Myrna Loy: December's Salve

The holidays is a time for joy, giving, family, religious or cultural iconography, cold, boredom, old people smells, excited new dogs, alcoholism, despair, sunshine, candy caning, and-- saving every cold, old dying soul from the terror of time--there's Myrna Loy. She's the ultimate salve for a wounded bloody and so very bowed end to the year, century, mankind, era. She was in THE THIN MAN, Myrna Loy, and FU MANCHU. That heavenly vixen so able to embody exotic blends of counterespionage agents, sexy sadists, loving witty and wry detective wives, good-natured prostitutes always willing to testify against the mob if it means saving an innocent whatever, and vamps with secret hearts of gold. Button-nose cute, too, with a twinkle in the eye so pronounced it's like looking into an ice-packed highball on a country club veranda as the sun sets...

TCM digs it, so Fridays they're pulling out the stops, it's Loy Fridays all month, and Acidemic has culled from its totterirng archives to tell you which ones might well be missed (post-code gender straitjacket re-donning) and must be watched, taped, adored, applied.

FRIDAY 12/9:

2 PM -MASK OF FU MANCHU  

(1932) - ***1/2

MGM's contribution to racist sensationalism, this great punchy little film plays like a massive headrush serial, with elaborate exotica sets: opium dens, expressionistic corridors, eerie operating rooms, lightning, crocodiles, spiked crushing walls, ear-drum bell torture, mind control and above and best of all, Myrna Loy as Fah Lo Suee, the sadistic-kinky daughter of the exonerated Fu Manchu (Karloff). As if that wasn't enough, one of the 'good guys' is Karen Morely, who insists she come along on the expedition to rescue ancient Chinese artifacts (the sword of Genghis Kahn) from the Chinese (i.e. Fu), who'll use them to stir a revolt to "kill the white man, and take his women!"
(for more: Free Fu and Fah Lo).

8 PM - LOVE ME TONIGHT

(1932) - ****

I haven't written much about it in the past, but I love this, for if he never made another film, this would make me a big Maurice Chevalier fan. A musical perfect even for those who dislike the genre and Jeanette MacDonald's trilling operetta singing. Here she's pretty sexy as is sister Loy, but not in a winky way - it's knowing and wry without being tawdry (and my favorite spoken song lyric, "you're not wasted away, you're just wasted." Amen. Myrna--playing a sex-starved sister trapped by her moral father at the family estate where no man is under 60, is alas mostly cut out due to being too sexy even for 1932. Every time I see it I long to crawl inside the screen and hurl myself into her welcoming boudoir. France, monsieur, ah France. The quest to find the footage of her singing her verse of "Mimi" while in lingerie in her boudoir is one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. All we have is the above still for now, but one day a pre-release print will be unearthed and the sky will crack open.

11:30 PM- NIGHT FLIGHT

(1933) - ***1/2

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) might not give Loy more than a scene or two but turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic meditation, full of great cool midnight moments all its own. Unfolding over one long night in the early days of night flying over the Andes down in Argentina, a very dangerous and historic period in post-WWI aviation--when planes were still open cockpit single propellors unable to get over the peaks, so they have to kind of wind their way through on instruments and one strong wind can blow them off course and straight out to sea or into the face of a mountain--it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and, sadly nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator in the cockpit down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction and the sublime moment he clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in Buenos Aires tango music on his headphones, and looks up at the dreamy moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Of course, if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy waiting at home, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile another isolated wife played by Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting.  (See: Andes Hard)

 1 AM: THIRTEEN WOMEN

(1932) ***

Myrna Loy may be gliding through her then-typecast parts as Asian or half-caste femme fatales but she's still got Loy star powers, so evil or not,you'll be rooting for her vendetta against a now-married and settled down pack of girls' college alumni racists, all the way (unless you're a prom school snob who's never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself), even if it would stung more and been more daring if Georgie was played by Anna May Wong instead, i.e. actually Asian or half caste. The racism would have some real bite, then, but one understands if not forgives perhaps these pre-code baby steps, and if you love Loy as I do you have a special spot in the dark of your heart for her early Asian vamp roles. What she lacks in the warmth and wit of her later persona she makes up for in slow measured cobra staring, taking full advantage of the unwritten rule where a vamp could get away with all sorts of verboten sordid sadism, as long as she was at least a half-caste (for full review - here)

 3:35: PENTHOUSE

(1933) ***1/2

This was the one that made critics and audiences perk up and go whoa, this girl is a frickin' star - it just took us awhile to catch on as she was trapped under all those faux-epicanthic folds and exotic headdresses. Warner Baxter is the typical mob lawyer with a secret heart of gold and a shocked butler - and Loy is a party girl his grateful mobster client (Nat Pendleton) hooks him up with, who then winds up helping him get the goods on a dickhead rival mobster who offed Myrna's roommate (Mae Clarke). Either way, she's resourceful, fearless and genuinely touched when he doesn't molest her the night she first sleeps over. You can actually see Loy's wings come out of her back and expand as her character realizes this guy's no naif-in-the-woods, but at the same time no douche, and so, now she doesn't have to get tiresomely noble like Clarke in Waterloo Bridge or resort to her old exotica spellbook. She sees the chance and blooms, and flies clear away with the picture. Nat Pendleton smiles like a helpful marriage counsellor, and it's that even-keeled honesty about character and innate nobility over labels, social standing and circumstance that prevail, leaving up feeling pretty optimistic about the future and smitten beyond words with little twinkly-eyed two-fisted Myrna.

5 AM: THE BARBARIAN 

(1933) - **1/2

Of course she still had a bunch of MGM contract parts to fill, and those miscegenation fantasies were big business - here it's the reverse where she's liberated from stodgy British marriage (she's half-Egyptian but--like Zita in The Mummy, Egyptian royalty, so it's okay) by a smoov tour guide gigolo (Ramon Navarro) who's thing is seducing rich bored British wives. (Like Svengali, we first meet him saying goodbye to one, and immediately setting out after another). At first she's just sport, but then he's so fed up with Loy's resistance he abducts her out into the desert, whips her, bathes her and ta-da, it turns out he's the son of a rich sheik on walkabout, so it's okay. As I wrote while in a pervious incarnation: "If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO ending winds to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders." (pop the full capsule here)

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That concludes the 9th. Coming up the following Friday (the fightin' 16th), most of the morning and afternoon are those quality but inert post-code MGM triangulated weepers that bottom out Loy boxes but then:

5 PM: STAMBOUL QUEST

(1934) Dir. Sam Wood

**/12

I must preface this recommendation by saying I'm personally no fan of the inescapable soap peddler George Brent. A holdover from the pre-Gable kind of pursed-lip romantic acting which seems today as gooey as a molasses spill, so that he's the bumbling American tourist (allegedly) who knocks the sublimely urbane counterspionage super spy Fraulein Doktor off her heels is a kraw-sticker in this otherwise enjoyable addition to the many pre-code movies made about either Fraulein Doktor or Mata Hari or some fictional combination, ala X-27 (Dietrich's DISHONORED). Why? Maybe it's the weirdly condescending trill in his voice, the way he talks to every girl like she's six and just skinned her knee, or his stupid face that kind of leans out with his nose like a self-satisfied anteater, or his wholesale buying into terrible romantic lines. He was made for woo, and his behavior here would today be hopefully labeled as stalking.

