After the Thin Man (MGM, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 6:45 p.m. on the last day of 2022 I rang out the old year with the 1936 movie After the Thin Man, which Turner Classic Movies was showing as part of a marathon of all six Thin Man films in chronological order. There was a time, back when I could still make recordings off the air onto physical media (either VHS tapes or DVD’s) when I would have grabbed at the chance and recorded all these movies in sequence, but now that the tech gods have taken that power away from us poor mortals I contented myself with watching this one, the second in the series, as it aired in real time. It turned out to be an unexpectedly appropriate movie since it takes place largely on New Year’s Eve and is a direct sequel to the first Thin Man film from 1934, literally picking up where the other left off with Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy, delightful together as ever) in a sleeping car on the train taking them back from New York to their home in San Francisco. The first half-hour of this film is pure screwball comedy, with such gags as Nora asking Nick if he’s packed the bottle of whiskey, and he says he has while he’s still drinking from it. They finally make it off the train and get out with all their belongings intact – though one of Nick’s friends, a purse snatcher, greets them at the train station and suddenly Nora discovers that her purse is missing. Nick slyly tells his friend that Nora is his wife, and the crook returns the purse to her as unobtrusively as he stole it in the first place. Nick and Nora plan to hole up in their apartment and sleep for the next two days, but instead they’re treated to a surprise coming-home party thrown by hosts who don’t even know them. It’s the sort of movie in which we laugh at someone being told to “help yourself” to the liquor in his own home. There are some nice culture-clash scenes between Nick’s raffish acquaintances and Noras’s strait-laced relatives, particularly Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph).

Then the intrigue rears its inevitable head as Nora comforts her cousin Selma Landis (Elissa Landi, a highly talented actress who didn’t have the star career she deserved), who’s disturbed because her husband Robert (Alan Marshal) has disappeared for several days. Robert is hanging out at the LiChi Club, owned by gangster “Dance” Joseph Calleia). He’s having an affair with the club’s singer, Polly Byrnes (played by an actress billed as “Dorothy McNulty” but really Penny Singleton, who would go on to star in Columbia’s “B” series based on the comic strip Blondie, with Arthur Lake as her husband Dagwood), and he wants $20,000 so he can divorce Selma and run off with Polly. The man who agrees to pay him off is David Graham (James Stewart, of all people, at a time when MGM had him under contract but didn’t know what to do with him then and for two years later, until Frank Capra borrowed him for You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, his star-making films). David was interested in Selma and resented it when she jilted him to marry Robert, and he obviously hopes that once he fives Robert the money to divorce Selma, she will return to him. The principals settle in at the LiChi Club for New Year’s Eve, during which Polly sings two songs, “Blow That Horn” by Walter Donaldson,Chester Forrest and Robert Wright and the haunting “Smoke Dreams” by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. (I first heard “Smoke Dreams” in the marvelous record by Benny Goodman’s band, with Helen Ward on vocal, on an original RCA Victor 78 rpm pressing that identified the song as coming from the film, and when I first saw the movie I was disappointed that so little was made of it and Penny Singleton wasn’t allowed to sing it without dialogoe over it. Goodman’s version is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCISbp3ZdrU and there’s an equally haunting one by Red Norvo and Midred Bailey, in a musically advanced Ravel-esque arrangement by Eddie Sauter, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppjqGB4wzpc.)

There’s another song that became a Swing Era standard, Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” sung here by Eadie Adams at the welcome-home surprise party, that became so famous as a gargantuan instrumental by Goodman’s band a lot of people forget that it had a lyric. There’s also a nice cameo by george Zucco as Dr. Kammer, a psychologist who tells police lieutenakt Abrams (Sam Levene) that Selma is too sick and too unbalanced to be interrogated. Two more people get killed – Phil Byrnes (Paul Fix), who poses as Polly’s brother but is really her husband, and Pedro Dominguez, who worked as a gardener for Nora’s family years before and now is the custodian at Polly’s building. Nick gathers all the suspects together for the then-standard group interrogation of all of them, and he finally figures out that the killer is [big-time spoiler alert!] David Graham, who not only was jealous of Robert but had come to hate Selma as well for going with Robert instead of David. So he hit on the idea of killing Robert and framing Selma for the crime, getting his ultimate revenge by seeing her executed for a murder she didn’t commit.

In his book The Detective in Film, William K. Everson had the predictable problem with the ending: “The only real surprise is why Stewart – having maintained his humble, self-effacing ‘Mr. Deeds’ mode [sic – it was Gary Cooper, not Stewart, who starred in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town], the stumbling ‘sincerity’ of his speech and the wistful pain in his eyes so convincingly for clost to two hours – would suddenly turn into a raging, snarling, low-key-lit maniac at the moment of his denunciation by Mr. Charles.” (At least George Zucco is on hand to remind everyone else, “I knew the killer had to be insane!”) While Stewart would develop into a far rangier actor later on after World War II (in which he served as a combat pilot), particularly in his films for Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann, he clearly wasn’t ready for a role like this – which didn’t stop MGM from casting him, with equal unlikeliness, as a hard-edged bootlegger and gangster in Ziegfeld Girl in 1941, after his first two films for Capra had clearly established what he could and (at least at that time) couldn’t do.

After the Thin Man was, like the first Thin Man, largely the creation of actual couples; though Willam Powell and Myrna Loy weren’t an “item” off-screen (at that time he’d been divorced from Carole Lombard and was engaged to marry Jean Harlow when she died), original writer Dashiell Hammett had created Nick and Nora largely as avatars of himself and his live-in partner, Lillian Hellman, and the writers who adapted Hammett’s characters and story for the films were another real-life couple, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. The director was W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, whose nickname on the MGM lot was “One-Take Woody” because he could shoot quickly and finish a film under budget and schedule. Ingrid Bergman hated him after their one film together, Rage in Heaven (1941), and chewed him out by saying he had no idea how to direct women. Myrna Loy would have strongly disagreed; she loved working with Van Dyke so much and regarded him as so crucial to the success of the Thin Man films that when he died right after makignt he fourth one, Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), Loy felt the studio should have abandoned the series instead of making two more with other directors.