TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1958)

Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who also took the lead role of a sanctimonious journalist, Deux hommes dans Manhattan is a procedural. Two men, journalist Moreau and photographer Delmas, investigate the disappearance of France’s ambassador to the U.N. Their nocturnal search takes them throughout the electric city and into “darkest Brooklyn”—a reference that always cracks me up. Two Men looks back to a number of films, including two noirs by Jules Dassin, The Naked City (1948) and the London-set Night and the City (1950), and with its complex tone—a mix of journalistic objectivity, spooky mystery skirting luridness, macabre comedy—and tortured lonely lives, it looks ahead to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
     It turns out that a heart attack killed the French diplomat in his mistress’s apartment. His daughter shadows the investigative pair while her mother, the one most in the dark, waits for some word from her spouse. For her, it’s another one of those nights.
     The dead man had been a true hero of the Resistance. A quarrel ensues as to how to treat the “story”—sensationally, which will mean big bucks, or tactfully, which is to say, deceptively. Melville knows his Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948); Moreau and Moreau’s boss insist on “printing the legend.” Delmas, a cynic and the one struggling hardest to make a living, is slower to come around.
     At one level, the two men are warring aspects of a similar job description; at another, they are both differently wrong. One adheres to the past; the other must cope with the present.
     Widely regarded as one of his failures, even by Melville, this is actually one of his most brilliant, most moving works—and the black-and-white cinematography, by Nicolas Hayer and Melville himself, is peerless.

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L’AINE DES FERCHAUX (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel, excellent as usual) is a Parisian banker an imminent investigation of whose corrupt dealings has him taking off for the U.S., accompanied by a newly hired secretary, an ex-boxer beautifully played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. The boy’s voiceover has him introducing himself as Michel Maudet, but adding, “At least you can call me that.” “Call me Michel”: a fitting start for a film by Jean-Pierre Grumbach, whose nom-de-caméra, Melville, derives from the American author whose most celebrated novel begins, “Call me Ishmael.” However, this loose adaptation of Simenon’s novel includes elements of Belmondo’s biography, too. Belmondo also was a boxer, his family also came from Italy, and he played Michel in Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959).
     Richly scored by Georges Delerue, this is a solitudinous “road movie”—by flight from Paris to New York, by car down South, with an extended, fatal pause in Louisianan woods outside New Orleans. In particular, this is J.F.K.’s America, with a roadside motel flashing this message on its sign: “Pray for peace.” Melville takes in the disparity between rich and poor, which, ironically, Dieudonné and “Michel” themselves reflect. It should be noted that Ferchaux is a racist who hates “niggers” and even has two slave children back in Paris—one black, one white, because bankers aren’t racially discriminatory when it comes to exploiting and oppressing common humanity. Feisty “Michel” makes plain that he won’t roll over and submit to any flick of his employer’s metaphorical whip.
     The relationship between old Dieudonné and young “Michel” grows complex; they are a contentious father and son. According to the banker, there exist three kinds of men, sheep, leopards and jackals. He wonders which kind “Michel” is. We alone discover that the boy is not a jackal.

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LEON MORIN, PRIEST (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)

Because of its religious material, an inheritance from the autobiographical novel by Béatrix Beck on which it is based, Jean-Pierre Melville, an atheist, disparaged one of his most beautiful films, Léon Morin, prêtre—like his first film, Le silence de la mer (1947), set in a small town during the German occupation.
     The central character is Barny (Emmanuèlle Riva, superb), a young war widow with a daughter by a Jewish father. Barny is also a communist and an atheist, but whatever she “is” she is also remarkably unformed behind her settled masks. At work, she is half-attracted to an androgynous female co-worker before striking up a platonic relationship with the titular handsome young priest, beautifully played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. But what precisely draws her to this boy who becomes her tutor? They talk faith (his, necessarily), and she feels compelled by powerful forces of conversion. But is Barny the best analyst of her own motives? It turns out that Léon’s moral strength derives as much from his anti-fascist activities as a member of the underground Resistance. It is resonant rather than arbitrary that this film is more pencil-gray than black and white.
     Barny’s shopping around for a definitive personality suggests a self-making Frankenstein monster; but her predicament suggests the extent to which war and enemy invasion have put lives on hold, especially robbing the young of opportunities for normal mental and emotional growth. Who knows what of life that Léon’s dangerous patriotic activity is holding him back from.
     But even the Occupation of France cannot keep life from bubbling up here and there. Melville releases one of cinema’s finest erotic charges when Léon, the object of her stirred desire, literally brushes past Barny as she is seated in church.
     Our own hearts nearly stop.