Here, as Doktor, Myrna Loy is in slinky and exotic mode (probably close to the last time - she had just made THE THIN MAN) and wears a fabulous dress in the climax, a big finale which leaves us with the notion, at least for awhile, that ardent Loy-wooer George Brent has been shot by a firing squad. Hinting at the steep 'price one must pay' as a hot female spy in Austrian counter-intelligence, she starts the movie ratting out Mata Hari for falling in love with a Russian officer --fatal for a femme fatale, we know from her strident position on the subject (and since Ben Hecht isn't writing it) that 'Fraulein Doktor' has doomed herself. Too bad for us it's the naive whimsicality of George Brent that woos her away from trapping double agents, and he treads all over her sublime machinations with his muddy American bungler feet.. (full)

Friday 12/23

Merry Xmas!

9:15 AM - THE GREAT ZIEGFELD 

(1936)

Trippy musical numbers evoke a time before TV or 3D movies, when the eye was courted as if an indulged royal baby. Or maybe I was just super strung out from a terrible weeklong fever last time I saw it (see: Flo, the Great and Powerful: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD and the Ludovico Flu)

4PM - I LOVE YOU AGAIN

(1941) - ***1/2

Loy and Powell are by now too old for the previous meet-ups' debonair sparkle; Loy's no-longer-amused and patient wife is now debating wether she has the energy to waste time yelling at him. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts to see them play characters who hurt themselves by hurting each other. It hurts her to be mean to him, to force him to re-examine his notion of himself as an adorable souse. Drinking men Loy's age slide into sobriety, moderation, or an alcoholic ward. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle. For an actress who's been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity to make her romance with either version of Powell believable, Loy's had to mellow, and so they seem like Nick and Nora Charles if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy. But then Nick relapses she loves him again and hence the title! His co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk makes a weak wooing combo, but it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't, and takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon beneath. But who can't forgive a little torture if provides even a moment of true bliss? (more: William Powell's Psychedelic Amnesia)

8PM - Dawn: THIN MAN MARATHON

 (See: Notes from a class struggle in a THIN MAN marathon)

--
Sorry loyal readers if my output late has slowed - I'm writing, but finishing things has become difficult - Diffused, scattered, trepidatious is my heart, even my usual pre-apocalyptic black humor is failing me. BUT things are coming, soon. Crom bless us, every one. fejjpfpdew[

PS - I missed the 1930 advocation of May-December romance, THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUTH, it was on last week, before I knew it was Loy month, but it will come again... and is avail on DVD... R

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 over Xmas) 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 ("it makes you my equal" as Sinatra tells der Bingle in High Society), illuminating the scions of the rich's lack of interest in bourgeois sophistication as opposed to earthy vitality and color. Seen as a whole, in one glorious TCM New Years night, from MGM to my screen--seven (or eight? hic) films stretching from pre-code 1934 to post-war noir jazzbo 1947, we see this class struggle in action, but also the way the long term effects of copious drinking parallel the effects of censorship and WW2 on American life. There's a reason, in the end, for avoiding America's low-lifes-- no matter how Runyonesque they may be. Censorship ironically made us presume otherwise (fighting dumb social norms being an American obligation) but hang out with them long enough and the poor rub off on you until there's no going back, entirely. In your absence, the upper crust cracked open and all that's left of the mansion you left behind is Blanche Dubois, impinging on your booze and personal space. Follow that earthy Runyon flame too closely and the lowlife becomes your whole life; suddenly you're traveling in coach instead of a private car, then packed into the baggage car with barn animals, peasants, drunken bums... Maybe it's that there's a war on...

And then maybe you're the drunken bum...

Nora was definitely slumming when she married private detective Nick Charles, for she started out rich and to the manor-born, the alleged upper crust. But her side of the family all have a yen for the rough trade, as we see firsthand in AFTER THE THIN MAN. Dominated on the home front by upper crust tea-totaler patriarchs and great aunts who need eight servants just to get out of bed, naturally they'll run off with any man who's independent, tough minded and able to breathe life back into their half-suffocated sense of adventure.

In the original THIN MAN (1934) the 'actual' titular 'thin' man (Nick isn't the Thin Man--that's a common misconception), Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a successful 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 broad with whom he has a foxy young daughter Dorothy and a creepy-intellectual son Gilbert, and still 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 long distance bill-running 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 cross-class couples in this first film better situate the unique chemistry of our favorite drinking duo, thus answering the question: what would their romance be like if street kid Nick and debutante Nora's respective classes were reversed? And in later films, in a clear nod to MGM's obsession with provincial morality, Nick's past is changed to indicate he's not from New York City but from a cute small midwestern town with a well-respected physician father and literally a white picket fence.

I've always liked to believe THE THIN MAN is really a kind of Hammett-to-Chandler cross-over BIG SLEEP sequel. The wry humor and quick back and forth of Bogie and Bacall in SLEEP seems like a prelude to Loy and Powell's Nick and Nora--the class differentiation is just right. Marlowe isn't just a gumshoe-- he "went to college and can still speak English if the situation demands it" and Mrs. Rutledge clearly loves the rough trade as much as her nympho hophead sister. She mingles with the underworld for gambling and drugs, and he mingles with the high class socialites to provide protection when their blackmailers play too rough. As a couple they act as go-betweens between these two worlds: Nick knows the night-spots and the thugs; Nora knows their prey --the shattered effete scions, skittery cousins, and shrill dowager aunts.

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, in turn, connecting him financially with mugs like Edward Brophy and that dirty little rat Nunheim. Wynant reminds us, so painfully, that to be rich and successful is to need a detective on rolodex ("Rutledge should hire you permanently to keep those girls of his out of trouble" notes Marlowe's assistant DA buddy Bernie Ohls), or a 'present' parent (like Sebastian's mom in Notorious) to screen out the charmer predatory riffraff, do background checks, and otherwise make sure you're not sleeping with or getting rooked by any gold diggers, vamps, spies, pimps/hookers, or greedy two-timers. Wealth does not often equal a clue when it comes to dealing with its accompanying social parasites, especially as so often the father is too busy working to raise his kids properly. So the wealthy patriarchs hire detectives to get rid of their daughter's leeches without getting their family name dragged through the papers. In marrying the detective, Nora keeps her own wealth permanently immunized.

