Notes from the Class and Alcoholic Struggle in a THIN MAN Marathon

TCM screened the entirety of the alcoholically fluent Thin Man series for New Year's Rawkin' Eve 2016. Naturally I hung around for it, glued, as one is, by the ever-deft blend of comedy and mystery, the natural charm of Powell and Loy as tipsy Nick and Nora, and the colorful thugs. The thing struck me most now for this nth viewing (and maybe I gleaned this visiting my brother in Arizona) is the way rich or upper middle class alcoholics often wind up with slightly lower rungs of friends and mates, the booze acting as a kind of leveler a handicap, but also a plus; their lack of interest in class as opposed to vitality and color. Taken as a whole, over seven films, stretching from 1934 and the end of the pre-code era to the post-war noir jazzbo world of 1947, we see the way drinking mirrors censorship and how World War Two proved a great class equalizer, as well as booze. There's a reason, in the end, for avoiding the low-lifes: hang out with them long enough, and the lowlife becomes your whole life. You suddenly wind up in coach, or packed into third class cars with barn animals, peasants, drunken bums... oh wait, now you're a drunken bum...

Nora was definitely slumming when picking up knight errant Nicky, for she started out rich and to the manor-born. The alleged upper crust, her side of the family, are flighty heiresses with similar longing for the rough trade, dominated on the home front by upper crust tea-totaler drags who expect their son-in-law to drop domesticity and trundle to their FREE aid even though they treat him like a pest, like hired help and lock up la cabinet liquor. (Lucky Nora steals the key).

In the original THIN MAN (1934) we meet that 'actual' thin man, the only one in the series, and while not related directly it's the same vibe with him: Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a crackpot inventor with terrible Gold Digger blonde-fakeness-roitin' up tootin' and powder takin' feminoid chits with perma waves fit to knuckle a Fred down low past the trotters and the truffles and all the googen plazas in betwixt. By which I mean, he lets a platinum wave undercut good common sense. Wynant was first married to Mimi (Minna Gombell) -a shrill, clipped uptight nouveau riche with whom he has a foxy young daughter Dorothy and a creepy-intellectual son Gilbert, and supports them and also Mimi's gigolo second husband Cris (Cesar Romero). And then there's Wynant's secretary Julia Wolfe (Natalie Moorhead) who cheats on him, presumably, with the squat pug-like Morelli (William Brophy) and the dirty little rat Nunheim (Harold Huber).

 The party Nick and Nora throw meanwhile indicates they too like to hang out with the lower dregs just as much as the Wynant family. Their Xmas party is packed with flea-bitten boxers, agents, dumb reporters who don't know what the word 'sexagenarian' means, and a stockpile of gold diggers and sobbing mom-callers. The only sane sweet two girls in the whole rotten pack are brunettes: Nora herself (Myrna Loy) and Maureen O'Sullivan as Wynant's daughter Dorothy. The rest are hardbitten blondes (including Nunheim's 'frying pan juggler' and Chris' first wife).

I might come off as being snooty in pointing these differences out, but in fact I'm arguing that the variations of class-stratified couples in this first film act as mirrors across railroad tracks that better situate the unique chemistry of our favorite drinking couple. The question might be also, what would their romance be like if their classes were reversed? Though in later films this is challenged (in a clear nod to MGM Andy Hardy provincial morality-flattering cleanliness) it's inferred Nick's a tough guy from the streets of NYC (since he knows nearly everyone there). We only learn subsequently he's from a decent small town with a physician father and a white picket fence.

I've always liked to believe, as I've written, that THE THIN MAN is really a kind of Hammett-to-Chandler cross-over BIG SLEEP sequel, or at any rate, a Phillip Marlowe sequel, (he ends up with the nice rich dame a lot). The wry humor and quick back and forth of Bogie and Bacall in SLEEP seems like both a precedent and forerunner to Nick and Nora's and the class differentiation is just right. Marlowe too isn't just a gumshoe, he "went to college and can still speak English if the situation demands it." So by moving into a life of crime solving they take a step down, to mingle with the dregs.

