Above, a fantastic Czech poster for the 1934 romantic comedy-murder mystery The Thin Man, which there was titled Detektiv Nick v New Yorku. This is a photo-illustration, rather than the paintings we love, but it’s still, in our book, as good as promo art gets. As far as the film goes, like Casablanca or Chinatown, there’s no way to overrate it. Some of the humor is so modern that you’ll have trouble believing it was made almost a century ago and wasn’t cribbed from an episode of Friends or Seinfeld. Just goes to show that in the infinity of time we don’t change as quickly as we think.
We adore the boozing party animals at the center of this tour de force—Nick and Nora Charles, played by William Powell and Myrna Loy—whose drunken interactions could easily be the inspiration for Jim and Jules of the hilarious television show Brockmire. Credit the director, actors, editors, and everyone else for this masterpiece, but give the biggest nod to Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the excellent source novel. There’s no release date for Detektiv Nick v New Yorku in Czechoslovakia, but figure spring or early summer of 1935.
