THE THIN MAN Murder, Mirth and Marriage  At The Movies

     Meanwhile Mayer, perhaps still trying to dissuade Van Dyke from using Myrna Loy, informed the director that he could only have Loy if she were finished with the picture in time to start filming Stamboul Quest with George Brent and director Sam Wood.

     This was no problem for Van Dyke, who had come by the nickname of “One Take Van Dyke” rather honestly. As Loy recounts in Being and Becoming:

If he could get it the first time, he wouldn’t even bother with a cover shot. “Actors are bound to lose their fire if they do a scene over and over,” he said. “It’s that fire that brings life to the screen.” He wanted spontaneity, and speed ensured it. Of course, he had us going like crazy, but by that time I could come in, look at new lines, and do them. You had to in those days, because they changed scripts overnight. Often you would study the day before; often you couldn’t. Woody demanded extraordinary deeds and you need the discipline to go along with it or you couldn’t work with him. He ultimately became too fast; it became an obsession. But his pacing and spontaneity made The Thin Man.

     This drive served Van Dyke well, as he completed the film in between sixteen and eighteen days, complete with retakes.

     Another asset in the quick filming was the fact that both Powell and Loy seemed to know instinctively what to give to their director. For her entrance at the beginning of the film, the script called for Loy to enter a hotel bar laden with packages and being dragged by Asta. Van Dyke asked her to trip and fall at the end of the shot, landing on her face. He merely gave her a mark and positioned a camera on the floor. Loy, a former dancer, did the shot in one take with no rehearsal.

     Unfortunately, not all the filming went smoothly. Loy has reported that the stars weren’t allowed to make friends with the several wire-haired terriers that played Asta over the years (lest it would break the dog’s concentration) and that the first one, Skippy, even bit her once during filming.

     During the climactic dinner party scene, Powell had a large amount of dialog to deliver. While he is doing so, waiters come out and serve the cast oysters on the half shell. Unfortunately, Powell kept fumbling his lines, as the speech was long and convoluted. As they continued to reshoot the scene, no one bothered to change the oysters, which began to putrefy under the hot studio lights.

     The first inkling that anyone at the studio had about what a huge hit they had in the film was during a sneak preview at Huntington Park.

     “It was a night of great jubilation on the Huntington Park sidewalk after the preview,” recalled Sam Marx in Loy’s Being and Becoming. “That first preview was a thermometer that told us how much heat this team was generating. It was automatic that you would continue to put them together.”

     Critical reception to the film was overwhelming. Mordaunt Hall in the July 30^th edition of the New York Times called it “an excellent combination of comedy and excitement. It is another of those murder mysteries wherein the astute criminologist has many opportunities to chuckle over the work of the police and, as usual, it is virtually impossible for the onlooker to pick out the murderer.”

     The film was an immediate hit with the Depression-era audiences, earning over two million dollars in its initial release.

     But audiences weren’t the only ones taken with the film. Academy members nominated it for four Oscars that year- Best Actor (Powell), Director, Writing, Adaptation and Picture. Surprisingly, Loy wasn’t nominated. With the Academy being flooded with complaints about the oversight, along with others who were upset that Bette Davis’s performance in Of Human Bondage had been similarly passed by, they suspended their voting rules that year to allow write in candidates. Ultimately, It Happened One Night would sweep the four categories it shared with The Thin Man and One Night star Claudette Colbert would take the Best Actress Oscar.

     In the face of all this success, the MGM brass were quick to order up a sequel. Though not involved with the production of the first film, it was decided that Dashiell Hammett’s involvement in developing the second installment was a must. In late September, 1934, MGM’s Culver City office requested that the New York office negotiate a contract with Hammett to write new story material for a follow up. On October 1^st, the New York office advised Culver City that Hammett was unreliable and that it would be difficult getting work from him. Louis B. Mayer himself wrote to the head office from New York on the 19^th warning of Hammett’s “irregular habits.” Nevertheless, Hammett is signed to the studio on October 23^rd for $2,000 a week for ten weeks, commencing on his arrival in Hollywood. Hammett immediately left for Los Angeles by train, reporting to the studio on the 29^th.

     Arriving in Hollywood, Hammett immediately slid into the flamboyant lifestyle he was well known for. He rented a six bedroom penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for $2,000 a month. On his first day there, he wrote to Lillian Hellman, telling her that he had a nice office, met good people and that he missed her. He also spent much of his time going out on the town with old friends.

     On the 31^st, he wrote to Hellman that “We’re going to make a picture with all the surviving members of the first cast- which won’t be silly if I can devise a murder that grows with some logic out of the set up we left everybody in at the end of The Thin Man- and I think we can. We may title it After The Thin Man.”

                                                                                PART 2