Natalie Moorhead / Edward Ellis

For a contrast, we have the dysfunctional slumming dating pattern of Wynant (he dates downward, and so do the women he dates, making him the Nora in his class divide-crossing relationships). He reminds us so painfully that to be rich and successful is to need either a personal assistant, a detective ("Rutledge should hire you permanently to keep those girls of his out of trouble"), or a 'present' parent (like Sebastian's mom in Notorious) to screen out the riff-raff, do background checks, and otherwise make sure you're not sleeping with or getting rooked by any blackmailers, gold diggers, vamps, hookers, or greedy two-timers just because they remind you of some dame in Kansas City. Wealth does not often equal a clue. In marrying the detective, Nora in a sense immunizes her own wealth from such mooching (Nick says he's "taking care" of it) by submitting to a kind of form of it in what is essentially a job of permanent security and riff-raff shepherding.

And in the end maybe what started out as bored jetset thrillseeking borne out of accidental meeting if, say, Nick was hired by Nora's late father in the past to shake a grifter off her tail, especially is noblesse oblige that separates the cool rich (the kind we love) vs. the snobby airheads (the targets of our scorn). To see Powell especially in these films as Nick Charles is to see that easygoing 'every class treated like the first class' charm that is like a beacon, not just great to drink to but to aspire to. For it's also this classiness that magically roots out the con artists and moochers. Even so at the dinner party denouement he immediate and a priori to his arrival articulates animosity towards an as-yet-unmet sleazy lecher for Dorothy (they're interrupted from boarding a train together, perhaps crossing state lines and allowing her to make "first false step.") The guy she's meant to be with is a young dope of amiable disposition and clearly moderate but not paltry self-sufficiency who understands her perfectly. One of my favorite toss-away lines is when Tommy (Henry Wadsworth) tells her to "pack some clothes and your skates" to come with him to his parent's cabin in the country -- the addition of the skates is so sharp, detailing all sorts of character traits -- he knows her very well and what will cheer her up, so we like him. 2) the skating aspect implies the cabin is near a frozen lake, and that they've skated up there before together, probably under the watchful eye of his parents. In short, from this one detail we appreciate and admire the youthful earnestness of their pairing, compared with the louche "first false step" guy, who basically gets slugged.


AFTER THE THIN MAN (1936) plunges us into more of a 50/50 mix with the (K)nobb (Creek) Hill types of San Francisco, replete with goggle lensed alienist (George Zucco) keeping doe-eyed debutante Selma (Elissa Landi) strung out pills and like Nora or Mimi or anyone, susceptible to some handsome philandering grifter husband (Alan Marshall) to the point of shunning the respectable slime pails in her class (like Jimmy Stewart). He's a real slimeball this grifter husband, but Selma's obsessive doting over him is also rater sickening, though a valuable window into yet another possible facet/outcome of the rough trade/gigolo gold-digger (male) symplex which we see time and again in the series, putting us in the odd position of realizing money is in its way an amplifier for trouble in ways middle class folks don't usually need to worry about. In this case the domineering matriarch Aunt Katherine (Jesse Ralph) is clearly underwriting Selma's case of nerves, amplified still further by quack shrink Zucco's undoubted regimen of mind-altering drugs

Curiosity about the lifestyles of the poor has long been an obsession of the rich. The last few parties I went to have been at my rich ex-roommate's with all his high roller and top shelf model friends. And in each right around two AM the "call" is made, and some sketchy dude shows up to sell the gathered eight balls of cocaine in a different room (which I never go to). Once said sketcher sees the hotties to be had he calls his buddies and within minutes there's a sketchy hoodrat hanging on a willowy model in every corner of the room - it's an old dance, Angel Boobs, and it goes back to prohibition in the 20s-early 30s, when "that man is here" (a phrase that turns up more than once in the THIN MAN series) meant said sketchy coke dealer's ancestor had arrived at the party with a package... and became the apple of every thirsty girl's eye.


