Dashiell Hammett played his part in the confusion, as well, first by posing on the dust jacket of Knopf’s first edition of The Thin Man novel. Hammett was lean and stylish as any film star. He was also a master of observation and wordplay who claimed credit for the film’s title. Hammett told his daughter Jo that MGM’s filmmakers had gone round and round, unable to discover a suitably artful moniker for the third of the Thin Man films, and that he had suggested what seemed the obvious solution—Another Thin Man. The title was simple and straightforward on its face, subtle in its implications. Little Poulsen joined Wynant, Hammett, and Powell as another of the “thin men.” Nick and Nora launched another episode of merry mayhem. And Hammett and the Hacketts were caught up again, against their better judgments, in yet another Thin Man filmmaking ordeal.
While Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich failed to kill off the Thin Man film franchise with Nora’s pregnancy, the arrival of Nick Jr. did alter Another Thin Man’s trajectory. Nick and especially Nora are more temperate. Nick talks about wanting a drink more often than he gets one. Nora rarely imbibes, as is fitting for a young mother. After reviewing the Hacketts’ initial screenplay submission, the Breen office made only a general request to minimize the “display of liquor and drinking.” A few scenes depicting violence or sexuality drew specific objections. Body parts, whether bloody or alluring, were frowned upon. Innuendo-laden dialogue was censured, though not eliminated. Another Thin Man is tame by comparison with the first two films. Nick and Nora recapture their smart and sassy relationship and the film maintains what one reviewer called “that agile, faintly sardonic quality.” But, whether influenced by the Charleses’ transformation into parents, Hammett’s accommodation to the Thin Man’s formula, or the Hacketts’ pragmatic modifications, the film is more domestic than decadent.
Hammett fulfilled his screenwriting obligation to MGM in mid-May 1938. He was hospitalized in New York ten days later, again leaving the Hacketts to shape his crime-fiction story line into its final filmable form. As in After the Thin Man, they pruned, juggled, and appended Hammett’s story elements. They compressed the time line by a day, curbed some of the characters’ rougher interactions, and reshaped some ancillary action. The Hacketts inject new complications as well, so that Mrs. Bellam professes motherly concern for Lois and Colonel MacFay distrusts Dudley Horn to the extent that he threatens to disinherit his daughter if the two were wed. These were the Hacketts’, not Hammett’s modifications and while they are generally helpful, the film’s plot and resolution remain complicated.
The final filmed version of Another Thin Man also shows changes to Hammett’s cast of supporting characters. Hammett’s original thieving bellboy, “a youngish man with a small, cheerful, wizened face” named “Face” Peppler, is supplanted by “Creeps” Binder—who is similarly young and cheery, but without the improbably aged face. Interesting, Hammett and the Hacketts used the name “Face” Peppler for entirely different characters in The Thin Man novel and film. Mrs. Dolley’s role is more subtly altered. Hammett describes the landlord of Linda Mills’s apartment building as a “frowsy, middle-aged woman with the sniffles. In one hand she carries a newspaper, in the other a handkerchief.” Marjorie Main plays Dolley, as gruff as Hammett imagined. But Main is a tough not tawdry character, who carries no damp handkerchief and delivers her lines in tones that minimize potential for innuendo. Changes to her role might be attributed to Production Code censors, who had objected to implications that the building was a “house of assignation, or that the landlady is a madam.” The breed of the murdered dog undergoes more conspicuous transformation, beginning in Hammett’s “Farewell Murder” as an Airedale pup, becoming in his screen story a collie, and ending in the film as an Irish wolfhound—big enough to leave paw prints on a man’s shoulders.
Two other supporting roles deserve attention. The first is Assistant District Attorney VanSlack. In Hammett’s screen story VanSlack is an unlikeable character who toggles between incompetence and authoritarian insolence. Hammett described him as “a tall, stooped colorless young man with a vague face; the same vagueness characterizes his words and manner.” Hammett’s VanSlack is ambiguous, tentative, and unsure how to assert himself and enact his obligations. In Another Thin Man, the role is played by Otto Kruger, a veteran stage and film actor who was fifty-four when he received an urgent casting call from MGM and rushed back to the studio from a family vacation. Kruger’s VanSlack is cryptic—even vague—but he offers none of the moral vacillation suggested by Hammett’s younger version. The character still works, and works well, but Hammett’s subtleties are lost in translation.
