‘Such Lovely Friends’: Class and Crime in ‘The Thin Man’ Series

Abstract

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.’s (MGM) ‘The Thin Man’ films are unusual among the detective crime series of the 1930s and 1940s because they maintained their A-Movie status as main features throughout their run. Other crime series topped the bill at times, usually because they were mid-level product (‘shaky As’ or ‘programmers’) that could be exhibited as support or main features (‘Charlie Chan’), but also because some series (‘Bulldog Drummond’ and ‘The Lone Wolf’) were accorded an A-Movie budget in their early stages before subsequently dropping to B-Movie status. ‘The Thin Man’ films have something of a problematic position in this regard because although they cannot be considered B-Movies, nor are they obviously A-Movies, not least because the series was set off by a quickie that became a hit. The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1934) was filmed in 12 days for $231,000 and, although it went on to make $1,400,000, its budget was closer to that of a programmer in MGM terms.¹ That the film was based on a piece of pulp fiction, albeit a ‘soft-boiled’ confection of whodunnit and hard-boiled forms, makes its categorisation ambiguous, as does the mix of generic styles typical of the B-Movie, and it is mainly the gloss of screwball comedy that, as Hardy notes, moves it ‘away from hard-boiled whodunit [sic] towards the sophisticated run of cocktail-fuelled marital comedies that were to proliferate in the mid-1930s’ (Hardy, 1997: 79).