The Thin Man is one of the most influential films that Hollywood ever produced. It’s included in the American Film Institute’s list of 100 funniest films (in a list made in 2000 the film comes in at #32); IMDB users have given it a stratospheric score of 8 of 10 (only three films have scored in the 9s); and it’s extremely rare to read a disparaging review of it, except by god-bothering teetotalers. Many film historians praise it as the first depiction of a happy, antic, achieved marriage of equal partners in Hollywood romantic comedy. Others treat it as a breakthrough in genre-bending, the first successful blend of romantic comedy, screwball, and crime film. The popularity of the Myrna Loy-William Powell screen chemistry led to the pair making eleven more films together. The film’s success led to a boom of imitations of its formula, from the execrable The Ex-Mrs. Bradford to the brilliant The Mad Miss Manton. The Thin Man has a lot of fans. I’m not one of them.
Let me clear the air. I like William Powell and Myrna Loy, the actors who play the lead characters, Nick and Nora Charles. I like them a lot. But The Thin Man is far from my favorite of their pairings. (That would be Libeled Lady). For me, its story is muddy and choppy. It’s so complicated that Powell himself had trouble figuring it out. The plot of Dashiell Hammett’s original novel on which the film is based is also tangled and uninspired (for Hammett), but the film’s version is much worse. The audience doesn’t actually care about the story. Lots of the film’s admirers say just forget the plot and focus on the Nick-and-Nora banter — but the plot takes up more than half the film. The blend of mystery and gaiety never comes together. I keep writing about how I feel the aesthetics of melodramatic noir mystery and light romantic comedy never really coalesce, even though that combo had success at the box office and Hollywood kept churning it out. I may just not have the feel for it. The problems for me aren’t just in the big differences between a genre devoted to persistent, ominous, murderous disorder and one devoted to happy endings; they’re in the mix of visual styles as well — almost all such movies have to splice scenes of dark, moody, expressionistic lighting with the brighter, open mise-en-scène of comedy, and to my taste they rarely work. The one big thing that noir and screwball have in common is snappy, intelligent dialogue. The Thin Man tries to build the entire film on that connection alone. Everything else is like a coat-hanger to hang Powell’s impeccable suits on.
I’ll save for another entry the way the film diminishes Hammett’s original novel and its world view. Here I’m interested mainly in the comedy. The Nick-and-Noraisms are genuinely funny. The merits of the much-praised script by the husband and wife team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich are mainly in what would be considered punch-up dialogue in most films, and I agree with the fans that Powell and Loy deliver the easy-living lines gracefully. They totally get the comedy of a married couple whose relationship is totally lubricated — they have to make up little humorous frictions to keep up their mutual stimulation. They’re witty and quick. They’re constitutionally ironic, and their irony comes from complementary places. Loy’s Nora has the irony of a slummer enjoying Nick’s low-life world, secure that she is protected by her high class, her good looks, her wealth, and her streetwise husband. Powell’s Nick has the irony of a low-end savant with a taste for high-end haberdashery, worldly erudition, and rich folks’ indolence — he’s liberated from care by Nora’s wealth, pure and simple. The sea of alcohol that the couple bobs on like a couple of corks is actually a pretty good objective correlative of their utopian situation: their joint is lubricated. (You see this in Hammett’s novel, too, but there’s a brooding hum under it there.)
Taken in isolation, it’s virtuoso banter — but that’s all it is. It’s more sitcom than romcom or screwball, but a curiously skeletal sit com, because there are no interesting supporting characters to add social depth. I believe screwball comedy generally has verbal and physical slapstick complementing each other. There’s lots of verbal slapstick in The Thin Man, but precious little of the physical stuff. Powell didn’t do a lot of physical comedy in his career, but he was good at it; he has great scenes in Libeled Lady and I Love You Again. It’s Loy who gets the best physical moments, though, when Nick knocks her out to save her from being shot by Morelli, and in the great, arbitrary falling-down-the-steps entrance. On second thought, Powell’s debonair louche besottitude has a lot of the virtues of silent comedy.
Nick and Nora possess everything — all the laughs, all the power, all the solutions; most of all, they possess themselves. Nobody can test them comically. Other romantic-screwball comedies about married couples — like The Awful Truth, Wife vs. Secretary (which also starred Loy) and Love Crazy (which starred Loy and Powell) — involved divorce-threatening problems within the marriages. The elegant boozy harmony of Nick and Nora that so many fans love is just a constant display of holiday sparklers. In most comedies, the holiday mood is something that’s achieved by the protagonists when the Comic Spirit decides they’ve had enough testing. In The Thin Man there aren’t any comic tests or other characters with comic intelligence. Maybe Nick and Nora are supposed to embody comic spirits themselves. That would be cool. But if so, they’re the high-class spirits who have no skin in the game.