Come on, let’s get something to eat. I’m thirsty.

After the Thin Man

(1937)

(SPOILERS) Nick and Nora are back. There might not be quite as much investigative anarchy as there was first time out, and the booze is definitely not flowing quite so freely, but the chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy is as fresh as ever. This is the longest of The Thin Man series, and at times it does get a little too caught up in respectful plotting, but there’s more than enough wisecracking from Powell (and Loy) to see us along.

W.S. Van Dyke returns to call the shots, while Goodrich and Hackett are back on scripting duties. This well-oiled approach extends to the action, which begins only three days after the original with Nick and Nora still on their post-Christmas train journey. They’re called to the home of Nora’s Aunt Katherine, who thoroughly disapproves of Nick, in order to track down cousin Selma’s husband Robert. They find him without much problem, but he soon turns up dead and assortment of suspects present themselves. More bodies pile up, and before long it’s time for Nick to host another of his Poirot-esque unmaskings.

The plot is quite involved, including a raft of characters with unclear and conflicting motives. There are also some neat red herrings, the most obvious being that Selma (Elissa Landi) looks to have committed the deed up-front. We meet local hoods, blackmailers and floozies. There’s a very young James Stewart (only three years before Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but he seems very much pre-discovered here) who has the dubious distinction of being he wot dunnit. Dubious, because his motives are a bit of a bodge-up as these things go. Still, you can’t have everything. Stewart’s solid enough, but this isn’t his finest hour.

The fun comes elsewhere, including Sam Levene as excitable Lieutenant Abrams (“Where’s this brother of yours who didn’t kill anyone?”), forever interrupting Nick’s lines of inquiry, Jessie Ralph as Aunt Katherine, coming on like she’s just been ejected from a PG Wodehouse novel and beating photographers with her walking stick, and George Zucco (Moriarty in Rathbone’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) in milk bottle glasses as Dr Kammer (who gets the astounded line “Good heavens. I was right. That man is crazy!”). Penny Singleton’s shrill and not-so-bright moll Polly is served some of the best lines (“Waddaya mean illiterate? My father and mother were married right here in the City Hall”; asked how many men she gave keys to her apartment to she replies “Say, what do you think I do? GO round stuffing them under doors?”)

If the drinking is down a notch, it’s still present. As is the innuendo:

Nick: With these earphones, Anderson could hear everything that went on down in your place.

Polly: Everything?
Nick: Everything.

Polly: Ho-ly smoke!

Nick: (appropriate pause)

But it’s the interplay between Powell and Loy that makes this. We kick off with the pair canoodling and telling an inquisitive guard “It’s all right, we’re married”. When pickpocket Fingers lifts Nora’s purse but then returns it, on learning she is Nick’s wife, Nora exclaims “Dear, you do know the nicest people”. He is occasionally a bit of a rotter, again locking her away so she can’t follow him into danger and instructing the police to “throw her into the fish tank”. There’s a running gag about how she is having an affair (“Perhaps I better leave” offers Nick when Abrams asks Nora what she was doing at Stewart’s apartment).

When the New Year lights go on and Nick is discovered kissing the wrong woman, she doesn’t react to the lipstick on Nick with outrage, but a knowing response to his suggestion that he is bleeding (“a little accident”); “I know, this New York traffic is terrible”. Powell gets the lion’s share of the action, but they are equals whenever they share the screen. The early sequence at Nora’s family’s house finds Nick sharing after-dinner cards with her aging relatives. Every one of them is snoring loudly while Nick is left to amuse himself. The more obvious gags are no less funny when delivered by Powell (“Walk this way, sir” invites an elderly butler whose movements are all over the place. “Well, I’ll try,” replies Nick, mimicking him). Nick, attempting to get off to sleep, is wheedled by Nora until he arises and makes scrambled eggs. There’s also a lovely little moment that looks almost improvised, where he instructs her in the art of forgery over lamplight and snatches a kiss.

Asta appears of course. At first not entirely successfully; an attempt to give him a subplot in which Mrs Asta is cheating on him seems to be kowtowing to his huge fan base. It’s a peculiar state of affairs (particularly given the movie ends on Nora’s revealing her pregnancy and many of the jokes are about each other’s mock infidelities) but Asta gets his own scene-stealing set piece moment as Nick and Nora attempt to prize him away from a note thrown through their window. Asta ends up pawing away at a goldfish bowl (“What’s the matter with you on this case? You’re losing your grip”).

After the Thin Man could have done with being streamlined a little, and more mindful of the disrespect Nick shows detective work (while being very good at it), since he’s at his best being wholly offhand about everything. But the scenario is actually a strong one, and there’s an array of entertaining supporting characters. Some have suggested this is actually superior to the original. I’d say not, and its clear Van Dyke was never going to get anywhere near the first tier of directors. It forsakes genuinely inebriated exuberance for something a little more standardised, and it’s a peculiar decision to bring in little knitted booties at the end (bring Nick and Nora back into line?). But, with such a winning double act, as long as Powell and Loy continue dealing out lively banter the series surely couldn’t fail.

***1/2

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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