The final character of note is Nick Charles Jr., described in Hammett’s screen story as “a fat, year-old boy who is interested in very little besides eating and sleeping.” He eats anything and sleeps anywhere. His basic vocabulary consists of “‘Drunk’ for things he does not like and ‘Gimme’ for things he does.” Nick Jr. rarely laughs, never cries, and is not amused by his fun-loving parents. “He ordinarily regards them with the same sort of mild curiosity or tolerant boredom with which he regards the rest of the world,” wrote Hammett. Bored babies don’t play well on the big screen, however, so while William Poulsen’s infant character is docile, he is hardly the dullard child that Hammett bestowed on the Charleses in Another Thin Man’s screen story. Hammett’s littlest Thin Man was tubby, vapid, and humorless—the opposite of everything Nick and Nora represented and a fitting Parthian shot for Hammett’s last piece of long fiction.
J. M. R.
SEQUEL TO THE THIN MAN
Headnote
Hammett’s final contribution to the Thin Man film franchise was an eight-page story that was neither developed nor produced. He was fed up with the project—and it showed. Hammett’s slapdash invention of the “Sequel to the Thin Man” may in fact have been a signal to producer Hunt Stromberg to give up, to recognize that Hammett wanted nothing more to do with his Hollywood stepchild.
Evidence within the text suggests Hammett based his 1938 “Sequel” on an early story idea for the second of the Thin Man films, After the Thin Man, released in 1936. The train station and surprise party descriptions, in particular, are nearly parallel in both stories. Those scenes had been settled upon long before the script for After the Thin Man took its final shape. Hammett’s description of Dancer and his Chinatown nightclub are also suggestive, since they are introduced as if for the first time, as though the first sequel did not exist. Morelli, Georgia, Macaulay, and other supporting roles reprised from the novel and original film go unexplained. Nick Jr., from Another Thin Man, is absent. And, in a move that would have satisfied producer Hunt Stromberg’s earliest demands, most of the original cast of characters from The Thin Man reappears. From the very beginning Stromberg had advocated for the Charleses’ return to New York for the second film “because it would give us the opportunity to bring back all those swell characters of the original.” Hammett does not set his “Sequel” in New York. Instead he transports the troupe to San Francisco for a madcap adventure.
Hammett’s “Sequel to the Thin Man” features a merry pastiche of bantering romance, eccentric encounters, greed, and crime. While not a recipe for a true screwball comedy, it would have complemented contemporary popular releases like Holiday (directed by George Cukor, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Bringing Up Baby (directed by Howard Hawks, also starring Grant and Hepburn, with Asta cast as her dog George), both released in 1938. Hammett’s blend of mystery and comedy was in vogue, but in this instance he may have pushed his literary license beyond what MGM could bear. Reluctant screenwriters, an unenthusiastic leading lady, and an indisposed leading man spelled troubles enough for the film franchise. The potential for public distaste for the sour turn of a sympathetic character might have been anticipated as beyond the pale. A scribbled annotation on a draft of the “Sequel” (“what is audience reaction to . . . being murderer . . .”) suggests that the dénouement in Hammett’s final Thin Man offering gave MGM on
e more reason to reject the story.
J. M. R.
“SEQUEL TO THE THIN MAN”
Metro Goldwyn Mayer Script Dept.
December 7, 1938
Nick, Nora, Tommy, and Dorothy arrive in San Francisco and are met by reporters who want to know about “new developments” in the Macaulay case. Nick ignores their questions as he has ignored the telegrams he has been receiving en route. They are driven to his house and have settled down with signs of relief at being in a quiet place once more when a mob of surprise party guests comes out from behind furniture at them.
