The Thin Man
Short description
Nick Charles, a former detective, has settled into a comfortable life of drinking and leisure with his wealthy wife, Nora, in San Francisco. Their holiday is interrupted when Dorothy Wynant, the daughter of Nick's former client, an eccentric inventor named Clyde Wynant, asks for help locating her missing father. A murder connected to the case draws Nick back into investigating, and Nora, intrigued by the mystery, encourages him to take it on. As they question Wynant's relatives, friends and business associates, a complicated tangle of motives emerges.
W. S. Van Dyke directed the film, which was adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel by screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, with Hunt Stromberg producing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Cosmopolitan Productions. It followed Van Dyke's Tarzan the Ape Man and arrived in the same year as Manhattan Melodrama and Laughing Boy, well before After the Thin Man. William Powell and Myrna Loy lead as Nick and Nora, supported by Maureen O'Sullivan, Nat Pendleton, Minna Gombell and Porter Hall among a credited cast of 69. The film runs 91 minutes and earned 1 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 8.8 out of 10 from 47 reviews, while on TMDB it has a 7.5 out of 10 from 555 votes, showing stronger approval from critics than from the wider audience.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on Dashiell Hammett's novel «The Thin Man» (1934).
- Seeing the natural ease of William Powell and Myrna Loy (who played Nick and Nora, respectively), director V.S. Van Dyke incorporated this effortless rapport into the script. Van Dyke constantly encouraged the actors in the film to improvise.
- According to Myrna Loy, actors were not allowed to interact between takes with Skippy, the well-trained dog who played Asta.
- W.S. Van Dyke typically did not do retakes if he felt a scene had been captured well on the first take, believing that by repeating the same scene over and over, the actors' performances would only deteriorate. This caused additional stress for the actors, as they often had to learn new lines and details of the scene immediately before filming began, knowing there would likely be only one take.
- MGM was concerned that William Powell was too old and stiff for the role of Nick, and felt that Myrna Loy had played too many femme fatales to convincingly portray Nora. To prevent Loy from playing Nora, MGM management told W.S. Van Dyke that he could only cast her if he filmed all of her character's scenes within three weeks. Van Dyke managed to film them in 12 days.
- The scene in which William Powell's Nick shoots at ornaments on the Christmas tree was added to the film after the actor jokingly picked up a toy gun and began pretending to shoot at the ornaments being used to decorate the tree at the time.
- According to Myrna Loy, the most difficult scene to film was the dinner scene where William Powell's Nick names the killer. The actor himself complained about having to memorize too many lines and struggled to follow the intricacies of the plot. The dinner scene was one of those that absolutely required multiple takes, which created a new problem: oysters had been served to the guests, and due to the repeated takes, the oysters spoiled under the studio lights and began to smell.
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