker 5: Next time they hear jazz, they'll just plots.
Speaker 9: Or even the scraping of a needle at the end
Speaker 9: of a record Avlovian response.
Speaker 5: Immediately, all right, we're going to take another break and
Speaker 5: play a preview for next week's show right after these
Speaker 5: brief messages.
Speaker 1: There are two billion people on the Earth, and the
Speaker 1: one motion picture for all of them is On the Beach,
Speaker 1: the biggest story of our time that now becomes the
Speaker 1: biggest motion picture evented in entertainment history.
Speaker 16: On the Beach so powerful, so bold, so vividly realistic,
Speaker 16: only these great talents can do just to its shattering them.
Speaker 16: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, and a
Speaker 16: sensational news star Donna Anderson, five stars under the aegis
Speaker 16: of producer director Stanley Kramer. Together they give you On
Speaker 16: the Beach, a motion picture milestone.
Speaker 1: If you never see another motion picture in your life,
Speaker 1: you must see On the Beach.
Speaker 5: That's right, We'll be back next week with a look
Speaker 5: at Stanley Kauffman's On the Beach. Until then, they want
Speaker 5: to my co host Sam and Andrew. So, Andrew, what
Speaker 5: is the latest with you?
Speaker 11: Sir.
Speaker 9: Two weeks ago. I got back from West Africa after
Speaker 9: making a feature film, not a documentary but a Feach film,
Speaker 9: this time about an Australian jerk going to West Africa
Speaker 9: to make a Kung Fu remake of the Heart. They
Speaker 9: come with little people. So I'll be touring that around
Speaker 9: North America and you're probably second for twenty twenty five.
Speaker 9: Hope to see you there.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, I didn't realize there was going to be
Speaker 5: that soon. That's fantastic.
Speaker 9: Oh, we're madly editing right now and we're looking at
Speaker 9: the premiere in August twenty twenty five, so I'll be
Speaker 9: running around banging the can very very soon after that.
Speaker 5: Well, I will be sure to set up a special
Speaker 5: episode where we get you on and have you talk
Speaker 5: about the movie.
Speaker 9: Oh, Mat, I can't wait to show you because, like
Speaker 9: I was saying before, you and Stam are pretty much
Speaker 9: my audience.
Speaker 5: I think we'll have a lot to talk about. And Sam,
Speaker 5: what's going on in your world?
Speaker 10: Nothing nearly as exciting as Andrews. I guess I should
Speaker 10: shout out my podcast ersplus Massacre, which I took a
Speaker 10: little bit of a break because I dealing with wintertime burnout,
Speaker 10: but I am back. Things I've worked on that have
Speaker 10: been announced recently, Arrow did this Japanese v cinema box
Speaker 10: that is for pre order right now. I contributed a
Speaker 10: video essay to that. It's really, really an amazing labor
Speaker 10: of love that you should check out. Also, Radiance recently
Speaker 10: put out Sasian Suzuki's Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. I
Speaker 10: contributed a commentary to that. And all I do is work,
Speaker 10: So we could be here for a while with me
Speaker 10: listing commentaries, but I'll stop at those two.
Speaker 5: Sam, when is our commentary? And the release of the
Speaker 5: Seventh Curse coming out?
Speaker 10: That should be out soon. It has been announced it's
Speaker 10: Seventh Curse and which from DePaul as a double feature
Speaker 10: from Vineger Syndrome. Yeah, that should be out soon. I'm
Speaker 10: always the last person to know when things have actually
Speaker 10: been officially announced. Often I know because people on Instagram
Speaker 10: tag me and things and I'm like, oh, good to
Speaker 10: know this is finally out.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 5: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 5: of the other shows that I work on there. All
Speaker 5: available at weirdingwemedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
Speaker 5: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
Speaker 5: com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the
Speaker 5: Projection Booth take over the world.
Speaker 14: Theresis street in Manhattan.
Speaker 9: With a house.
Speaker 15: That has no no pay.
Speaker 9: And the line.
Speaker 10: But bns one.
Speaker 14: Listen go from.
Speaker 1: I live.
Speaker 10: So long ago.
Speaker 2: With a god.
Speaker 15: You wouldn't care to.
Speaker 10: Know, got its code.
Speaker 14: Nother thing could hear?
Speaker 2: Go back.
Speaker 3: Not to n.
Speaker 9: Z Ies sang to me all day.
Speaker 2: A smile.
Speaker 10: In a fun way.
Speaker 14: Nothing more for me to say all day down that
Speaker 14: street in Manhattan, at the house that has no window pane,
Speaker 14: and that the but but my Mota way.
Speaker 11: Go its bad.
Speaker 14: Tonight. Damn that street in manhad m HM.
Speaker 7: And that house.
Speaker 9: That has no window plane, and that.
Speaker 15: That but my hot away God.
Speaker 10: It's bad
Speaker 2: To Okay, I'll be back in a minute