We have only a few instances of this romantic slumming after the repeal of prohibition in 1933 made celebrities stop having to rub elbows with outlaws to get their liquor. Today there's weed guys too but soon it will only be the cokehead celebs that have to, and the junkies and they have Hep-C already, so more power to them.

On a side note, I've not only struggled with alcoholism but with my own snobbiness for I've never wanted to belong to a class that would have me for a member, to paraphrase Groucho Marx. I've learned to be the bemused hip side man rather than the worrywart aunt of sulky ectomorphism when it comes to monitoring my friend's and family's mate choices, to trust that everything was OK, that things didn't need to be or couldn't be any better or worse. The amount of suffering I had to undergo to make it to this sketchy truce of peace was/is astronomical. I dated a Cherry Hill NJ girl five years without ever overcoming it, and man oh man, the middle class is a tricky place to be -- what does money have to do with it? It's character, pure and simple, that overrides culture. A rich family might live poorer than a poor one, a rich house in Princeton might look at first like a rustic cottage with an add-on, the austerity reflecting, only as we learn later, some Colonial antique debt of honor to family tradition. Meanwhile a huge mansion next door might be packed with gaudy statuary and uncleaned pee stains from amok puppies while the owner chomps a cigar and insults Mr. Merrill in back by the pool. 

Right as I wrote that I hear Nora behind me on the phone, noting that they had a wonderful time on their cross country trip: "Nick was sober in Kansas City!" as if that's in itself a rare and precious thing.

By the time of the third film, ANOTHER THIN MAN (1939) with Colonel McFee the family lawyer harrumphing that they drive out to his remote LI estate, to find it swamped with security guards "good air for the baby" and overlapping needy characters cramming their way into the smaller and smaller apartments, compartments and set, bearing pages of red herring exposition like trays of hardboiled eggs (and one duck egg). By this third edition, the rogue's gallery giving the gladhand after Nick sent them up the river is kind of cliche, as is the dour humorless relative / uncle, and the MGM treacle seeping over the Breen line ("Gee, a baby!"). Even if it is goddamned Dean Stockwell, saints forgive him an unwelcome intrusion though not much of one--they do have a nanny).  A

Muriel Hutchison

The real difference here, the unique selling point not later duplicated in the series, is the romance between Sheldon Leonard and Muriel Hutchison as a pair of tough grifters (when she pulls a pistol out of her garter belt the whole series grinds to a turntable scratch halt). They might well just be a skeezy pair but wind up the second coolest couple in the place, further blurring the class lines, (there's no real demarcation of rich and low class settings anymore, as the art direction has slid into those wartime fields of uniform gray. The way she says "okay" when he asks her if she wants to play for keeps and make it a duo is like an oasis of sexual vulnerability and streetsmart brass and spritely comedic wit perfectly fused, like Frances Farmer meets Judy Holliday.

Nora is on her way to being totally ditzy but still gets out good lines like following Nick's lead to get rid of the pesky romeos at El Morocco: "I won't stay in quarantine I don't care who catches it!" but then doesn't know to look at the maraca player onstage for her contact instead of falling into trite Lucy Show-style mistaken identity-brand comedy with an excitable gigolo.
Thist time the Dorothy Wynant girl is played by Virginia Grey as the patient daughter of the Colonel
Tom Neal (!) is a chemist, as is b-movie mainstay Patrick Knowles.

THEN CAME THE WAR

The weird boilerplate fascism accruing in the dregs of the slumming cocktail almost heralds the second world war - as if all the decadent art design and detailed underworld flava of the first film has to be sanded down and off so now the crooks aren't drunks themselves but racial stereotypes borrowing their babies for a baby party, with no sense of one another as characters or actors, like they all just met one another on the G train out of Brooklyn, or are lining up at boot camp, the endless blank white surfaces reflecting a utilitarian ease with which the wall of an LI mansion becomes the wall of an NYC hotel with just a change in wall hanging, and none of the lived-in wealth of grime vs. swank in the first film, some of which survives into OY! AGAIN WITH THE THIN MAN but by SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN is just vapor.

