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celebrated success, The Hustler (1961), shot on location in the pool halls of New York City (Archer, 1961). It was for his photography of this film that Schüfftan won his one and only Academy Award, a rather symbolic victory awarded from the institution which had prevented him from working freely for so long. As already noted, of all ironies, in Schüfftan’s eagerness to work, he found himself shooting in France for Jean-Pierre Mocky at the time of the ceremony, and was unable to accept the honour in person.

The Hustler starred Paul Newman as ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson, the eponymous hustler, who travels to New York City to challenge ‘Minnesota Fats’ (Jackie Gleason), supposedly the finest pool player around. The pair play throughout the night, with Eddie’s hubris rising with every game he wins and with every drink he takes, the bets steadily increasing all the while. After a marathon 25 hour pool session, a drunken Eddie loses everything and Fats calls an end to their game. Ashamed, Eddie runs from his hustling partner Charlie (Myron McCormick), and meets Sarah (Piper Laurie), another down-and-out, in a bar. The two soon fall for each other, and live together in Sarah’s apartment, rarely interacting with the outside world. Eddie slowly descends back into the seedy world of pool hustling, replacing Charlie with Fats’s manager Bert (George C. Scott), who begins to stake his games. After a big victory for Eddie and Bert, Eddie decides to walk home to Sarah. Bert arrives earlier, and sexually harasses Sarah, who despises the world within which Eddie operates. When Eddie returns he finds that Sarah has committed suicide, writing the words ‘PERVERTED’, ‘TWISTED’, and ‘CRIPPLED’ in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, before taking her own life. The film ends with Eddie challenging Fats to one final game of the pool. This time Eddie is the victor, and when confronted by Bert for his share of the winnings, Eddie, in the film’s final moments, refuses, and walks out of the pool hall.

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At this time Schüfftan was working between France (for his collaborations with Jean-Pierre Mocky) and New York. His Academy Award success for the cinematography of The Hustler immediately reunited Schüfftan with Rossen for the director’s next film, Lilith (1964). This film has been briefly discussed in part one of this chapter, and will play no further part in this case study of the films which were shot on location in New York City (Lilith utilized suburban locations, namely Long Island, and Rockville, Maryland, as opposed to the cityspace).

Trois chambres à Manhattan/Three Rooms in Manhattan (Marcel Carné, 1965)

Having made Something Wild and The Hustler on locations in New York City, and having received acclaim for his work on Rossen’s The Hustler and Lilith, Schüfftan came to the final film of this ‘New York trilogy’, Trois chambres à Manhattan/Three Rooms in Manhattan

(Carné, 1965). The film combined Schüfftan’s dual interests of European and American filmmaking, being a French production by Les Productions Montaigne, which filmed on location in New York City, as well as on sets in France. The film is also notable for reuniting the cinematographer with Marcel Carné, the director responsible for one of Schüfftan’s greatest successes, Le Quai des brumes, some twenty-seven years earlier (see Figures 71 and 72). An adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1945 novel, Trois chambres à Manhattan is the story of François (Maurice Ronet), an actor who moves from Paris to New York when his wife leaves him. In New York, François finds a job for a television company. Traversing the city one evening, François meets Kay (Annie Girardot) in a bar, and the lives of the two lost souls soon become entwined. The pair begins living together in a hotel room, before rapidly moving into François’s apartment. However, their blossoming relationship soon stumbles when François discovers that Kay is married, with a wealthy family living in Mexico,

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including an ill daughter whom Kay needs to visit, and furthermore, that she is in New York

because she ran away from her family with a gigolo.

Figure 71: Schüfftan on set with the cast and crew of Le Quai des brumes in 1938 (back row, second from right).

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Figure 72: Schüfftan on set with Marcel Carné and the cast of Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965 (far left).

Whilst Kay is away visiting her daughter François becomes jealous, convincing himself that he will be treated the same way she treated her husband. François goes out for dinner with his boss (O. E. Hasse) and June (Margaret Nolan), a beautiful young actress from the company. François takes June home and sleeps with her in the bed he shared with Kay. With her daughter recovering, Kay telephones that night from Mexico, and senses something is wrong from François’s awkwardness. She rushes home, and is confronted with the truth by

François. Kay storms out, but François chases after her and convinces her to forgive him. The film ends as the pair leave their apartment for the last time and walk out into the city, their futures awaiting them.

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New York, New York

The three films addressed here formed part of an emergent East Coast filmmaking scene of the 1960s, which would continue to grow until it was most fully exploited by the likes of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese in the 1970s. Demonstrating the successful growth of New York as a site for feature film production was The New York Times, which throughout the 1960s regularly featured reports upon current filmmaking projects, in and around New York. These reports were provided for The New York Times by the journalist Eugene Archer. Archer in fact supplied a set report for each of the three films addressed in this chapter, offering insightful information regarding the practices of location shooting, and the stylistic intentions of each director. One such fact which is revealed through Archer’s writings is that New York film production tended to centralize around Manhattan, best utilizing the most famous landmarks the city has to offer. To illustrate this point, the following map of Manhattan Island highlights a number of the location sites employed by each of the three films (see Figure 73).