And in the end maybe what started out as bored jet set thrill-seeking on Nora's part (they met when Nick was hired by Nora's late father) turns to love that's somehow the ultimate measure of class, the difference that separates the cool rich (the kind we love) vs. the snobby airheads (the targets of our scorn and con artist chiseling). William Powell is perfect casting for Nick Charles, since as in My Man Godfrey, he has an elegance and charm that is like a beacon that transcends classes, a charm that magically wards off the con artists and moochers. Even the mugs he sent to prison like him, and surely there is no higher proof of character.

Even so, at the dinner party denouement (of the first film) he articulates a priori 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 quality: Tommy (Henry Wadsworth), who tells her to "pack some clothes and (her) skates" to come with him to his parent's cabin in the country (the addition of the 'skates' is so sharp, I always use it as an example of the importance of specific detail in writing), letting us admire the youthful earnestness of their pairing even knowing absolutely nothing else about him' contrasted with the louche "first false step" guy, who basically has a kind of whiny fey sneer in his voice (he gets one line and gets slugged). Of all the people in the film, it's this one guy Nick isn't nice to, even though, aside from being a scuzzy opportunist, he hasn't really done anything wrong. But that lets you know too that Nick is, above all, chivalrous, and maybe even a bit of a prude when it comes to premarital sex. After all, despite the boozing, he does live at MGM.

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 on pills and, like Mimi (or even Nora), so under the sway of some handsome grifter husband (Alan Marshall) she shuns the respectable slime pails in her class (like Jimmy Stewart).

Another dark reflection of upper crust Nora's love of streetwise Nicky, Selma's obsessive doting over this cad is yet another valuable window into a 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 (the really slick operators are going to be hunting richer quarry). In AFTER, 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. She's so dominated and overprotected that her aunt indirectly forces her into marrying such a swine.

Curiosity about the lifestyles of the lower dregs has long been an obsession of the rich but during prohibition especially the two were dependent on one another for their very social survival. When Nick says "that man is here," while bringing in a tray of booze to their guests, he's referencing a common insider bootleg era phrase, evoking the system from the previous year when booze came by delivery service--usually via suitcase. A variation of that exists today for cocaine. The last few parties I went to were full of models and yobbos all ended with midnight or one AM "call" and the arrival of some sketchy dude selling cocaine to a crowd who've pooled their money in a different room. Once said sketcher would see the hotties to be had he'd call his buddies and within minutes there'd be a sketchy hoodrat hanging on a willowy model in every corner of the room. While I hate cocaine and would leave when they showed up (and no no longer go to those parties), I appreciate that this fraternizing of suzzy coke dealers and the beautiful people goes back to prohibition in the 20s-early 30s, and when the arrival of a certain package made an ordinary gangster delivery boy become the apple of every thirsty girl's eye.

Now me, I've not only struggled with alcoholism but with my own snobbiness for I've learned to be the bemused hip wingman rather than the worrywart aunt of sulky ectomorphism when it comes to monitoring my friend's and family's mate choices. 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. Looking back, I loved her folks, they were great people, but at the time, my indignant snob hackles rose. She later told me they sensed that, but were amused by it. Man oh man, the middle class is a tricky place to be.

What does money have to do with love maybe you ask? It's character, pure and simple, that overrides culture? Yeah it does. A rich family might live poorer than a poor one; a rich house in Princeton might look at first like a rustic cottage, its austerity reflecting--only as we learn later--some early colonial 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.  Class may not be just about money but in the words Loreli Lee, my goodness doesn't it help?

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 instead of a shameful waste of Kansas City's withering flatlands, of which drunkenness is the only possible response.

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 help him, the drinking was sidelined at best for unto Nick and Nora a child has come. They find uncle's compound swamped with security guards but there's "good air for the baby" and overlapping needy characters cramming their way into the smaller and smaller, simpler, and progressively more spartan apartments, bearing pages of red herring exposition like trays of hardboiled eggs. 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 upper crust relative / uncle who first summons Nick-o-lass and little Nora to his or her remote mansion, and the MGM treacle seeping over the Breen line ("Gee, boss... a cute widda baby!")--even if that damned baby is goddamned Dean Stockwell, saints forgive him--is an unwelcome intrusion. Even if they do have a nanny, the writing is on the wall.

Muriel Hutchison

The unique selling point to ANOTHER--not later duplicated in the series--is the startlingly touching romance between red herring grifters Sheldon Leonard and Muriel Hutchison. When she pulls a pistol out of her garter belt the whole series grinds to a turntable scratch halt. In lesser hands, this skeezy pair of crooks would be quite forgettable, but here they wind up as the second coolest couple in the whole series, further blurring the class lines. Now that there's real life Nazis in the works and boot strap-tightening and victory bonds to sell and buy, well, there's no longer magic in the contrast between rich and low class settings. The way Hutchison 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, streetsmart brass and spritely comedic wit, perfectly fused to Hutchison's Frances Farmer meets Judy Holliday sexual persona. As the patient daughter of the rich colonel, Virginia Grey; Tom Neal (DETOUR star later convicted of murder) is a chemist. And in't that WB B-movie gumshoe Patrick Knowles? It might not mean much in terms of charm and acting--all top notch--but it's clear we're beginning to drift off the A-list.

By now Nora is on her way to being marginalized as a totally ditzy dame but still gets out good lines, tossed off 'yes-and' improv intuitiveness, 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!" That shit is awesome, BUT then she 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. Come on, writers! She's not Lucille Ball... she's goddamned Myrna Loy! She's NORA!

THEN CAME THE WAR

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

And the thrill of drinking while dodging bullets, and enjoying a marriage with a wife comfortable with both, was going, if not gone, or at least 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 previously delivered, the way someone who eats too much of a certain food never wants to eat that food again, at least until, say seven years or a war have passed.

Two things MGM couldn't overbake with Fordian hick Christian small town provincial weepy moralism: the positive drinking, and the idea of an underworld itself --both essential staples to the series, and both presenting MGM's moral hand-wringers with a problem. The grifters might now all look like they'd been posed in front of walls as phony as a Woolworth painted family Xmas portrait backdrop, but they were there. The glorious mansion of the second film, or ritzy apartment of the first, even the visit to relatives in the third, is supplanted. though, in favor of a nanny, a maid and domesticity galore, Nick is even goaded into drinking a glass of milk to appease his demanding son. Sir, that's carrying supplicated wholesomeness too far!

