After the Thin Man - 1936

<p>Marty and Cindy pick up where The Thin Man left off, same train, same song, same peignoir, for a New Year&#39;s Eve in San Francisco, a murder, and a very young Jimmy Stewart.</p><p><br></p><p>Panelists: Marty Jencius (host) and Cindy Rotz (co-host)</p><p><br></p><p>FILM ESSENTIALS</p><p>• Director: W. S. Van Dyke</p><p>• Screenplay: Frances Goodrich &amp; Albert Hackett, from an original story by Dashiell Hammett</p><p>• Stars: William Powell (Nick), Myrna Loy (Nora), James Stewart (David Graham), with Elissa Landi, Joseph Calleia, Penny Singleton, and Skippy as Asta</p><p>• Studio: MGM | Released: December 25, 1936 | 112 min, B&amp;W</p><p>• Budget about $673,000 (roughly double the original); box office $3.165 million</p><p>• Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (lost to The Story of Louis Pasteur)</p><p>• Second of six Thin Man films; sixth of fourteen Powell-Loy pictures</p><p>• 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, often called the best of the sequels</p><p><br></p><p>TRIVIA</p><p>• Loy wears the same peignoir as in the first film&#39;s final scene, and &quot;California, Here I Come&quot; plays again.</p><p>• Arriving in San Francisco, the St. Francis Hotel showed &quot;Mr. and Mrs. Powell&quot; to the deluxe suite. Powell&#39;s fiancée, Jean Harlow, solved it by sharing the suite with Loy. Powell got the hotel&#39;s last room, a much humbler one downstairs.</p><p>• Powell earned $3,000 a week. Loy started at half that, then negotiated equal pay with L. B. Mayer.</p><p>• Stewart&#39;s confession, &quot;I did it, do you hear, and I&#39;m glad, glad, GLAD!&quot;, came early in his MGM career. He reportedly carried a camera around the set photographing the cast and crew.</p><p>• Goodrich and Hackett later co-wrote It&#39;s a Wonderful Life, another Stewart picture.</p><p>• Penny Singleton is credited as Dorothy McNulty. She soon starred as Blondie and later voiced Jane Jetson.</p><p>• Skippy, the wire fox terrier who played Asta, also played George in Bringing Up Baby. In Hammett&#39;s novel, Asta is a female schnauzer.</p><p>• 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.</p><p>• The opening train is the Sunset Limited, and the Joshua trees place it in the Mojave Desert.</p><p>• Nick&#39;s &quot;Walk this way, sir&quot; gag predates Young Frankenstein by decades.</p><p>• A 60-minute Lux Radio Theatre version with Powell and Loy aired in 1940, an