Marty and Cindy pick up where The Thin Man left off, same train, same song, same peignoir, for a New Year's Eve in San Francisco, a murder, and a very young Jimmy Stewart.
Panelists: Marty Jencius (host) and Cindy Rotz (co-host)
FILM ESSENTIALS
• Director: W. S. Van Dyke
• Screenplay: Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett, from an original story by Dashiell Hammett
• Stars: William Powell (Nick), Myrna Loy (Nora), James Stewart (David Graham), with Elissa Landi, Joseph Calleia, Penny Singleton, and Skippy as Asta
• Studio: MGM | Released: December 25, 1936 | 112 min, B&W
• Budget about $673,000 (roughly double the original); box office $3.165 million
• Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (lost to The Story of Louis Pasteur)
• Second of six Thin Man films; sixth of fourteen Powell-Loy pictures
• 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, often called the best of the sequels
TRIVIA
• Loy wears the same peignoir as in the first film's final scene, and "California, Here I Come" plays again.
• Arriving in San Francisco, the St. Francis Hotel showed "Mr. and Mrs. Powell" to the deluxe suite. Powell's fiancée, Jean Harlow, solved it by sharing the suite with Loy. Powell got the hotel's last room, a much humbler one downstairs.
• Powell earned $3,000 a week. Loy started at half that, then negotiated equal pay with L. B. Mayer.
• Stewart's confession, "I did it, do you hear, and I'm glad, glad, GLAD!", came early in his MGM career. He reportedly carried a camera around the set photographing the cast and crew.
• Goodrich and Hackett later co-wrote It's a Wonderful Life, another Stewart picture.
• Penny Singleton is credited as Dorothy McNulty. She soon starred as Blondie and later voiced Jane Jetson.
• Skippy, the wire fox terrier who played Asta, also played George in Bringing Up Baby. In Hammett's novel, Asta is a female schnauzer.
• The film features what IMDb calls the first puppy dog adultery in movie history, and Asta and Mrs. Asta sleep in separate doghouses as a wink at the Production Code.
• The opening train is the Sunset Limited, and the Joshua trees place it in the Mojave Desert.
• Nick's "Walk this way, sir" gag predates Young Frankenstein by decades.
• A 60-minute Lux Radio Theatre version with Powell and Loy aired in 1940, and Warner Archive released the Blu-ray in 2021.
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