|
On
New Year's Eve, Nick and Nora Charles arrive back home in San Francisco
after Nick successfully solved the "Thin Man" murder case in New York.
Exhausted from their trip, Nick and Nora want a quiet evening at home, but
discover that their house has been taken over by a group of revelers they
don't even know. When Nora's Great Aunt Katherine Forrest invites them
to dinner, Nick doesn't want to go, but agrees when Nora's cousin, Selma
Landis, pleads with Nora.
At Katherine's house, they discover that Selma's
husband Robert has been missing for three days. Katherine asks Nick to
quietly find Robert, and, although he is reluctant, he takes Nora to the
Lichee, a Chinese nightclub that Robert frequents. Robert has been at
the Lichee, drinking and waiting for the club's entertainer, Polly Byrnes.
Polly and "Dancer," one of the club's owners, are expecting to get money
from Robert and Dancer tells Polly to take Robert home.
A few days previously, Robert had approached
David Graham, Selma's former fiancée, for $25,000 to leave for good.
David meets Robert a short time later to give him negotiable bonds, then,
after cruelly bidding Selma goodbye, Robert walks out into the fog and is
shot. When David's car drives up to Robert's body, Selma is standing
over it with a gun. Dazed, Selma gives David the weapon and he tells
her not to say anything. Despite their efforts to protect Selma, Nick
and Nora are unable to prevent her arrest by Lieutenant Abrams. Though
Selma says that she had not fired her gun, David reveals that he threw it
into the bay, thinking that Selma actually had killed her husband.
The next day, Nick goes to the hotel room of
Phil Byrnes, a man posing as Polly's brother, but actually her husband.
Upon his arrival, Nick discovers Phil's dead body.
Later,
he also discovers that someone had been listening to Polly's apartment
through a device in the apartment above. Suspicious when he hears
Dancer enter Polly's apartment, Nick follows him to the basement and finds
the body of the janitor. When Nora arrives at the apartment building
and hears the janitor's name, Pedro, she reveals that Pedro used to be her
father's gardener. Nick then asks Abrams to have all of the suspects
congregate at Polly's. Though Dancer and Polly admit their plan to use
a check forged with Robert's name, each claims to be innocent of the
murders.
During questioning, David says that he remembers
Pedro, a man with a long white moustache, but hasn't seen him recently.
When Nick looks at a picture of Pedro taken years before and sees that Pedro
then had a small black moustache, he knows that David must be lying.
Nick then says that the murderer has finally made a slip and reconstructs
the evidence to reveal that David killed Robert out of revenge, then killed
Phil when Phil tried to blackmail him. Finally, when Pedro recognized
him, David was forced to kill him as well.
Now cornered, David reveals
that he had been planning to frame Selma for her husbands murder. He
draws a gun and threatens to shoot Selma and then himself, but Lum Kee,
Dancer's partner in the club, knocks the gun out of David's hand and David
is overpowered.
A short time later, Nick and Nora leave San
Francisco on the train, accompanied by Selma, who plans to start a new life.
Finally, when he is alone with Nora, Nick sees that she is crocheting a
baby's sock and is shocked when she says "And you call yourself a
detective."
Notes
The film is based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett. According to contemporary news items, portions
of the film were shot on location in San Francisco, and the base of the
city's Coit Tower was used as the exterior of the Charles home.
According to a news item in HR on October 30, 1934, author Dashiell
Hammett was to have a small part in the picture; however, when the film went
into production almost two years later, his name was not mentioned and the
possibility of his acting in the picture was apparently dropped. The
nightclub featured in the film was loosely modeled on the famous Forbidden
City, a popular San Francisco night spot from the late 1930s through the
1950s.
This was the first film in more than five years
made by actress Dorothy McNulty, who had been appearing on Broadway during
the early 1930s. She changed her name in 1938 to
Penny Singleton, and became more familiar under that name when she
played the lead in Columbia's Blondie series. A modern source credits
Henry Grace with set decoration. This was the second of MGM's
Thin Man
pictures.
Music includes: Smoke Dreams,"
music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed; "Blow That Horn,"
music by Walter Donaldson, lyrics by Chet Forrest and Bob Wright. |
|
_01.jpg)