Good bits: Nora summoning Nick from a bench in Central Park, just by shaking up a cocktail shaker near their fourth floor window across the street! But the minimal sets and tedious MGM homespun shit, coupled with Nick's dime store penchant for playing the ponies, seems like their millions are long gone (they now have an upper floor Central Park condo with a single maid instead of their San Francisco mansion. More than a drinker, Nick's now portrayed as a chronic gambler (that might explain it), loafing around in an upper middle class boilerplate (i.e. they're now the Muensters not the Addams Family). The younger mirrors to Nick and Nora this time include Barry Nelson (the hotel manager from THE SHINING) as part of an allegedly good crime-solving couple, but the writing coasts on lazy coincidence of the sort that would make Dashiell Hammett turn ashen: Nick just "happens" to just be where crimes "happen" rather than being swept up in the 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, etc.

In other words, the believable chain of involvement that separates good writing from bad in the mystery game, is gone, replaced by the kind of lazy B-movie mystery writing where murders just happen wherever the detective happens to be. The one interesting saving grace: the detective's own fame is the trigger. If you're already paranoid about some devious deal your pulling, or pulled years ago during a mysterious hotel fire, the sudden arrival of a Charles onto your scene might trigger an outburst of blackmailer/witness silencing, and 'threatening note wrapped in a rock' window-throwing --this is believable as an explanation why famed sleuths find such ornate murders wherever they go. As Charlie Chan might say, a famous detective never runs out of crime to solve, for fame causes new crimes to cover old ones, like an artist sneaking into museum at night to fix a flaw only recently noticed in an old master, and thus turning an original into a forgery.

Stella Adler

This time the stealth actor in the bunch is none other than legendary acting coach Stella Adler. Watch her big scene with Nick and dig the way she feints forward while he questions her, as if about to kiss him before a serpentine back slither over the word "threaten" until it's practically an admission that Nick's a snake charmer and she's under his sway. But meanwhile, on the negative tip, Nora is getting daffier and daffier, relegated to all sorts of half-baked in-betweenism and ditzy harebrained derogatory MGM backwards-dancing clutziness. She's developed a real knack for stumbling down lazy screenwriter shortcuts towards new inadvertent clues, sussed out of the monochrome sets and cardboard cutout characters and spilled in her lap so the little lady can feel involved... aww, look at her go. MGM back to its old conservative tricks. That is, until the climactic reveal, when she shows moxy and courage to applaud.


THE THIN MAN GOES HOME (1945)
(THE WAR and its END)

"C'est la guerre" - Nick says before downing a nonalcoholic (supposedly) shot of cider. They're on a crowded train (and civilians told to not do any unnecessary traveling), a far cry fromthe swank sleeping cars they had in earlier films. Their overcrowded train coach reflects a loss of comfort or privilege inherent in  homefront upheaval, ala DR. ZHIVAGO's long train to Siberia, a kind of national boot-strap tightening, the kind of socialist compromise MGM would only allow during the actual war (there's not a lot of folk in uniform in this 1945 film, though - Nick's too old by now, or something).

This HOME they go to is another MGM wartime sentiment Andy Hardy softsoap backpedal. Up to now we though Nick a savvy big city detective, but suddenly his urbane cool is funneled into a Spielberg middle class small town ("Sycamore Springs" - saints preserve us) Look out the train window, Nora! He's wistful over the old windmill as it passes by in the train window. While in the baggage car with Asta they're sitting by boxes of "Limburger cheese" and many goats.... i.e. cheap hick sitcom laughs (they have to battle their way through standing room only crowded hallways to get there). I love that the family sticks with the dog 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. Was that Nick's idea, or Louis B's?

But the series surprises with a good thing for every bad, and this time Loy, in petit bowler hat, is suddenly a whole new mature kind of gorgeous, way above the curve for her or any age. Powell on the other hand looks legitimately booze-battered. He seems much older than last we saw the him: glossy, with a tacky oversize checkered-style suit coat hiding his paunch making him resemble a salesman rather than a detective, dyed-black, receding hair and mustache, complaining about his stomach lining, drinking nonalcoholic cider in a mirror maybe to Fields' Never Give a Sucker ice cream parlor. (As she would do in I Love You Again, Loy prefers the souse to the sober). We learn he's been working, making high fees as a detective, and that Nora's fortune seems apparently gone. The class system that they flourished in is gone, too. The war and its propaganda engine have elevated the cornfed law-abiding common man to the top of the heap and dissolved the sodden drinking classes in ways which seemed patriotic at the time, but would be considered red propaganda as soon as the war ended, and that's the weird thing with Russia. You were patriotic when promoting Russia during the war, and an enemy of the state immediately after. Make up your mind, America! Give Nick back his first-class compartment or give him a consolatory drink!

And the lighting, so layered and rich in the original, has been slowly fading away into spacey country blandness, so bleached out that a person wearing a dark color or sporting a noir shadow would be instantly arrested. So now Loy starts telling wild stories like the "Stinky Davis Case" - which we'd love to see as a movie instead of this one, to impress Nick's country doctor pops; when that fails she starts rattling Sycamore Springs' skeletons, hoping a crime will break out as a result "so [Nick] can show his father what a wonderful detective he is." We can't help but wonder: Are we hearing this right? The "only you darling, lanky brunettes with wicked jaws" worldly hipster has morphed to this sober paunchy gumshoe. ("You might get all sweaty and die," Loy cautions wryly). She's aged way better than he has. Did I mention that? And she's mastered the street slang. But her behavior isn't endearing - it seems wildly ill-advised. Worse is her comeuppance, a humiliating country spanking to punish behavior that the Nora we know would never stoop to. 

The only other babe this time is a muscular little Mary Lou Retinal scan of a blonde (Gloria DeHaven - left) who quotes Shelly while thesping around the first cool set in the film (her shadowy mansion), and then we remember the Tennyson quoted by Edward Brophy (now a greeting card salesman) and we get the feeling that, hey, them what wrote this been to college and wants we should know. Things start looking even further up when lanky Ann Revere appears in a red herring role as a crazy local wild woman, all underlit in her tarpaper shack out in the swamps, Charles suddenly dumping pieces of backstory out of the blue after sending ditzy Nora chasing Brophy around and trying to get him arrested ("They have to do something," the police chief says. Meanwhile Ann Revere conked him on the head with a frying pan rather than answer questions and somehow that doesn't get her arrested for assaulting an officer, so it's not just Nora who doesn't understand law but the police chief either. And then Nora slaps a red herring suspect at a pool room out of the blue in order to get Brophy arrested and the bouncy music says we're somehow supposed to laugh. 

