The Thin Man (1934)

The Thin Man arrives from 1934 with a martini in each hand and no interest whatsoever in improving anyone. W.S. Van Dyke's comedy-mystery follows Nick and Nora Charles, a retired detective and his wealthy wife, through a Christmas holiday of cocktails, a wire-haired terrier, and a corpse with shrapnel in its leg. The screenplay, adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, exists to deliver banter at speed. Nick shoots ornaments off the tree. Nora matches him drink for drink and quip for quip. The mystery resolves at a dinner party where the oysters have begun to turn. This is a film about pleasure, and it is unapologetic about the matter.

Assessing the picture against contemporary progressive markers proves a brisk exercise in absence. The casting reflects the default demographics of 1934 Hollywood, and the film makes no comment on it. Race, sexuality, climate, and body image go entirely unaddressed. Nora is a witty, active, and thoroughly modern wife for her era, though the film has no interest in critiquing patriarchy. She is too busy enjoying herself. Greed drives the plot, since bonds are embezzled and a lawyer kills to protect an inheritance, but wealth here is a backdrop for comedy, not a target for indictment. Nobody lectures. The film has no thesis to advance and no audience to correct.

The result is a picture that predates the entire apparatus of contemporary cultural instruction and seems untroubled by that fact. It took no competitive Academy Award, though it was nominated for Best Picture and later preserved by the Library of Congress. Its pleasures are the pleasures of craft: timing, chemistry, and a director who shot first takes because actors lose their fire on the fourth. A viewer seeking moral instruction will find none here. A viewer seeking a martini recipe and a murder will do rather well.