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When inventor Clyde Wynant vanishes days before hisdaughter's wedding and his secretary turns up murdered, retired detective Nick Charles is pulled back into the case by his unflappable wife Nora — solving it, cocktail in hand, with a dinner-party unmasking and his unbothered terrier Asta in tow.
Show Essentials
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Stars: William Powell(Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O'Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant)
Based on: DashiellHammett's 1934 novel The Thin Man
Release: May 25, 1934 ·91 minutes · Black-and-white
Recognition: 98% onRotten Tomatoes · 4 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture ·National Film Registry (1997) · #32 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs
Panelists: Marty Jencius(host) & Cindy Rotz (co-host)
Trivia Facts
Casting Against the Studio's InstinctsMGM doubted William Powell (too old and buttoned-down)and Myrna Loy (too typecast as a femme fatale) for the leads; director W.S. Van Dyke pushed for them anyway after seeing their chemistry in Manhattan Melodrama.
Louis B. Mayer only loaned Van Dyke three weeks of Myrna Loy's time before Stamboul Quest — he badly underestimated how fast Van Dyke could shoot.
Powell was about 42 and Loy about 29 during filming, close to Nick and Nora's book ages of 45 and 26.
Porter Hall, who played MacCaulay, was making his firstcredited film appearance.
Van Dyke's Need for SpeedGiven three weeks, Van Dyke shot the picture in around12 days on a budget of about $231,000; it went on to gross roughly $1.4 million.
Van Dyke skipped retakes when he liked a first take,believing actors "lose their fire" through repetition — Powell and Loy often had to nail new material cold.
Nick, Nora, and AstaAsta was played by a trained dog actor named Skippy,who worked for a promised squeaky mouse and a biscuit and wasn't allowed to interact with the cast between takes.
By Myrna Loy's own account, Skippy bit her at somepoint during filming.
The Christmas-tree ornament-shooting gag started as Powell fooling around with a prop air rifle between takes; Van Dyke worked it into the finished film.
Loy performed her own pratfall tripping while carryingthe dog and an armful of presents — no stunt double.
Nick's line "Here's that man again" is a play on "Here's that band again," the catchphrase opening Dick Jurgens'spopular radio broadcasts.
Ripped from Real Life Lieutenant Guild's question about the "Sullivan Act" references a real 1911 New York gun-control law; Nora's reply nods to the 1910 Mann Act.
MGM flagged several lines as potentially "censorable" before release, though the film was still approved in 1934.
The film hit theaters in May 1934, just months after Prohibition ended, letting its drinking jokes play as pure escapism rather than the grittier, illicit backdrop of Hammett's Prohibition-era novel.
Costumer Dolly Tree worked entirely in black-and-whitecontrast, since Technicolor wasn't part of the equation.
Legacy & Afterlife Added to the National Film Registry in 1997; ranked #32on AFI's 100 funniest American films.
Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" collection, and Akira Kurosawa later named it among his favorite films.
A Lux Radio Theatre adaptation aired in 1936, reunitingPowell, Loy, and Van Dyke himself as host.
The creators of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist(2008) named their leads as a direct homage to Nick and Nora Charles.
Spoilers The murderer is Herbert MacCaulay, Wynant's own lawyer,who killed him and forged letters to keep up the pretense he was still alive.
Nick identifies Wynant's skeleton by a piece of oldshrapnel in the leg that he remembered Wynant carrying.
In Hammett's novel, "Thin Man" actually refers to Wynant, not Nick — a distinction lost once audiences and later sequels adopted it as Nick's nickname.
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