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THE PASSENGER (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and the director, Antonioni’s The Passenger, a baleful, delicately mournful mystery, tests assumptions about identity, responsibility, authority. Antonioni also prods our perception to the full—for instance, by setting critical action just beyond the camera’s range so that we must listen carefully to hear what is going on.
      David Locke, a fatigued, jaded journalist, starts anew by exchanging identities with a corpse in a North African hotel. Maintaining professional distance, seeing detail but always missing the larger picture, Locke has held himself aloof from the revolutionary upheavals he has been covering, discounting their relevance to his own life. Now his new identity places him dead-center in the opportunistic, politically non-committed world of gunrunning.
      The Passenger critiques the assumption that the only connections the West can have to the Third World are colonialist, insisting instead on a shared humanity that links all people’s fates. Locke, as reporter, stresses the eye   (“Tell me what you see now . . .”); as artist, Antonioni stresses the soul.
      Antonioni’s penultimate shot resolves his material. (To be precise, it’s a gyroscopically “smoothed” meshing of shots whose outcome gives the appearance of a single slow camera movement.) From inside to out, through a close-barred window in a Spanish hotel, the (seemingly) steadily moving camera draws connections among disparate humans, including Locke, and elements of geographic and political space—indoors, outdoors, indoors again (now using a doorway instead of a window)—before the camera returns to Locke, dead, in his room. Failing to perceive all the connectedness that the camera has just elegantly drawn, Locke has taken a circular stroll into the arms of his own defeatism, uncovering the death lurking beneath the mask/metaphor of the original identity-exchange in Africa: for us, a cautionary experience.

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HARVEST 3,000 YEARS (Haile Gerima, 1975)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“The father grew maize. His son sowed bullets. That black bull will charge if sufficiently provoked.”
      Mirt Sost Shi Amit is a Brechtian parable about class division and revolt. Based in the U.S., Haile Gerima returned to his native Ethiopia to shoot this massive, staggering reflection on Ethiopia amidst the collapse of Haile Selassie’s uncaring regime prior to the military takeover.
      Tenants work in various capacities on a farm riddled with echoes of feudal colonialism. Mostly silent, the film is punctuated by distancing naturalistic sounds: mooing cows, squawking chickens, dripping water—this last, a sign of something ominous steadily growing. Work is treated neutrally; it isn’t sanctified, in the silent Soviet manner, or identified with oppression. Rather, it is the landlord, equipped with an absolute sense of entitlement, and the social structure he represents that attach oppressed lives to the farm laborers. Indolent (he even has to be shoed by a servant to be ready for church), the landlord berates the shoeless farmers for indolence—a charge that images of their field and other labor piercingly refute. However, this rural situation is metaphorical for all Ethiopia, including urban Ethiopia: “The rich live in high buildings while we, who have worked hard, live in graves.” Someone also says that an Ethiopian without money in a bank in Addis Ababa is out of luck, nowhere.
      Political conversations, both veiled and blatant, dot the film. More dramatic are instances of that earlier drip-drip coming to an accumulated point of satiation. One is ironic: the cowherder dying in a flooded-over stream trying to retrieve a cow after the landlord has promised death if she loses any of the cattle. Another: the landlord’s own lethal pummeling, to which conditioned peasants respond as if he were one of their own.

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