And the thrill of drinking while dodging bullets was gone, of if not gone, certainly put away for the moment, eased into storage alongside the west coast Japanese-American population and pacifist humanism until the end of the war, when noir artisans like Siodmak and De Toth would de-mothball the exoticism that Welles and Von Sternberg had overdone the way someone who eats too much of a certain food never wants to eat that food again, at least until, say 17 years or a war have passed.

The frills are on the lily but two things MGM couldn't overbake with a kind of fascist 'return to ze old world' Fordian hick Christian small town provincial weepy moralism were the drinking and the idea of an underworld itself. The grifters might all look like they'd been transplanted in front of walls as phony in regards their lives as a Woolworth painted family Xmas portrait backdrop, but they were there nonetheless. The glorious mansion of the second film, or ritzy apartment of the first, even the visit to relatives in the third is supplanted now there's a maid and domesticity galore, Nick is even goaded into drinking a glass of milk to appease his demanding son. That's carrying wholesomeness too far! As W.C. Fields might say, "It's inhumane!'

Good bits in SHADOW OF A THIN MAN (1941) though include Nora summoning him from the park across the street just by shaking up a cocktail-- he hears the shaker all the way across the street and up in their suite, but the minimal sets and tedious MGM homespun shit, coupled with Nick's dime store penchant for the races seems like they lost most of their fortune and are now just loafing around in an upper middle class boilerplate (i.e. they're now the Muensters not the Addamses). Barry Nelson (holy shit! the hotel manager from THE SHINING) as part of an intrepid allegedly good crime solving couple, are the mirrors this time, all clean cut and sharp. But what the hell, man, the writing coasts on lazy coincidence: Nick starts to just be where crimes are rather than the carefully planned naturalistic flow realistic to a big city life that brought Dorothy into a hotel bar over Xmas at the sight on Nick, who once worked a case for her father and with whom she had a childhood crush.

Stella Adler

Stella Adler is amongst the suspects! And she's terrific. Dig the way she feints forward in her first scene alone with Nick, as if about to kiss him then does a serpentine backslide over the word "threaten" until it's practically an admission that Nick's a reptilian and she's under his sexual enslavement sway. But meanwhile Nora is getting daffy, relegated to all sorts of half-baked in-betweenism of ditzy harebrained derogatory MGM backwards wartime non-feminist and savvy intuitive genius with a knack for stumbling down lazy screenwriter shortcuts towards new inadvertent clues, sussed out of the monochrome sets and cardboard cutout characters by lazy screenwriter tricks, i.e. coincidence.


THE THIN MAN GOES HOME (1945)
(END OF THE WAR)

"C'est la guerre" - almost like compared to the swank hotel compartments they had earlier, this overcrowding train coach nonsense reflects a kind of almost Communist descent, like only seen in so many war pics abstracted from the actual war (there's not a lot of folk in uniform in this 1945 film) .

We also think that Nick must be a savvy big city detective, but like HELLBOY in his sequel, suddenly his urbane cool is funneled into a Spielberg middle class suburban wistful over the old windmill; while in the baggage car with Asta, a box labeled "Limburger cheese" and many goats (I love the family sticks with the dog rather in the freight car rather than just letting the group be separated (and no little Nicky, where the hell did he go? Military school? Good riddance, at any rate.)


But Loy, with her petit bowler hat, now steps up her game and she looks suddenly a whole new mature kind of gorgeous; she's way above the curve while Powell looks like he's been a little booze-battered, old, cross-eyed, glossy, complaining about his stomach lining and bearing a flask full of "cider" (mirroring maybe Fields'Never Give a Sucker" scene in the ice cream store). It's the sort of scene where the father calls the wife "mother." We do learn he's been working making high fees as a detective, her fortune is apparently gone, but really the war has just elevated the common man and dissolved the classes in ways that the war made heroic but would be heresy and red commie propaganda in a little over half a decade, and that's the weird thing with Russia. You were helping America by promoting Russia during the war, and an enemy of the state immediately after.

