Deux Hommes dans Manhattan plot
In this film, director/screenwriter/actor/cameraman Jean-Pierre Melville expresses his longstanding love for the crime genre and America. He and Pierre Grasset play two journalists in Manhattan investigating the disappearance of a UN diplomat, the French resistance fighter and womanizer Fèvre-Berthier. The characters move across the screen in black and white, sometimes in darkness, sometimes brightly lit by neon, sometimes accompanied by harsh jazzy sounds, sometimes by silence, sometimes in long images, sometimes fragmented. These outward contradictions appear to have a substantive equivalent. Should journalists measure the truth broadly or rather cover it up?