Before the so-called New Wave père Melville went his own experimental way with this low-budget film set in the heart of the Asphalt Jungle, New York. Melville's Manhattan is how he found it, "as dark as it is beautiful." A French journalist (played by Melville himself) and photographer follow the story of a missing French diplomat who, it seems, has died in the apartment of his mistress. The journalists can aid the homeland or abet the scandal-or adhere to principle, if one knew what that was. Melville essentially follows his nose in this one, through semi-documentary New York exteriors cunningly cut with French interiors, working a jazz score into the plot itself, and giving in to the hopelessness of French actors speaking American in the bit parts. It's lots of fun in a Killer's Kiss kind of way, even without English subtitles for the French dialogue as we, alas, must show it (synopsis provided).