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Something Wild	The Hustler	Trois chambres à Manhattan

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West 147th St. (Mary Ann’s	160 West 44th St. (Ames	Dover St.
Family home.)	Billiard Hall.)
City College of New York	Port Authority Bus	Pearl St.
	Terminal
Staten Island Ferry	East 82nd St. (Louisville	West 42nd St.
	home.)
Times Square	McGirr’s Billiard Hall	Central Park
Lower East Side
Manhattan Bridge

Figure 73: Map and table showing the key locations employed on Manhattan Island for the three films.

Further attesting to the city’s keenness to promote film production are two articles of 1965, also published in The New York Times. The first of these, ‘City is Promoted as Movie

Locale’, reveals the news that five major film productions have, ‘obtained technical clearance and a guarantee of citywide cooperation’ (one of which was Trois chambres à Manhattan) (Anon., 1965). A statement by the Department of Commerce and Industrial Development, also quoted by the author, reiterates that ‘all city agencies are giving the producers the fullest assistance.’ (Anon., 1965) To further pave the way for film production, a second New York Times article, ‘Film Unions Here Set Up Amity Unit’, reveals that a smooth process of resolving disputes between union members and film production companies was being established in the city. For the union, the Local 52, it was imperative to, ‘strengthen and improve the relationship between management and labor in New York movie production and to foster and encourage filmmaking in the city.’ (Thompson, 1965)

The prominent use of location shooting in New York also invites an interest in the use of exteriors. Indeed, the use of exterior locations, and the degree of their use is an important

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point of interest in each of the three films. As the piecharts overleaf show (see Figure 74), the use of exterior locations was, for The Hustler, negligible, for Trois chambres à Manhattan, notable, and for Something Wild, considerable. In Something Wild and Trois chambres à Manhattan, the city locations provide a living, breathing space, which mirrors the evolving psychological state of Mary Ann, and the developing relationship of François and Kay. In Trois chambres à Manhattan, this sense of a corporeal city is literally brought into being when the couple observe steam rising from the city’s subway grates, as if the city were breathing. The Hustler is comprised almost entirely of interior locations, enhancing the intensity and claustrophobia of Eddie’s lifestyle as a hustler, and his relationship with Sarah.

Only approximately six and a half minutes of the 127 minute long film are exterior shots, and, at its most intense, we experience almost 40 minutes of interior scenes before we receive the brief respite of an exterior space. Whilst exterior locations are given greater representational space in Something Wild and Trois chambres à Manhattan, nonetheless interior locations dominate in a similar way, and provoke an intense sensation of cabin fever.

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Something Wild

	Interiors: 60 minutes (approx.)		Exteriors: 30 minutes (approx.)

33%

67%

The Hustler

	Interiors: 120.5 minutes (approx.)		Exteriors: 6.5 minutes (approx.)

5%

95%

Trois chambres à Manhattan

	Interiors: 90 minutes (approx.)		Exteriors: 14 minutes (approx.)

13%

87%

Figure 74: Piecharts demonstating the degree of interiors and exteriors in each of the three films.

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As I shall go on to demonstrate, however, it is the very expansiveness of the city exteriors that ultimately serves to reinforce the sense of claustrophobia of the interiors, which underscore François and Kay’s increasingly stifling relationship, and Mary Ann’s imprisonment in Mike’s apartment (explored further in the section ‘Cityspaces’). This is particularly true of Something Wild, for which an astonishing 33% of the film is comprised of exteriors, compared to only 5% and 13% for The Hustler and Trois chambres à Manhattan respectively. The degree of time spent by Mary Ann in exterior locations functions to enhance the degree of her claustrophobia when she is trapped in Mike’s apartment, and struggles to see through the window in order to get a glimpse of life continuing around her outside. This claustrophobia then in turn leads to the powerful emotion of Mary Ann’s escape, as she is able to rediscover the city with a new appreciation for life.

In addition to this dialectic between interiors and exteriors in the three films, it is also worth noting that the degree of location shooting for interior scenes varies between films. In the case of Something Wild, all scenes for the film, both interiors and exteriors, were filmed on location. In comparison, for The Hustler, Rossen employed some use of sets for interior scenes, despite his outspoken dislike for studio filmmaking (‘I have a horror for studios!’

(Noames and Rossen, 1967: 21)), and for Trois chambres à Manhattan, Carné relied upon an extensive use of sets, and all interiors for the film were shot in studio in Paris. These factors are relevant to the issues of ‘realism’ and ‘poeticism’ ascribed to each of these films, and discussed in section two of this case study.

The Name Game

It is unsurprising that Schüfftan was chosen to act as cinematographer in each of these films, considering each director’s outspoken desire to capture both elements of realism and

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