boblipton As a native New Yorker, I found the movie a bit creepy, Melville's image of Manhattan is too perfect, a city where the streets are seamless, glistening ribbons of asphalt, where the ashtrays have smoked cigarette butts stacked neatly in them with no sign of ash, where even the glass in telephone booths on the streets are spotless. When a French diplomat disappears and reporter Jean-Paul Melville in his first credited screen role -- clearly he must have impressed the director -- is set on his trail, he doesn't realize he himself is being followed. Meanwhile I was looking for a scrap of litter on the street, a straphanger on the subway whose hat and soul have been battered by a tough day.... nothing. Everyone is perfectly dressed, everything is perfectly clean, everyone dresses like a serious adult. You should have seen the motley assortment on the E train this afternoon.Finally, about a quarter hour in, Melville goes to the apartment of his cameraman, Pierre Grasset, and the wallpaper outside his apartment was poorly hung. Aha! I thought, a creature of the demi-monde, someone who cuts corners, was looking out for himself, who had pictures of the young women that the diplomat.... associated with. Off they went into the night, still followed by a mysterious trailer, Melville, the moral reporter, and Grasset, the corrupt guide. I knew they would find their prey; but how moral would Melville be and how corrupt Grasset? And who was following them and why? Who was the hero of this story and exactly what was the Great White Whale they were following?This movie is Melville's own personal fantasy, set in a fantasy New York glamorous beyond belief to anyone who has dwelt in the real one. He had been born Jen-Pierre Grumbach, and had adopted a new surname in admiration of Herman Melville. He had played Bartleby and written and directed his own movies and now was going on his own voyage to find out if he could be the hero of his own tale.

treywillwest At first, one has a sense that this is almost a mid-career home movie by Jean-Pierre Melville, but by the end it was one of the most satisfying films I've seen by this director. It should surprise no one that Melville would be in love with urban America. His Paris longs to be New York, or really the Great American City of Noir, with every turn of the street corner being a potential site for conspiracy and betrayal. For the first half of this film, Melville seems overwhelmed by the experience of being in Manhattan, and much of the early scenes feel like a man on vacation in his dream locale. Indeed, many of the shots seem intended to frame Melville, who plays the lead, in front of some iconically "New York" site. But gradually the director finds his barrings and this becomes actually one of his more understated narratives: a character study of two men, a journalist and a photographer who at first seem similar, then very different, and perhaps ultimately similar again, as they wrestle with a simple, but decisive ethical choice.

antcol8 This film is actually quite bad. But that really isn't so important. It's also fascinating, and that's much more important. The whole concept of Misreading, as it has been developed by Harold Bloom, is really important to me, and this film is like a certain kind of textbook. If you have a big American car in a French film, that means one thing. If you have a couple of French guys driving a big American car in New York, the meaning is totally different. Now, of course, we can take this line of inquiry to some absurd places: if an American director would have directed French actors in a French film, shot in New York (driving a big American car)...But, anyway - so much post - Breathless French style is derived from American style. But a lot of American style is derived from misreadings of French misreadings of American style - have you seen Jarmusch's The Limits of Control? Impossible without Melville...What else should I talk about? The Jazz? Solal's Jazz in Breathless. Perfection. Here? Not really. Again, it's French Jazz, and doesn't really fit NY perfectly. But that's OK - maybe if it was worse, it would be better, like the Jazz in Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska! In any case, I really want to collate scenes from movies from the late '50s and note how many times certain things reoccur - little portable record players with records strewn all over the floor, cool scenes of cigarettes being lit, gas stations - the scene in the recording studio so much like the one in Masculin/Feminin. What would we get out of such lists? Something...something about zeitgeist. Something about transmission. Something about cross - pollination and its relationship to influence, something about modern myths.So if the experience of making this film helped him to know what to do and what not to do in his later masterpieces, then, you know what? It's a beautiful thing. Godard once famously said "It's not blood, it's red". Melville found out some kind of similar thing about the difference between America and...American - isms? Something like that.

kinsayder Melville is clearly enjoying himself in this picture. As director, there is a virtuosic flourish to many of the extended shots and the night-time cinematography. As actor, the constant smirk on his character's face is surely that of Melville himself, playing out his personal fantasy as a film noir character in his favourite city.When the story arrives, it's revealed to be an ethical dilemma: our two principals (Melville as an Agence France Presse journalist and Pierre Grasset as his photographer buddy) discover a French diplomat and ex-Resistance hero dead of a heart attack in an actress's apartment. Do they report the truth, cover it up to preserve the guy's reputation or sensationalise it even more to make a fortune from the exclusive?Melville was by no means a great actor, but his baleful eyes, bland smile and spiffy bow tie in this film give him a kind of sleazy charm that brings to mind Peter Lorre. His character's name (Moreau) is a pun on "moraux", which means moral, and indeed he is intended to be the moral centre of the film. There are moments, though, when he seems genuinely sinister: when he peeps on a bare-breasted dancer in her dressing room (the scene was censored in the UK), and when he looms threateningly over another girl who has just attempted suicide."Deux hommes..." is the most New Wave of all Melville's films. The raw, documentary-style shots, the improvised feel to some of the scenes (Melville makes frequent mistakes when speaking English), the use of real locations and untrained actors (including Melville himself), were jarring to audiences and critics at the time. In the light of Godard and Truffaut we can now better appreciate the type of film-making that Melville helped to inaugurate. Nevertheless, Melville regarded "Deux hommes..." as a failed experiment, returning in his subsequent films to a more classical approach.