What I do is false. Always.
Jean-Pierre Melville in Melville on Melville (Rui Nogueira, The Viking Press, 1971)
When I first saw Melville's Deux Hommes dan Manhattan at MoMA several years ago I found it disappointing; now that it is available on DVD I find it fascinating. It is something of a film noir as seen by a Frenchman, just as C'era Una Volta Il West is a Western seen by an Italian. It is certainly not my favorite Melville film (that would be the beautifully austere Le Samurai) but it is a complex view of New York in 1959, with exteriors filmed in a very dark New York and interiors in a French studio, as two journalists (one played by Melville himself) try to find a missing French diplomat in the seedier parts of Manhattan, going from a diner copied from Asphalt Jungle (Melville's favorite movie) to a strip club in Brooklyn and a recording studio where Glenda Leigh sings the lovely "Street in Manhattan" (written by Christian Chevalier and Jo Warfield). And the ending is obviously from another era, when the peccadillos of someone who was in the Resistance (in which Melville played a part and for which he originally took his new name, from the author of Moby Dick) would be covered up at his death.
One of the pleasures of this somewhat disappointing New York baseball season has been the pitching of Masahiro Tanaka: after last night's victory in Seattle he is now 10-2 with a 2.02 ERA and 103 strikeouts. It is beautiful to watch him work; he concentrates so effectively and pitches so quickly and intensely that the batter often doesn't even have time to step out of the batter's box and waste everyone's time adjusting his batting gloves. Last night Tanaka pitched a complete game that was over in less than three hours.
Tanaka has only 1 loss May 20th to the Cubs @ Wrigley
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