The Thin Man (1934) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Thin Man (1934)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Director W. S. Van Dyke persuaded MGM executives to cast William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles despite their fears that Powell was too old and too strait-laced for Nick and that Loy had become typecast in exotic femme fatale roles.
• For William Powell's first scene as Nick Charles, W. S. Van Dyke told him to walk through with a cocktail shaker while the crew pretended to check lights and sound; Powell improvised lines and business, and Van Dyke, who had secretly begun filming so he would stay relaxed, called out "That's it! Print it!"
• SPOILER

  The Thin Man's dinner-party scene was the one scene that needed several retakes, and the oysters the script called for were carried out under the hot lights take after take; Myrna Loy recalled that they began to putrefy, after which nobody wanted to see another oyster.
• Dashiell Hammett drew on his own past as a union-busting Pinkerton detective in Butte, Montana, and built Nick and Nora's banter on his rocky, on-again, off-again relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman.
• The "Thin Man" of the title is not Nick Charles but Clyde Wynant, the man Charles is hired to find: in the novel the overweight, out-of-shape Charles calls Wynant a thin man with white hair, so casting the trim William Powell made viewers assume the title meant Charles, and the sequels' titles followed suit.
• Trainers would not let the actors play with Skippy, the dog who played Asta, between takes so he would not lose concentration, and the dog once bit Myrna Loy during filming.
• The scene in which Nick shoots ornaments off the tree was not in the script: it was added after William Powell playfully picked up an air gun and started firing at the ornaments the art department was putting up.