(Martin Ritt, 1961)

Although released the same year as last week's The Connection, and featuring modern jazz just as centrally, this film by Martin Ritt (The Long Hot Summer, Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Great White Hope, The Molly Maguires, Sounder, The Front, Norma Rae, and many others) is about as far from Clarke's mock-cinéma vérité as a film could be both in its overall tone and in its depiction of the lives of jazz musicians. Another hard-to-come-by film only recently made available on home video and for public exhibition (although very occasionally popping up on TCM), this stellar romance gorgeously shot on location in Paris (where else?) stars Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as expatriate jazz musicians in Paris who hook up with two vacationing American tourists played by Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. Although not noir by any means, despite its many nightclub and jazz cellar settings, it was shot in stunning black and white by Christian Matras (see below) and does have a great jazz score, again by Duke Ellington (with Billy Strayhorn). Unlike in Anatomy of a Murder, Ellington doesn't appear on screen, but Louis Armstrong does (not as himself, but as a character named "Wild Man Moore"), along with scads of other American and European jazz musicians and, in a small but memorable role as a Django Reinhardt-type guitarist named "Michel 'Gypsy' Devigne," Italian-born French singer and actor Serge Reggiani (dubbed on guitar by real-life American expatriate in Paris Jimmy Gourley).