Along the way, there’s plenty of drinking and flirtation, a few clashes of culture, and not just one of the best-loved pooches in fiction and film, Asta, but also one of the drollest kids, little Nick Jr. Burr MacFay, an old business partner of Nora’s father, who is being terrorized by a former employee claiming that he dreamed about MacFay’s death - and then those dreams come true. In “After the Thin Man,” Nora’s cousin Selma misplaces her husband, and Nick’s reluctant investigation reveals love triangles, extortion, murder and more. Still, both of the main stories are pleasures to read - Rivett rightly calls Hammett’s dialogue “a rare blend of silly and cynical, sloshed and smart” - and the film scripts ultimately hewed pretty closely to these texts. Rivett (Hammett’s granddaughter) notes that Hammett’s own words appear alongside passages written by screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich - so that these works aren’t even word-for-word his alone. These pieces are less novellas than some hybrid of scripted dialogue, stage direction and short fiction. There is, perhaps, a degree of puffery here. Now, for the first time, we have in print the original screen stories Hammett wrote for two of those films - “After the Thin Man” and “Another Thin Man” - alongside the very brief, unproduced “Sequel to The Thin Man,” marketed as “novellas” and the “last long pieces of fiction Hammett ever wrote.” Though Hammett himself called the couple “insufferably smug,” the mystery-comedy mix made “The Thin Man” his most commercially successful book and sparked an equally beloved series of films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, whose chemistry and sly, sophisticated repartee made the movies Depression-era hits.
Nora was an heiress, Nick a former detective from the other side of the tracks, and together they made an urbane, irrepressible pair. But none of his creations proved as endearing as Nick and Nora Charles, the wisecracking crime fighters of “ The Thin Man,” his final novel.
Dashiell Hammett created two of the seminal figures in hard-boiled detective fiction: the Continental Op and Sam Spade.
0 kommentar(er)
