30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying. That’s certainly the case in The Thin Man, a murder mystery in which the murder and the mystery are insignificant compared to the personal styles of the actors. Powell and Myrna Loy co-star as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired detective and his rich wife, playfully in love and both always a little drunk.

Nick Charles drinks steadily throughout the movie, with the kind of capacity and wit that real drunks fondly hope to master. When we first see him, he’s teaching a bartender how to mix drinks (“Have rhythm in your shaking . . . a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters and he hands her a drink. She asks how much he’s had. “This will make six martinis,” he says. She orders five more, to keep up.

Powell plays the character with a lyrical alcoholic slur that waxes and wanes but never topples either way into inebriation or sobriety. The drinks are the lubricant for dialogue of elegant wit and wicked timing, used by a character who is decadent on the surface but fundamentally brave and brilliant. After Nick and Nora face down an armed intruder in their apartment one night, they read about it in the morning papers. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” Nick observes. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true,” says Nick. “He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”

After a prologue set three months earlier, most of the movie takes place over the holiday season, including cocktail parties on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and the exposure of the killer at a dinner party sometime around New Years’ Eve. The movie is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir, and it does technically provide clues, suspects, and a solution to a series of murders, but in tone and intent it’s more like an all-dialogue version of an Astaire and Rogers musical, with elegant people in luxury hotel penthouses and no hint of the Depression anywhere in sight.

The Thin Man was one of the most popular films of 1934, inspired five sequels, and was nominated for four Oscars (best picture, actor, direction, and screenplay). Yet it was made as an inexpensive B-picture. Powell and Loy had been successful together earlier the same year in Manhattan Melodrama (the last film John Dillinger ever saw), and were quickly cast by MGM in this crime comedy that was filmed, incredibly, in only two weeks. The quick shooting schedule was possible because there are very few sets and negligible exteriors, because there is much dialogue and little action, and because the director, W. S. Van Dyke, was known for sticking to a schedule. That The Thin Man cost so little and looks so good is possibly because the interiors are simple and elegant, and the black-and-white photography flatters the loungewear and formalwear worn by a great-looking cast (which in addition to Powell and Loy, included Maureen O’Sullivan and a young Cesar Romero). And there is a kind of grace in the way the six-foot Powell hovers protectively over the fix-foot-six Loy (or sometimes simply leans as if blown in her direction).

Although Dashiell Hammett was known for hard-boiled fiction, and John Huston’s 1941 film of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was one of the first examples of film noir, The Thin Man is essentially a drawing-room comedy with dead bodies. The plot is so preposterous that no reasonable viewer can follow it, and the movie makes little effort to require that it be followed. Nick Charles typically stands in the midst of inexplicable events with a drink in his hand, nodding wisely as if he understands everything and is not about to share. When a reporter asks him, “Can’t you tell us anything about the case?” Nick replies: “Yes. It’s putting me way behind in my drinking.”

Briefly, the film involves the mysterious disappearance of an inventor (Edward Ellis); the concern of his daughter (O’Sullivan), who is an old friend of Nick and Nora; the greed of the inventor’s ex-wife (Minna Goimbell); the even greater greed of her gold-digging husband (Romero); the suspicious motives of the inventor’s mistress (Natalie Moorhead), and various other thugs, gunsels, cops, reporters, and the untiring cast of partygoers who turn up nightly at the Charles’ suite for free drinks.