Meanwhile Loy picks up the balance from the booze-wobbly Powell and narrates the whole Stinky Davis case in a way moderately better than the mystery of the film itself. The lighting, so moody and rich in the original has been slowly fading away into spacy country light, as if the lighting is so incredibly high and bleached out that a person wearing a dark color or sporting a noir shadow would be committed to a mental institution. So now Loy is rattling skeletons hoping a crime will break out in this small town, "so [Nick] can show his father what a wonderful detective he is." Are we hearing this right? The "only you darling, lanky brunettes with wicked jaws" has morphed to this, as if the whole thing has shipped across the line between the first three badass MASH seasons and all the others, once Potter arrives and the wholesome June Moon Spoon "she married a brewer from Miluwaukee" nonsense comes a commencin' - "You might get all sweaty and die," Loy cautions wryly. She's aged way better than he has. Did I mention that?

the only other hottie is a muscular little Mary Lou Retinal scan of a blonde (Gloria DeHaven - left) who quotes Shelly while thesping around her mansion, the first cool set in the film, and then we remember the Tennyson quoted by Edward Brophy (in the "I'm the fella who wrote this picture, screwy idea, wasn't it?" bushes dweller role) and we get the feeling that, hey, them who wrote this went to college. Ann Revere is in a throwaway role as a crazy chorus (in the greek sense) wanderer, as if small towns were all apocalyptic Lynchian Godard's WEEKEND cool with genuine links to the founders rather than suffocated in the MGM small town "Curse of Arthur Freed" crib. (Deep in the Heart of Texas refrains as Nick suits up).

But the end, the final round up exposition, is as deliriously convoluted as we'd like, with the small town maid-playboy adoption and the Bruce Partington Pants, but there's also Nick popping two buttons that day as a lad who finally earns his dad's admiration for solving it all AND using dad's kind of highbrow medical jargon along the way.

The brush, son... the brush.

The War's over now, and the Noir can safely begin, set to smoldering jazz on boats three miles out-ish, though I presume we're not meant to think Prohibition's still in effect, bring on the finale, la SONG OF THE THIN MAN (1947)

w/ Keenan Wynn as the 'young hep cat' they adopt, or who adopts them

But before the jazz, and the hep lingo, it turns all bullshit sterile, with Myrna turned into the exacting old bitter battleaxe she stood against in the earlier films, demanding Nick spank Nick Jr. because he wants to pitch ball instead of lumbering along with his bourgeois piano practice, acting like she's the height of hipsterdom for letting Nick bust out his "last" bottle of Scotch for some special occasion or other, as if Prohibition was still in effect, to celebrate the--what was it?--no one who hasn't decided their Scotch is their "last" can remember or think what the hell that is? By now it's Nick Jr. who's cool, not his drab parents, with Nora's spanking obsession and Nick's tedious jet black  hair dye doing nothing for him seeming a bit bloated and old, and why not? You'd be too if you drank like Nick Charles. Who plays off his non-alcoholic cider like it won't effect his jubilant ease-in-his-own-skin one bit, like an acrobat trying to seem carefree and light on his feet with a ship anchor tied around his neck. Nick's alcoholic métier never quite recovers from his character's booze-related health issues, the inevitable age of his character and the actor, wartime home front belt-tightening and MGM small town mythologizing mirroring and his slow backsliding out of the upper class, dragging Nora and her family fortune down with him until he's just another Bukowski-esque bum at the dog track.


If you've been drinking all the way up to the and including the last film here then maybe you'll wonder if Nick's boozing at all by now. Mainly the drinking is all done by salty sailor types cuz by now a man can not be a dad and MGM A-lot dressing room dregs and still be a lush, aye now there may be something in what all that is about and we must like that the real time between these cases is allowed to accrue, so each time the folks look further aged.