Loy, who began her career playing a variety of mysterious Asian exotic characters, hit her career stride as the no-nonsense, witty Nora - a perfect foil to Powell's suave, cocktail-swilling Nick. Off screen, the couple's relationship was purely platonic, each holding the other in the highest regard; Loy once declared, "I never enjoyed my work more than when I worked with William Powell. He was a brilliant actor, a delightful companion, a great friend and above all, a true gentleman." As Nora, Loy was dubbed "The Perfect Wife", a label she admittedly struggled with. As she explained, "It was a role no one could live up to, really. No telling where my career would have gone if they hadn't hung that title on me. Labels limit you, because they limit your possibilities. But that's how they think in Hollywood." Still, Loy managed to make the best of her screen opportunities: her starring role in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) cemented her popularity, and she enjoyed a career spanning over fifty years. In 1991, she was awarded with an honorary Oscar® for career achievement. It was pointless to try to stop the Nora juggernaut anyway: "Men-Must-Marry-Myrna" clubs popped up all over America, professing their devotion to the character, and her profile was the most requested by women to their plastic surgeons during the 1930's. In 1936, she was voted "Queen of the Movies" by twenty million fans. . . her king, however, was Clark Gable!
The sixth installment of the Thin Man franchise has Nick and Nora trying to solve the murder of a bandleader on a gambling ship. Director Edward Buzzell took the reins of the production, having cut his teeth on a couple of Marx Brothers films, At the Circus (1939) and Go West (1940). Consummate character actor Keenan Wynn was cast as a hipster musician; the son of Broadway and radio star Ed, the younger Wynn was content to play second fiddle in films (though in Song of the Thin Man he plays clarinet): "My billing has always been: 'and' or 'with' or 'including'. That's all right. Let the stars take the blame." An eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell appears as Nick Junior; one of the few actors to successfully negotiate a transition from child to adult actor, Stockwell found later success in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob (1988). Gloria Grahame, arguably the greatest example of the on-screen femme fatale, was cast as a sultry nightclub singer - being tone-deaf, however, she was ultimately dubbed over. The visual, however, was striking: her gold-lame outfit was stunningly sleek, but almost pushed to the limit. From the biography Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame by Vincent Curcio: "During an interview break from Song of the Thin Man, while wearing the aforementioned gold lame outfit, she topped off 'a solid lunch' with two bowls of bananas and cream. Interviewer Myrtle Gebhart noted that she 'had to be a little careful how she sat or gestured, for fear her luscious loveliness might pour out through a seam.' Small wonder." Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank Morgan (of Wizard of Oz [1939] fame), and Jayne Meadows, later to be Mrs. Steve Allen, also appeared in supporting roles.
Despite the large amount of talent in the film, the material was stretched thin after five movies. In her autobiography Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, co-written by James Kotsilibas-Davis, she decreed, "Song of the Thin Man was a lackluster finish to a great series. I hated it. The Characters had lost their sparkle for Bill and me, and the people who knew what it was all about were no longer involved. Woody Van Dyke was dead. Dashiell Hammett and Hunt Stromberg had gone elsewhere. The Hacketts were writing other things. Surprisingly, though, [it] was pretty well received, particularly in England, where, according to the Hollywood Reporter, 'Most of the cricks gave a cordial welcome to old-timers Bill Powell and Myrna Loy. . . .' I know that only because Bill sent me the article with 'old-timers' circled in pencil and this note scrawled at the top of the page: 'Dear old girl! I know you wouldn't want to miss this! Love, Willy (old boy)."
In her personal life, Loy defied the "The Perfect Wife" label with four marriages and four divorces. On the screen, though, she nailed it. Director Alan Pakula perhaps best explains her ageless mystique: "In the Powell-Loy pictures, the relationship between those two was as deep and as alive and as true as in any complicated story about a marriage I think you can have. And she was a working, collaborative wife. To young guys today, that's the fantasy American woman. They want to marry bright women with minds of their own, careers of their own, wit, sexuality. Women who are a match. Myrna always had that. At the same time you always felt she really cared about her man in some very simple way."
Producer: Nat Perrin
Director: Edward Buzzell
Screenplay: Stanley Roberts (story), Steve Fisher, Nat Perrin, James O'Hanlon, Harry Crane
Cinematography: Charles Rosher
Film Editing: Gene Ruggiero
Art Direction: Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons
Music: Ben Oakland, David Snell
Cast: William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Keenan Wynn (Clarence Krause), Dean Stockwell (Nick Charles, Jr.), Philip Reed (Bandleader Tommy Drake), Patricia Morison (Phyllis Talbin).
BW-87m. Closed captioning.
by Eleanor Quin