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

The brush, son... the brush.

1947 -- The War's long 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 --is that for the gage, the dope, the weed? Bring on the finale, la SONG OF THE THIN MAN.

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 Nora 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 to celebrate the--what was it?--no one who hasn't decided their next 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 jet black dyed hairpiece making him seem bloated and old, and why not? You'd be too if you drank like Nick Charles for the last 20 years... wait, its only been like 13! That's booze for you- and is exactly how long I drank like that too. Anyway, he plays off his non-alcoholic cider like it won't effect his jubilant ease-in-his-own-skin debonair airs, but where are they? His alcoholic métier never quite recovers from his character's booze-related health issues, the inevitable age of his character and the actor, the previous films' wartime home front belt-tightening mirroring 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 pitching nickels at the dog track.


If you've been drinking all the way up and including this last film in the series during the TCM New Years marathon, then maybe you'll wonder if Nick's as woozy as you are. Now the drinking is all done by salty sailor types, for now a man cannot be a dad and still be a lush, no matter what Nora says to the contrary (she's not mad he's drunk, just mad he didn't bring her) Still, "he's a pretty good guy," she tells Asta. "he keeps us in dog biscuits"). 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.

 By contrast imagine if James Bond in that TV BBC Casino Royale stood in for the real Bond instead of making him a perennial youngster and including the same Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell, so that he needed a cane fur crime solvin' while she stayed kinda hot til late in the game, but there you go because the jazz lingo is all about the Jacksons and 'buckle buckle who's got the buckle' and there's a bullshit detector I got when that shit is like strictly Abe Kabibble and Pops under glass, and da bunk and the Jacksons are all out on the MGM lot with the reeds and the Freeds, but the diggity is strictly like from the non-squaresville camp. Like hey the writing has copped to the censorial small town rubric but the noirscape has taken effect anyway, like the profs never stepped all over the straight shit from out the dance floor in good old Hawksian the SONG IS BORN with Gary Cooper instead of Danny Kaye, I mean BALL OF FIRE not soul of the southern song, like strictly from Memphis, "that don't sound like the old Hollis Juice" - and with most of the film taking place in a series of jazz boats and joints (and even Nora picking up the lingo that giving the gal the 'fuller' means "the brush," son). "The brush."

Gloria Grahame in Song of the Thin Man

They're still "the squarest bunch of hipsters I've ever seen" notes the young Gloria Grahame, looking Veronica Lake type-ish in what would be her definitive scene-stealing performance if she wasn't stealing scenes even more valuable all through subsequent decade and Nick Ray's flea-bit pocks, er.. pockets. By which I mean the 50s, Asta, the 50s.

Last thing to mention, a really gone (white) Charlie Parker type checks into an alcoholic rest home--one of the first we've seen though they were all the rage in the pages of Chandler. The doctor notes of this suspect that "His mind has been completely shattered by alcohol." As a clearly pre-recorded clarinet solo wails in the background on the rest home grounds, dig the fine line between insanity and just cookin' on yon olde axe.

And compare too the awful ground between the high steppin' livin on 1934's original and 1947's now. Barely 13 years--you took no notice, old VERTIGO redwood slice-- but a whole nation's concept of alcoholism was won and lost as if in an MGM backlot dice game between Charlie Parker and Bing Crosby vs. Josephs McCarthy and Technicolor Dreamcoat Stalin. And best of all, surprising the hell out of me, Keenan Wynn is their jazzbo mascot, gamely shepherding them through the jazz joints like a mix of Johnny Staccato and Charon.

The last image of the entire Thin Man series, and maybe my entire life: Asta sneaking out from under Nick Jr's sheets to not get busted by Nick and Nora for sleeping in his bed and moving back up through the sheets to the pillows almost immediately as the lights are off.

Positively tha same dog.

See also:

Myrna Loy Round-up 

Booze! Rate Your Drinking Problem through these 12 Progressively More Harrowing Movies

William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

Amnesia is always a great topic for the movies, furnishing a built-in self-reflexivity vis-à-vis the movie watching experience itself. We all start any movie an amnesiac (unless it's a sequel or based on a book we've read), instinctively sizing up clues as to what's what and who's where and why when. As far as narrative identity, we start the film lacking the whole backstory of each character, and we could wind up identifying with, rooting for, or against, nearly anyone until finally the good and bad pieces sort themselves out.  But we root for William Powell no matter what. He's one of the few actors able to be witty, wry, composed and elegant without seeming British, and he plays an amnesiac in two very different and worthwhile films from the early 40s. In the comedy I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940) and the noir mystery CROSSROADS (1942) he plays a guy who we only gradually learn has been suffering from amnesia, and undergoing a radical personality change because of it, ever since he was hit on the head, ten or so years before the films begins. Now he's a staid stalwart and sober citizen. But then - BAM! he takes another hit. The past self, the complete opposite of his then-established paragon of dull virtue, now fades in favor of his previous incarnation as a louche con artist. As in LOVE, William Powell's characters' initial conk-on-the-head-amnesia ten years earlier has ushered in sobriety, loyal decency and, this time, success as a diplomat, but he's far from a bore or windbag. When Basil Rathbone shows up alleging he's an old con artist crony, we never know for sure if he's telling the truth. To give away more would spoil them both, spoil the post-modern amnesiac cinema frisson provided by seeing them as a double feature, ideally at the same time, opposite each other, reflected onto mirrors.

I'll tell you something about LOVE, my friend: Powell starts out as Larry Wilson, a small town tea-totaling bore on a cruise who gets a conk that knocks him back to Nick after rescuing drunken McHugh (still staggering around the liner where Powell left him back in 1932's ONE-WAY PASSAGE). When Powell wakes from his conk in his stateroom the next morning it's not as old staid Larry but his original self, George Carey, a charming, quick-thinking grifter much more like the William Powell we love but a stranger to his current load of friends, co-workers, and soon-to-be-ex-wife (Loy). Realizing his interim self, Larry--about whom this new Powell, George remembers nothing--might be rich, George's eyes light up, his body careens around the stateroom--recruiting McHugh--who turns out to be a fellow grifter and immediately has the good sense to latch on for the ride--to help him loot his own bank account. It doesn't make sense, but it feels familiar.

pre-conk - '85

Post-"conk" - '86

I love this early stateroom scene because it captures exactly my first psychedelic awakening, in sophomore year of college, wherein all my old worries and dull habits were wiped away (see my Larry self, at senior prom, left). Pacing my dorm room while the sun came up, much as Larry paces his cabin in the film, my old comic book-reading depressive warmonger self like a cocoon husk kicked under the bed, a paisley butterfly from my cracked-open third eye, I felt towards my possessions and moneys as if I had found them all in a treasure chest that didn't really belong to the new me, but I could loot and give away. I once walked out of my dorm and left the building, with my door unlocked and wide open, music still playing on my turntable, all lights on, so free was I of all concern and attachment to possessions. Naturally, I wasn't robbed. I was so aligned with the tao I was invulnerable to harm.

