William Powell and Myrna Loy play a married couple who plainly enjoy each other, which was rarer on screen in 1934 than a murder. The murder is here too, and it is the weakest thing in the film. The marriage carries it without noticing the weight.
Dashiell Hammett’s novel is a hardboiled mystery about a missing inventor and a dead secretary. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett read it, kept the corpse, and built the film round the couple who trip over it on their way to the next cocktail. Nick Charles (William Powell) used to be a detective and has since married Nora (Myrna Loy), whose fortune means he need never work again. They are in New York for Christmas with their dog and a great deal of spare time. When Dorothy Wynant (Maureen O’Sullivan) asks Nick to find her vanished father, he says no, and Nora, who has never seen a murder, says yes on his behalf.
We recommend it warmly and with one caveat, which is that the mystery is a coat rack. What hangs on it is the best married couple Hollywood had put on screen up to that point. Nora’s first entrance has her dragged across a nightclub floor by the dog, arms full of parcels, after which she asks how many drinks Nick has had, is told six, and orders five more so she can catch up. We laughed out loud, and then noticed we were smiling at the screen for the next ten minutes, which is not something we often do with films of this age.
Powell’s timing is the engine. He plays Nick as a man who is never entirely sober and never remotely drunk, and who treats each new development in the case as a mild social inconvenience. He shoots the baubles off the Christmas tree with an air gun Nora has given him, lying on the sofa, and does not look at the tree. Loy is the invention. Nora is not the nagging wife of a hundred detective pictures and not the frightened one either; she wants in on the case, she resents being left behind, and she says so, and the film thinks she is right. The two of them talk over each other like people who have been married long enough to stop being polite and not long enough to stop being interested.
W. S. Van Dyke directs at speed and it shows in the good way. Scenes end the moment the joke has landed, and Robert J. Kern’s cutting gets the whole thing done in 91 minutes with room for two nightclubs, a Christmas morning and a police interrogation. James Wong Howe lights the hotel suite bright and flat, which suits a film that lives in daylight and dressing gowns; he saves the shadows for one visit to the inventor’s shuttered workshop, torch beams and dust sheets, and the change is sharp enough to make the murder feel briefly like a murder. Dolly Tree dresses Loy in striped suits and long, plain gowns that look like clothes rather than costumes. William Axt’s music is barely there, which is the correct decision.
The trouble is the Wynants. Minna Gombell’s Mimi, the inventor’s ex-wife, is shrill by design and stays that way; William Henry’s Gilbert, the son, reads about psychology and is a joke rather than a person; Cesar Romero’s Chris Jorgenson barely registers. Every time the film leaves the Charleses’ suite for the Wynant house it slows down, and it goes there often. Nat Pendleton’s Inspector Guild is a broader sort of comedy than the leads, and the gap shows. When a gunman (Edward Brophy’s Joe Morelli) turns up at the hotel, Nick gets Nora out of the line of fire by punching her unconscious, and the film plays it as a gag. We did not entirely laugh.
The solution, when it comes, arrives in a lump. Powell has to talk for a long stretch, and Van Dyke stages it as well as anyone could, which is not the same as making it interesting. We will not say where it happens or who is present. Most of the reviews of the time were happier with it than we were; the New Yorker thought it an improvement on the book. We think it is the price of the previous eighty minutes, and a fair one.
It started a series, and more than that it started a way of doing marriage on screen: two clever people who would rather be with each other than with anyone else, and who show it by teasing. Very few films have managed it since. Watch it with someone you are still fond of, and a drink you can defend.