While the party is going on, Mimi phones from New York to say that Macaulay has escaped and she is afraid he will kill her, since she was the chief witness against him. Nick, uninterested, hangs up and tells Nora it was a man trying to sell him something.
Nick and Nora are asleep when Mimi—fresh from a plane—crashes their bedroom to demand Nick’s protection. She is followed by Gilbert, complaining about the cost of taxis in San Francisco. He has become a miser since inheriting money. Nick and Nora unwillingly tell them they can stay.
In New York, Macaulay—disguised as a middle-aged woman—learns Mimi has gone to San Francisco and dashes for a plane, being helped aboard by Guild, who is at the airport hunting for him.
Next day Mimi phones Chris in New York, begging him to come out. He pretends indifference until his first wife, Georgia, comes in, overhears the conversation, and starts a quarrel, saying she will never let Mimi have him unless she gets some money out of it. Chris laughs at her threats and leaves for the West. Georgia goes out to keep a date with Morelli, who has been in love with her since Nick’s dinner, and tells him about the dirty deal she is getting. He is having the first “clean” love affair of his life and thinks this slut is Joan of Arc. He offers to take her to San Francisco and see that her wrongs are righted.
In San Francisco Nick and Nora have been leading dogs’ lives for a couple of days. In addition to Mimi—who keeps complaining about Gilbert’s stinginess—and Gilbert—with his complaints about her extravagance—they have an antique uncle and aunt of Nora’s visiting them, people who never trusted Nick very much and now suspect him of everything down to being Mimi’s lover and Gilbert’s father.
Chris arrives on the Coast and phones a man called Dancer—a man of Chris’s type but much more dangerous—who tells Chris, “Yeah, I remember you,” and hangs up. Chris calls him back and with promises of easy money persuades Dancer to meet him.
Nick and Nora, fed up with their guests, sneak out the back way, run into Tommy and Dorothy doing the same thing, and they all set out for a peaceful evening somewhere away from home.
In a Chinatown joint Chris tells Dancer he knows he can get a lot of money from Mimi, because she is crazy about him, but he is afraid of Nick, Georgia, Morelli, etc., as well as having no local connections. Dancer is skeptical, especially since Chris has no cash now. Nick and his party come in, are greeted warmly by the proprietor, and Dorothy sees Chris; she’s angry at his having followed Mimi to San Francisco and tells him so. When Chris starts to tell her what he thinks of her, Tommy hits him, and as much riot as we want is on—winding up with Chris and Dancer out on the sidewalk. Dancer says: “If you’re on the level, now’s your chance. Let’s go up and see the dame while these people are here and collect.” Chris agrees to call on Mimi.
Across the street from Nick’s house Macaulay, still in disguise, sees Morelli and Georgia arrive and go in.
Inside Mimi and Georgia have a grand row, Georgia demanding money for giving up Chris, Mimi saying she wouldn’t give her a cent if it meant losing him forever, throwing threats at each other and at Chris—“Even if I can’t have him, you won’t,” etc.
Chris and Dancer arrive and after a bit of five-handed quarreling Chris gets Mimi aside and tries to get some money out of her but she is too afraid Georgia will get some of it, so she gives him very little. He tells her she has till the next morning to make up her mind and they rejoin the others for another battle-royal that lasts until Nick arrives and puts Chris, Dancer, Morelli, and Georgia out.
Macaulay follows Chris and Dancer down the street and waits outside when they go into a saloon. When they come out Dancer says to Chris: “If the idea is for me to keep you from being hurt maybe it’s better I stick a little ways behind you,” so he follows Chris while Macaulay follows him. Meanwhile Nick and Nora have gone to bed; Mimi, after trying to get Chris on the phone, has sneaked out of the house, shadowed by the ever-spying Gilbert; and downtown, Morelli and Georgia, making lame excuses and a date for later, have separated and each is headed for Chris’s hotel.
At Chris’s hotel—a small one in a dark and now foggy street—Mimi is told that he has not come in yet. She leaves the hotel. Morelli and Georgia arrive separately, neither aware of the other’s presence, and conceal themselves in darkness. (For reasons that will be obvious the audience should not know too much about their positions in relation to the hotel; they should simply be hiding in darkness.)