That didn't last of course. My old Larry self came creeping back, no conk needed, and eventually the two--psychedelic 'shabby-chic-sham-shaman' and the surly awkward nerd--kind of blended together.

I had forgotten all about those times, that total instant post-conk transformation, until I saw Powell exhibit that same aliveness in his turn from Larry the dull sober moralist to George, the fun drunk con artist.

Returning to Larry's home town in order to get at that bank book, McHugh poses as Larry's doctor to explain why "Larry" must have lots of rest and be excused if he acts peculiarly, as in not recognizing Myrna Loy waving at him when he gets off the train, explaining that for his treatment to work, Larry "must have lots of alcohol!" Larry's ten years of sobriety as Carey was surely good for his liver. Now he can get back to processing THIN MAN-level toxins! But will George's attraction to Loy get in the way of this noble plundering and deep elbow-bending?

It's pretty funny when he meets her on the dock and can't tell who she is, the wife, girlfriend, random stranger, fan, or does she just thinks he's hot, the way Kay Francis did in ONE WAY PASSAGE? It turns out Loy's in the process of divorcing him because his old self was so sexually inhibited and boring. She's unaware he's changed so drastically, to the point he's this other character from before they even met who hasn't met her either. George is everything Larry wasn't, but he can't tell her he changed lest she wise up and deny him Larry's riches (a detail I love because if he thought it through he'd realize she can't deny him the riches - they are his, irregardless. But it feels like he's stealing, like he's moving into some easy mark's action, which--if he can play it cool--holds no barriers between him and the plunder. I know that feeling too, to a tee- the post-conk/trip butterfly you are now bears so little relation to your old straight-edge caterpillar cautious fearful comic book-collecting nerdy self that you wonder if your mom will even recognize you when you come home for Christmas, won't let you into the house or even pick you up from the train station once she sees how long your hair is. It's absurd of course, but that's how it feels. And then, once home, you have to play the game without letting on that you've been 'activated' through mushrooms or whatever, that you're now more than human. Can you display your enhanced self without coming off like a pompous tool? Or will you lose your new perspective and fall back into old behavior like prison stripes? 

Every alcoholic, once he's been sober longer than he drank for, can't help but wonder the same thing, albeit in reverse.

It would be very easy to start again... it's stopping again that might not work.

In the end, if the new George is a much closer approximation to his savvy souse of the THIN MAN movies than a noble bore, he should be the very man for Loy's weary near-divorcee. But let's face it, having such a drunken rogue as a husband requires indulgence, tolerance, and her own level of booziness not to get mighty fed up. One can only imagine what the nights are like when there's no murder to solve. If Nick's hollow leg is anything like mine, he can drink anyone under the table and still pass for sober when needed, but for just so many years and then - Booom! Done. Once that hollow leg is finally filled, it can never be emptied. One drink becomes an impossibility. A single shot can launch you right into withdrawal sickness if another one doesn't follow immediately.

It's interesting too because both Loy and Powell are getting older; her no-longer-patient wife is less able to embody the tolerance for Nicky's antics she showed in the first film. Her elfin sparkle has dimmed. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts them to hurt each other as characters. It hurts her to be mean to him, to force him to re-examine his notion of himself as an adorable souse. Drinkers his age have tough choices: slide into sobriety, moderation, a coffin, or an alcoholic ward. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle. In a sense, his new con man self has lost a decade of youth but gained a decade more of drinking. He looks older but can drink like an 18 year-old. For Loy, an actress who's been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity, it's enough to make her romance with either version of Powell believable. Loy's had to mellow and compromise, the hard way, being one person in one body. Together in AGAIN they seem like Nick and Nora if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy. But then Nick relapsed, so she loves him again and hence the title! Alas, his co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk makes for a sad, weak wooing. But, then it it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't. Sure, once it finally has you in its iron grip, booze takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon laughing at your pain, but who can't forgive hours of torture if it first provides even a moment of true bliss?

I Love You Again (1941)

Love Crazy (same year; same dress?)

This movie is awesome so it begs the question, why haven't I seen it sooner? I've drunk more bourbon watching THIN MAN on my duped VHS in the 90s alone than most people drink in their entire lifetime. But I got I LOVE YOU AGAIN confused with the far lamer LOVE CRAZY, another Myrna Loy-William Powell comedy of remarriage, which I watched back before I had read Stanley Cavell and knew what to look for and so disliked it. I still haven't been able to get into DOUBLE WEDDING because I was so bummed out by LOVE CRAZY. I thought all non-THIN MAN Loy-Powells were as wartime watered-down as Garbo's TWO-FACED WOMAN (also 1941). I shouldn't have been so brittle. I could have been drinking to this all along! Shrooming, too. For LOVE YOU AGAIN's giddy stateroom awakening from stale Larry to foxy George is as about as succinct an encapsulation of my old dorm-at-dawn sophomore year peaking as I've seen in some time. Oh my god, did I write about that already? Did I mention already Frank McHugh staggering around the ship bar in the opening scene shortly before falling overboard, Powell noting McHugh appears inebriated to the bartender. "Wha'd he say?" asks Frank McHugh -- "ee-nee-brated," the bartender says. "Oh he did, did he?" McHugh asks appalled--- and you realize "ee knee-brated" seems like some byzantine bird-flip or bodily insult, as in "he neebrated all over your stool"? Fuckin' brilliant, man. That's Lederer gold.

Also: some snazzy rousting of Herbert (Donald Douglas) Loy's dimwit new boyfriend while she and Larry are in the midst of divorcing, and man, what good, dirty writers could do with the old trope about 'coming upstairs to look at my snapshots' or in this case, taxidermy ("I'll never stuff another squirrel as long as I live!") In some ways it's like the screwball en verso of BIGGER THAN LIFE!!

