THE THIN MAN

The Thin Man, W.S. VanDyke, Director, 1934

 HOOK: No two people have ever played off of each other better than William Powell and Myrna Loy in this art deco world of long shots and footsteps on a sound stage. 

LINE:  “Can’t you tell me anything about this case?” “Yes, it’s putting me way behind with my drinking.” 

SINKER: Powell lying on a couch drunk shooting ornaments off their Christmas tree with a bb gun.

JOHN: We had to watch this one because Spanky has a thing about Astor, who almost steals the movie. In this black and white world of booze, money and nefarious crime there’s always time for the dog. Powell and Loy (even when alone) act like they are at a party and really enjoying themselves, and because of this we dower shadows in the audience some vicarious way do to. When the mystery finally heats up it is all Nick Charles, but this is the world of seventy year old villains and middle aged women with hair like platinum helmets. You definitely have to suspend disbelief (and perhaps your judgment—these were chauvinistic times), but it is worth the ride, dog and all. 

GO GO GO (3 GOS out of four)

SPANKY: Let me not there are very few genres about people actually doing their work (Hammett is one author who puts the subject center soundstage). That’s part of the joy of this film. Plus there’s newspapers coming off the presses, police motorcycles with sirens blaring, all the suspects sitting in an Art Deco dining room anxiously awaiting the big revelation and there’s even a tickertape. True, Astor seems to be the only sensible being in a world of doofess humans, but we know that’s always been the case for dogs. And when the film ends with the happy couple on their way to many sequels (The Thin Man · After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, Song of the Thin Man), the band plays “California Here I Come” and I couldn’t help sitting up and barking. How the hell have movies and civilization go so wrong since then? There’s a mystery even Nick and Nora couldn’t solve. 

“TWO PAWS UP” (5 BARKs out of four) 

The Thin Man was Hammett’s last novel. Lillian Hellman, in an introduction to a compilation of Hammett’s five novels, contemplated on several explanations for Hammett’s retirement as a novelist: “I have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novel after The Thin Man. I do not know. I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do a new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life.”