As Chris, walking down the street, approaches a dark alley on one side of the hotel, Dancer silently moves up closer behind him. Macaulay is half a block down the street. A policeman standing on that farther corner hears two shots and turns toward the hotel. Dancer dashes into the dark alley and there are scuffling sounds, his voice grunting in surprise, the sound of running feet in the alley. Macaulay, scampering down the street, trips himself on his skirts and falls, losing hat and wig. The approaching policeman grabs him, drags him up to the entrance of the alley next to the hotel, and turns his light down on Chris, who lies dead on the sidewalk.
In an all-night lunchroom Morelli and Georgia keep their date and immediately each knows the other was at the scene of the killing. They leave to find a place to hide.
In the morning Guild and some local detectives call on Nick and tell him about Chris’s murder and Macaulay’s arrest. Nick tells them of the meeting between Chris, Dancer, Morelli, Georgia, and Mimi the previous night and arrangements are made to try to pick up Dancer, Morelli, and Georgia. Then Guild asks, “And how about this Mimi?” Nick says he thinks she is out of it—she was in the house. Guild says the clerk at Chris’s hotel described a woman like her calling for Chris not half an hour before he was killed. Nick sends for Mimi, who comes in followed by Gilbert. When asked about her whereabouts she says she was at home of course but Gilbert interrupts her. He tells her it is silly to lie at a time like this; he knows she went to Chris’s hotel because he shadowed her there and back again to Nick’s. Questioned, he places the time of her return early enough to make it impossible for her to have been in the neighborhood of the hotel at the time of the shooting, though the police do not altogether believe him.
Macaulay is brought in and questioned again. He says he accidentally ran into Chris on the street, was surprised to know he was in the city, and shadowed him in an attempt to learn where he lived so he could avoid that part of town until he could board a boat for the Orient. He said he heard the shot and ran because as an escaped convict he could not afford to be around trouble, but he did not see the flash and could not tell whether the man walking behind Chris had killed him or not.
Dancer phones Mimi, saying: “This is the fellow who was with your boyfriend. Can you meet me now?” She says she can and he gives her careful instructions. When she goes out a detective shadows her, with the result that both she and the sleuth have walked a couple of inches off their heights before Dancer can safely pick her up in his car.
Later that afternoon, in a room behind drawn blinds, Morelli and Georgia see their pictures in an afternoon paper, with WANTED over them; Dancer looks at his as he leans carelessly against a police-call box on crowded Market Street.
Morelli suggests that now her husband’s dead, Georgia should marry him so neither can be made to testify against the other in case they are caught, but she thinks it is simpler for them just to lie, and besides how could they walk into the City Hall with their faces spread over all the papers? More
lli has to go out, his only explanation being that he’s “got a job to do.”
At cocktail hour Nick and Nora, with Mimi, Gilbert, Dorothy, and Tommy, are drinking in a front room in his house when somebody firing through the window from the street shoots a glass out of his hand. Nick digs the bullet out of the wall and takes it to headquarters, where the expert says it was from the same gun Chris was shot with.
Dancer comes into headquarters and gives himself up, saying he had just seen in the papers that he was wanted. He tells of the proposition Chris made him, but said he had no intention of getting hurt, at least until Chris paid him something, which is why he walked behind Chris—he didn’t want to stop a bullet meant for the other fellow. He didn’t see the flash and as soon as he saw Chris fall he ran up the alley and away from there, taking no chances on being next. Nobody can prove he ever owned a gun or had the slightest reason for killing Chris, whom he had never known well and had not seen for years. Macaulay sends for Nick and makes a complete confession to having shot Chris over Dancer’s shoulders, involving Mimi in both the murder and his escape from prison. Nick says: “Hooey! Just a fellow who’d rather stall through a long, drawn-out murder trial here than go back to be burnt in a few days,” and tears the confession up.
Return of the Thin Man: Two never-before-published novellas featuring Nick & Nora Charles Page 24