Getting back to Myrna and Bill's legendary screen chemistry, now faded and strained, with every sparkle coming only with moderate effort. Each glimmer of the old charm adds a vibe of sadness. We come to see them as if we are their adult children perhaps. We've come to rely on Nick and Nora's sophisticated co-dependent chemistry to invigorate our ever-threatened conceptions of marriage, so now what do we aspire to? We loved how Nora would pretend to be sore at Nick for his constant drinking and how relieved we were in she smiled that wry pixie nose wrinkle half-smile to indicate she was just ribbing him. We all knew the drab buzzkill wife sermons so common to lesser romantic mysteries (such as in RKO's attempt at the THIN MAN formula, the buzzkill code-strangled STAR OF MIDNIGHT --see "Without a Slur"). Alcohol had long beeen the spinach for this marriage's Popeye; its absence has left their love near dead from iron deficiency. It becomes intrinsic to George's future happiness to inflate the old give-and-take back to life, to avoid being bumped on the head again, certainly, and most of all to strike it rich with a phony oil deal and to convince Myrna he's changed permanently before enough Larry creeps back he starts gets all small town noble.

But first many areas of small town life are milked for comedic goofiness, including a Boy Scouts award ceremony and a department store razzing (for Larry's Jack Benny-level cheapness). It's a firm reminder we did the right thing by moving out of the suburbs; how glad we are now that we live in a place where no one ever knows our name and an American is judged not on the color of his Elk's Club tie or his ability to sublimate sexual desire into tiresome Norman Rockwell Americana, but on his wit, virility, and in-the-moment alacrity.  That said, finding our own Nora on match.com is like looking for a diamond on the floor of an OTB.

In LOVE, Powell the grifter wakes up from a nine year coma of being Powell the staid bore; in CROSSROADS (1942) that same (but more sophisticated) bore's a diplomat in Paris who woke up with amnesia after a bad boat accident ten years earlier, and so can't account for anything of his past (he was never claimed, so to speak), but he's been his new self long enough he's married a gorgeous European gal (Hedy Lamar, never prettier), and become a trusted success. When a letter arrives requesting money owed by his old shady self, a self he has no memory of, the intrigue begins. Just as each personality didn't know anything about the life of the other in I LOVE YOU AGAIN, here we have the grifter emerge only in the court depositions of the old molls and jakes who come out of the woodwork to be cross-examined in what may be the most intelligently written court scene ever (Parisian, naturellement). By jove, there's none of the excess legal jargon that clouds the pens of lesser hacks. Claire Trevor is the savvy showgirl grifter shadow to Lamar's playful Grace Kelly-esque younger wife; then there's Basil Rathbone nosing into the proceedings, leaving us to wonder if blackmail's just another word for 'you owe me money but you don't remember.' How convenient.

Right off the bat, CROSSROADS lets us know we're in strange country: a lecture hall where Powell is dissertating; a brazen student at Powell's witty lecture seduces David (Powell) into a car. It later turns out she's his wife, a fun jest he picks right up on that casts a weird glow over the rest of the film (a dark mirror to the scene where Powell doesn't know who Loy is on the dock when he gets off the boat, and tries to fake it), letting us know in very well written language that film is an amnesiac experience -- until the dust settles after the first reel, they could well be meeting for the first time. He could be playing the same game on the audience and his friends from the get-go, just faking being noble to get access to some safe in a long long con. A lawyer here is even smart enough to ask how long an actor might stay in character before he officially becomes that character, as in common law marriage or naturalization! At an hour or less (ala Lamar's taxi ruse), it's just sparkling play amongst sophisticated people; at over an hour its theatrical acting; at over a month it's dissociative identity disorder (DID); at over five years it's retrograde amnesia. Longer than that, it's who the person really is! Now the old, original self is the act. One might thus legally go to jail for robbing oneself.

Helping matters is the out-of-time feel of the figures from David's past (when he was Jean Pelletier). Lamar seems modern like a Velvet Underground-moderne version of Grace Kelly in REAR WINDOW but the mysterious woman claiming to be Jean's old flame (Claire Trevor -left), wears her hair piled high like she just drifted in from the 19th century; and in her shadows lurks the aquiline silhouette of mighty Rathbone, stalwart heavy of Victorian mellers. The wet soundstage impression of a noir Paris muddies and blurs (maybe its TCM's print) like ink gouache across a....oh, man, but Heidi's pretty.

Sig Ruman shows up at the trail playing a bad doctor. Frank Bressart plays a good one, and the language and class barriers are--a rarity for Hollywood--vividly rendered. The script is maturely engaging and thought provoking without needing to rely on cheap thrills  or sudsy sentiment. David regularly makes smart decisions we normally don't see his brand of noir protagonist make, and we sympathize.

The mature noir chain to LOVE YOU's bouncy Runyon pendant, CROSSROADS might not be as lively but it's got its own weird midnight beauty and might have my favorite Lamar performance. And to think I avoided both films for years because I got them mixed up with DOUBLE WEDDING and LOVE CRAZY! It's understandable, though.

Without the THIN MAN structure, the chemistry of Loy and Powell often overflowed and swamped lesser vehicles, dragging them under by frilly post-code censorship and daftly interchangeable, meaningless titles. They never quite caught on, like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda or Barbara Stanwyck did, to the correct vibe for screwball comedy. LOVE CRAZY was made after I LOVE YOU AGAIN, with a similar comedic plot (acting insane to prevent a divorce). But with Lamar as his more demure opposite, CROSSROADS followed, more serious amnesia formula, further adding to my split self confusion upon reading the blurb (i.e. mixing up LOVE YOU AGAIN with LOVE CRAZY, then LOVE with CROSSROADS, even now I'm confused. Have I even seen DOUBLE WEDDING, except in passing? Maybe I saw it only long enough to note its 40s MGM streamlined short hair sentiment and slyly ant-feminist parabolism (her success in business requires Loy to be a bitch). So many MGM films of the period were so similarly bludgeoned by Louis B. Mayer's bourgeois sentiment and censorial hatred of feminism it's hard to keep them separate, or want to see them more than once.

But when they shine, brother, they shine.

So there you go the whole story of two films about assumed identities and fading marriages rekindled by lively alter-egos, and me, a viewer so confused by their bland titles that I waited to see them until this latter period in my film watching life, now that I too have no memory and keep repeating myself. Don't make the same mistakes I did!! Don't let fuzzy blows to the head or drugs to the pineal fuzz your roll into the split screen duplicate machine. Powell makes the jump with mere conks to the noggin. Can you do less? The screen shall split you whole if you don't mind first surrendering your individuality in the service of a grand war. Does that mean relapse, or just a feigned slur? Sometimes drunkenness isn't the same thing as not being sober -- it's called the movies.

