For despite a noisy Greek lobby in the United States, the simple fact is that Turkey is a valuable ally of NATO, Greece almost worthless. The commander of the American Sixth Fleet would hardly lose sleep if he heard that the entire Greek navy had sunk at anchor overnight; and any soldier would much prefer one stolid Turk, the formidable mehmetchik, to a platoon of quarreling Hellenes obsessed by a past which has gone forever.
The story wasn’t written to convey a message, and if one can be read into it, it is nothing new. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes — ‘I fear Greeks bearing gifts.’ Or bearing anything else for that matter, particularly the military begging bowl. To fill it is a waste of precious arms. At the first sign of real trouble Greece will let both Britain and the United States down, as I privately fear that France will too.
Dashiell Hammett
After the Thin Man: Part I
NBM is honored to have the opportunity to publish for the first time Dashiell Hammetts original story on which the 1936 movie After the Thin Man was based.
It is commonly believed that Hammett’s writing career ended with the completion of his fifth novel, The Thin Man, in 1933 and that he never again produced a long work of fiction. Not so. In fact, Hammett wrote two long original pieces after 1933: After the Thin Man, 115 pages in typescript; and Another Thin Man, 144 pages in typescript. Both of them were written as screen stories, the story line on which a screenplay is based.
There were six movies in the Thin Man series starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora. Beginning in 1934 with The Thin Man, based on Hammett’s novel, the series spanned thirteen years and included After the Thin Man (1936), Another Thin Man (1939), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and Song of the Thin Man (1947). The screenplays for the first three movies in the series were by Hammett’s friends Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich; the last three were produced without consultation with Hammett, and each of them employed different writers.
Hammett’s association with MGM was stormy. After the success of the movie The Thin Man in 1934, a wire was sent from the Culver City office of MGM to the New York office requesting that Hammett be hired to write a sequel. Despite Louis B. Mayers warning about Hammett’s “irregular habits,” a contract was negotiated by which Hammett was paid $2000 a week for ten weeks to write original story material. Hammett arrived in Culver City on October 29,1934, rented a six-bedroom penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and proceeded to astonish Hollywood regulars with his profligacy. Two days after arriving in Hollywood, Hammett wrote Lillian Hellman that he had been doing “a little town roaming” until 5 a.m. and had begun work on his Thin Man sequel at ten that morning. The town roaming became habitual. He drank the nights away in the company of a variety of female partners and then complained about being harassed by starlets; he rarely went to the studio and frequently refused to talk by phone or even to correspond with director W. S. Van Dyke or producer Hunt Stromberg; and at the end of his ten-week contract, he had only a thirty-four-page plot summary to show.
The material was promising enough, however, to induce MGM to offer Hammett a new longterm contract which provided for a salary of $1000 a week to work as a script doctor and $1750 a week when he was working on “complete continuity.” As Stromberg put it in a memo: “If Ham-met ever sobers up and becomes fit to work, we would then have exclusive call on his services.” The contract included a cancellation clause that allowed the studio to fire him with one week’s notice, and they were forced to exercise that right at least once before After the Thin Man was completed, rehiring him within a week.
The screen story published here is Hammett's second draft. After his thirty-four-page summary was accepted, Hackett and Goodrich prepared a script. Hammett then revised the plot line, working from that script. There was a final revise before the movie was shot (the changes will be discussed at the end of the second part of After the Thin Man in NBM6), but in most respects the movie follows the story published here.
After the Thin Man was released on Christmas Day 1936, with James Stewart playing David, Elissa Landi as Selma, and Joseph Calleia as Dancer. When the movie was released, the studio heads decided that while they wanted to continue the Thin Man series, they were no longer willing to be forced to accept Hammett’s behavior because of his ownership of literary rights to the series’ characters. So in February 1937, MGM agreed to pay Hammett $40,000 for all rights in perpetuity “to write and use, and cause to be written and used, stories… which contain any or all of the characters” in the motion pictures The Thin Man and After the Thin Man. Hammett worked sporadically for MGM during the next two years, but his only produced work was the third Thin Man movie. In a sullen mood after an argument with Hunt Stromberg during his work on that project, Hammett wrote to Lillian Hellman: “Maybe there are better writers in the world, but nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters. They can’t take that away from me even for $40,000.”
NOTE: Transitional material (italicized in brackets) has been supplied by the editors.
[The action begins on board a train from New York as it pulls into San Francisco. It is New Year's Eve, and the Charleses are returning home just after Nick has solved The Thin Man case. They are met at the train by a gaggle of reporters congratulating Nick on his recent success as a detective and asking if he will continue his career as a private eye. His answer is a flat no.
When they reach their palatial home, Nick and Nora find a boisterous New Year's Eve and welcome-home party in progress and join it unrecognized, as most of the guests do not know them.]
On sound track, three pistol reports from front door, followed by the sound of door crashing back against wall and a man’s hoarse exclamation.
Nick, followed by Nora, goes to the front door. The man who admitted them to the house — sober now — is standing at the door staring down with horrified face at a dead man huddled on the vestibule floor at his feet. The man at the door turns his frightened face to Nick and gasps, “I opened the door — bang, bang — he said ‘Mees Selma Young’ and fell down like that.”
Nick corrects him mechanically — “Bang, bang, bang” — while kneeling to examine the man on the floor. He rises again almost immediately, saying, “Dead.” By now guests and servants are crowding around them. Nora, craning her neck to look past Nick at the dead man’s face, exclaims, “Nick, it’s Pedro!”