In May of 1934 most Americans were in bad shape. The unemployment rate was close to 25%. The Dust Bowl, which had begun in November of 1933, had already thrown so much Midwestern top soil up into the air, that clouds of debris had appeared over Washington DC. Refugee camps for internally displaced migrants, Hoovervilles, had sprouted up all over the country, including one on the outskirts of Seattle that lasted almost a decade, and one right in the middle of Central Park. Capitalism had all but collapsed. Nothing had taken its place.
You won’t see any sign of the Great Depression in The Thin Man, W. S. Van Dyke’s 1934 movie, which was filmed in 2 weeks on a budget of a little over $200,000, and eventually became a long-running franchise that spawned 6 sequels. Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, also released in 1934, the Thin Man is an idealized portrait of Hammett’s 30-year common law marriage to writer, and Communist Part activist, Lillian Hellman. Nick Charles, like Hammett a former private detective, and Nora Charles, his wealthy socialite wife, never experience poverty. Played by the suave William Powell and just barely on the ladylike side of bombshell Myrna Loy, they never get sick, and never seem to age. Like Hammett and Hellman, they are a golden couple who genuinely love each other. Unlike Hammett, who was sick for most of his life, and Hellman, who was hounded by Joe McCarthy and his band of quasi-fascist inquisitors, neither of them has a care in the world. Every once in awhile, and usually just for fun, they solve a murder.
Nevertheless, The Thin Man is a prime cultural artifact of 1934, and for one reason. In December of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, the suave aristocrat in the White House, who superficially resembled the suave Nick Charles and the suave William Powell, signed the law repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, and ending Prohibition for good. For almost 15 years alcohol had been illegal in the United States. Originally supported by an unholy alliance of feminists, who wanted to punish their husbands, and the KKK, who wanted to punish Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Prohibition had accomplished little other than to create a wealthy class of professional criminals like Al Capone, and a repressive police state led by J. Edgar Hoover. What’s more, alcohol hadn’t disappeared. It had only been made the exclusive property of the upper-class, who were rarely if ever prosecuted for drinking, and who could always travel to Europe to drink anyway. As Eastern and Southern immigrants became assimilated Americans, and as the old, vindictive Protestant culture became liberal, and as the Great Depression raged on, just about the only thing most Americans could agree on was that it was time to have a good stiff drink.
We first meet Nick Charles at the bar, instructing the bar tender about the best way to stir a martini. Unlike the thuggish James Bond, who really seems to think we give a damn if he orders his dry martini shaken or stirred, Nick Charles is putting on a show. “The important thing is the the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. A dry martini you always shake to waltz time.” Indeed, if James Bond is Alan Dulles or Richard Nixon, a murderous enforcer for the ruling class, then Nick Charles is Franklin Roosevelt, an upwardly mobile gentleman who’s left the Pinkerton Agency and strike breaking for good — Hammett was an ex Pinkerton — to manage his beautiful wife’s affairs. That she’s perfectly capable of managing her affairs by herself is so much the better. It leaves more time for drinking, for both of them. When Nora shows up, loading down with Christmas presents, being dragged along by her fox terrier Asta, the first thing she asks the bartender is how many drinks her husband has had. “Five martinis,” he responds, to which she answers gesturing towards the table, “then give me five. Line them up right here.”
It is indeed a startling cultural transformation captured by the Thin Man. Where only 15 years before, booze had been associated with wife beating husbands and dirty immigrants, it was now synonymous with elegance, good humor and sophistication, sex, prosperity, and a loving, happy marriage. Nick and Nora are high functioning alcoholics who drink enough to kill a whole frat house full of ordinary men, but they never seem to be desperate for the next dry martini. That would mean being desperate for money, and money is a worry that neither of them will ever experience, Nora’s late father having left them a railroad, a lumber yard, and numerous other capitalist enterprises. Happy days are not only here again. They never stopped. Crime, on the other hand, the next murder, always seems just around the next corner, and Nick, being a master detective, the Michael Jordan of sleuthing, is always in high demand. Even if Nora’s entire fortune disappeared, he could easily earn it back the next day.
When Dolores, played by Mia Farrow’s mother Maureen O’Sullivan, begs him to help her find her father, who had disappeared 3 months previously under a cloud of embezzled government bonds, vindictive trophy wives and mistresses, and suspicious employees, Nick has to be dragged kicking and screaming back into the detective business. Nevertheless, Nick is so good at “detecting,” as Nora labels it, he barely has to disrupt his drinking to solve a crime that baffles the police, who are depicted as honest and well-intentioned by rough and not terribly bright. There’s no torture or rough interrogation in The Thin Man. Unlike Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness or Gene Hackman’s Agent Rupert Anderson, Nick Charles never has to face the conundrum that arises when you have to beat a confession out of a suspect. All he does, with a little help from the police is to invite everybody involved in the case to a fancy dinner party, and with a dry martini in hand, verbally maneuvers the murderer into revealing himself in front of 20 witnesses.
W. S. Van Dyke, a man I’d barely heard of before seeing The Thin Man for the first time, is the anti-Stanley-Kubrick. Nicknamed “one take Van Dyke” he was famous for wrapping his films in a record amount of time. Yet nothing about The Thin Man looks cheap or rushed. Quite the contrary, the costumes, the interiors, the makeup, the spacing and the various sets, all look so polished and elegant that the movie is a quiet fantasy world for Americans suffering from poverty and despair. There is something so warm and secure about Nick and Nora’s elegant hotel room that even when a pistol wielding thug breaks in and threatens them both, it still seems like an inviting place, a shelter in a storm for anybody who spent a quarter for a movie ticket in that dark year of 1934. Even the absurd twin beds — the Hollywood production code mandated that even a married couple couldn’t be shown having sex — are barely an obstacle to the film’s cozy eroticism. In a train car, on the way back to San Francisco from New York, we are presented with twin bunks. “I think I’ll take the top one,” Nora says as Nick tosses Asta on top of the sheets and joins Nora in the bottom bunk, the credits rolling as the train speeds along in an evocative Freudian ending, and the lights go out.