Dec. 11, 2002 - 3:49 pm
nominated for 4 Oscars including Best Picture, is number 238 on the top 250 list. this was the first film of 6 total that would become The Thin Man series. a sort of comedy detective story written by...guess who...Dashiell Hammett. yeah, see, i just can't shake him. probably like 5% of the population at most knows who this guy is and i am just being bombarded with references to him this year. it's really freaking me out. oh well. i guess i should stop talking about it and just accept his presence in American literature.
this movie is about a middle aged couple on a binge together, having parties and drinking like mad, who get pulled into a murder mystery by the cops and all of the people involved. William Powell plays Nick Charles, a basically retired detective with a very quick wit. Myrna Loy plays Nora Charles, his wealthy wife who loves to be sarcastic with him and tries to (along with everyone else) push him back into the detective business. oh and "the thin man" is the guy who everyone is looking for as the murderer.
really though, the murder mystery is not the real attraction to this film. it's more about watching Myrna Loy and William Powell have their witty romance onscreen. those are two wonderful actors together that seem to have a great chemistry between them. i guess that must be the case, or else they wouldn't have made 5 sequels eh?
my horror story for today was that when i put in the first film to try and watch it this morning, it basically wouldn't play in my vcr. it looked like the control track wasn't being registered as the counter on the display was not changing whether i fastforwarded, played or rewound. i took it to be a bad tape and tried playing The Thin Man. it worked a little bit better, but the tape would only play for a few seconds in some sort of half-assed slowmo manner that i could tell was screwed up. i panicked and thought that my vcr was dying. just let that be a lesson to us all. if this ever happens to you, pick up a copy of It Happened One Night (1934) and try that. It Happened One Night is a panacea that can fix all of your problems. my vcr is working again thanks to that film and its seemingly magical powers of healing.