Without a Slur: STAR OF MIDNIGHT (1935)

For any true classic alcoholic movie lover, Nick Charles, as played by William Powell, embodies the dream of being able to drink heroically while always remaining competent, coherent, and witty. Sadly, few of us have managed it in real life: sooner or later the drinks catch up to us, and forget about murders, we're lucky if we can solve the mystery of where our pants are or whose couch we're waking up on and what time it is. But Powell's Nick Charles, no matter howmennydrinksh he has, stays lucid, in control. Even if he slurs on occasion he can still spot even the tiniest slip-ups of well-concealed murderers. And Myrna Loy as Mrs. Charles doesn't bat an eye when her husband pops open the bedroom bar in the wee hours of the night. She merely raises a bemused eyebrow when he shoots out a window on Christmas morning with his toy gun present. She finds out he's already had five martinis, so orders five of her own instead of browbeating him. What a gal!

Bu the chemistry of Powell and Loy / Nick and Nora was something strictly from the land of genius drunk Dashiell Hammett. They were the happily ever-after of all the cool detectives who fall in love with their rich client's sexy 'good' daughters, thus eventually inheriting the family fortune. It helped their high-functioning, co-dependent cause that they started the series already married. In the post-code world, girls cared only about getting that ring on their finger, and if their man liked to drink, the 'comedy' came from making him stop before the bitchy mother-in-law moved in with her rolling pin and stern glowers.

And the success of the THIN MAN movies was something anyone who could afford to rent William Powell from MGM wanted to duplicate, even if they couldn't get Myrna Loy for his co-star. Of one example, STAR OF MIDNIGHT, Classic Movie Ramblings' Dfordoom notes "The plot is fiendishly complicated, perhaps even too complicated, but these sorts of 30s mysteries rely mostly on style, witty dialogue and classy acting so it doesn’t do to get too stressed out about following every one of the countless plot twists." And I'm glad he notes that because I used to use to go to sleep watching this film on a blurry VHS back in the 1990s, when my drinking was at its most Wagnerian. With its rambling, dull plot, the film knocked me out like a feather with a Harpo crowbar behind it. Only now, after 35 viewings, can I actually follow most of it. As for rapport, I even prefer even the breezy B-movie bonding between Tom Conway and his various lady taxi drivers in the Falcon films to Powell's futile attempts to be scintillating with Rogers' clothes horse post-code buzzkill.

As a point of conversation, however, STAR OF MIDNIGHT is an invaluable window into an alternate cinema universe that imagines a sadder-than-Pottersville alternate cine-reality, wherein Nick and Nora had never met, and Nick had instead become a lawyer and hung out with a post-code Ginger Rogers, i.e. vivacious, gorgeous, stylish, yet hammered into the common post-code frilly mold of a suffocatingly nurturing, marriage-minded champion of moral sobriety. In fact, her attitude and acting seem to bitchily satirize Powell's true cinematic love, Loy, as the Ludivico technique's Chase Kahn points out: "(Rogers) mocks the gaudy glamor and comedic timing of Myrna Loy, even scrunching her face at a sly comment... Well, Ginger, that kind of mocking only works if you're superior to the thing you're mocking! If not, it just scans as bitter jealousy.

And worse, she's incompetent even as a harridan micro-manager: when she finds out Powell's been shot (just grazed), she freaks out to the point where he has to snap at her: "Hey, it's my wound!" You can't imagine Nora ever being so overbearing, no matter how many humiliating situations and castration-symbolizing hats and hairdos she was forced into by the post-code Better Home and Gardens gestapo. In THE THIN MAN, when Nick was similarly shot (just grazed), Myrna Loy's response was touching --she was really scared for a moment--and her womanly concern was understandable; "I'm just... used to you, that's all." She gives him a drink; Rogers tries to give him a hot bath--a terrible idea for a flesh wound--and Powell is more or less forced to kick her out just to drink in peace. And when Rogers does finally pour him a drink, she measures it out with an eye dropper. Is that supposed to be funny, you bitch? Bitch, I'll KILL YOU!!

In short, without Loy, this MIDNIGHT can only remind us of the lonely feeling of being stuck in a relationship with someone who desperately wants us for a life partner but only after they've changed us to their and their mothers' liking, and we have no better offers at the moment, no pressing engagements, and we're too drunk and/or lazy and/or weak-willed to resist except in token increments.

This is certainly borne out in the late night presence of murder suspect Vivien Oakland (left) as one of Powell's former lovers, who bursts in to get information, stays to flirt, and forces Powell to give the old "what's done is done, lets just be friends" speech (later it turns out she's slept with half the other suspects). Oakland's matronly carriage offers subtle insight into this beaten-down Powell's weakness for low-hanging-fruit, as she clearly didn't seduce him with her lithesome beauty, sporting instead a Margaret Dumont-ish height and imperiousness (she was in a lot of Laurel and Hardy films, pie-faced, no doubt).

And that's the thing.... poor William Powell seems so lost and sad in this RKO alternate reality (he was on loan from MGM), it's as if he had no one to eat lunch with between takes and was afraid to ask even where the commissary was. Jean Paul Belmondo seemed similarly alone and adrift in PIERROT LE FOU, knowing he could never compete with the camera for Anna Karina's affections, so too Powell seems alone and adrift in STAR. Ginger nags about his lack of interest in marriage--answering her own question via her incessant hammering-- but he's too sorrowful and bewildered to resist much longer. He needs to cheat or something, or get a crowbar to pry her off him. Or hop on an outgoing freighter, suddenly and without leaving a forwarding address.

Meanwhile at least two people in the murder mystery are never even seen and a lot of the action takes place off camera. What we get instead are those suffocating post-code 'domesticities.' We come to know in great detail every domestic breakfast in Powell's chambers and where Rogers slept that night (in the butler's room) so the censors can relax. There's lot of virginal white bouquets around and if someone's going to get semi-naked and take a shower under a police grilling it's going to have to be Powell and not Ginger. In fact Powell's so pussywhipped the butler has to practically prod him into drinking with any kind of heroic gusto. STAR OF MIDNIGHT indeed! Rogers all but enforces a nine o'clock curfew.

The big eerie possibility might be, and I dread saying it, that this mismatched pair are truly in love, and that's why they put up with this draggy repulsion. Sometimes the only way your friends know you've finally found love is when you seem happy in your despair and by contrast your old joviality and free-wheeling bachelorhood seems, in hindsight, forced and a little desperate, as if you had to keep the drinks and murder clues going full throttle lest your shaking hands, slurred speech and total loss of coordination drag you down to that same old ledge, like VERTIGO's Jimmy Stewart, fighting against the tediously life-affirming gravity vortex that is marriage... to Midge. Good old...