The Thin Man was run on PBS last year. One of the most striking things about it was the acceptance of alcohol. Nick practically stayed drunk and took a snort when a problem came up to cope. My son was shocked by it.
Is the change in attitude a symbol of the improvement in Americas relationship with booze and does it show how movies reflect our changing society. With the exception of the Up in Smoke series. They were joking about it. That is differerent.
I usually get a sympathy headache/hangover when I watch Thin Man movies. I seem to remember a scene where the cops woke Nicky up at 4 in the morning to ask him some questions, and the first thing he did was to pour himself a whiskey. Oy!
Just to cut the phlegm.
Hell, he needed the booze to make Myrna Loy look attractive.
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Only kidding- Myrna Loy was SMOKIN’!
I remember one scene where he’s in the park with his kid, near their apartment, and he says something like, “Hold on! I hear something important.” and it’s his wife shaking up some Martinis in the apartment.
I love that line. I haven’t seen the movies, but I have the book. It seems to me that Nick at one point is awakened by visitors at 11 AM or noon and has a couple of highballs for breakfast, to cut the phlegm, of course.
The first Thin Man movie was made just after Prohibition ended. Nick had to catch up for missed time, that’s all.
A lot of the movies of the '30s and '40s were based on American novels of the first half of the 20th century, many of which were similarly booze-steeped (I’m thinking of stuff like John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra).
I specklelate that part of it is a reaction to Prohibition–a restraint of the personal freedom of hard-boiled US writers to carouse and drink themselves into oblivion.
Also, a reaction against the preachy temperance movement.
The booze angle also let’s you have a voyeur’s view of the underside of society–something that is rather irresistable to writers. Human frailty and all that, not to mention the mobsters who talk funny and the really cool bling.
Somehow, I doubt a little thing like Prohibition would’ve stopped either one of them.
For the curious, Per capita alcohol consumption in the United States, 1850-2003.
I see that beer consumption peaked during my college years. I certainly did my part to help.
Actually, up until the late seventies, public smoking and drinking was an American way of life.
Slowly, ash trays began to disappear from doctor’s waiting rooms, then from schools and hospitals, then from government buildings until now, where you can’t smoke at all in any public gathering place. Drinking was not unheard of at any public club meeting. This was slowly curtailed; probably influenced by MADD and other similar organizations.
Even the later Thin Man movies cut it back. If you ever watch the last two or three (which I highly recommend you never do as they suck, stick to the first two only) Nick has completely cut off the booze. He drinks nothing but cider, and not even the alcoholic kind.
Uh, you’re using the past tense, here…
Did the Production Code have something to do with that? I’m not sure but I think the first Thin Man movie came out either before or just as the new Code was going into effect.
Anyway, just to show how much more movies and society seem to have gotten about public alcohol consumption, I was recently watching Five Easy Pieces and noticed in the scene where Jack Nicholson’s character drives from Bakersfield to LA to see his sister, he nurses a can of Lucky Beer during the entire trip. There’s no way you could do show someone doing that today (unless the character is raging alcoholic who later gets in an accident or picked up for DWI).
You were in college from 1906 to 1915!?!
All the Thin Man movies were post-code. The first was 1934, just a year past the lifting of Prohibition, so being allowed to show legal booze on screen was still a thrill. It was part of being young and alive in an era when films were an antidote to the depression of the Depression.
The presence of their growing son in the last film acted as a brake on the drinking. The drunkenness of his aging parents - Powell was 55 and Loy 42 - would be too much for the more sober climate of the postwar era. But the jazz band’s escapades were supposed to be enough vicarious thrills in Song of the Thin Man.
In addition to smoking on the air, didn’t early late-night TV hosts, like Jack Paar, and maybe even Johnny Carson in the early years, have an occasional snort-of-something-on-the-rocks?
In Kramer Vs. Kramer, there’s one scene where Dustin Hoffman has a glass of wine in his office. I guess in those days the line was, “Well, as long as it’s ONLY alcohol…”. This just amazes me today when you don’t dare even order a glass of wine if you have lunch out.
And the smoking. I have mixed feelings about that. I should be glad that I found out how bad that is for you, before having a chance to really get hooked on it, and I am glad of that. But I"m also represent the generation that watched our elders smoking away, then when we grew up it was no longer acceptable to do so. A little sad, that–because I don’t accept the usual sour-grapes rhetoric about how filthy smoking is, and how pointless it seems to be. I loved smoking when I tried it, only I didn’t stick with it because of all the good reasons for not doing it.
No, it wouldn’t, depending on where you were. NYC, for instance, was fairly “wet” during Prohibition, because people there mostly were opposed to the law. I’m sure that was true of most other large cities as well. In fact, it sounds almost like the “red” and “blue” divide of today.
I work part-time with my husband, and he keeps a bar in his office. We haven’t had occasion to open a bottle for the last 15 years or so, and that was for a friend who lost control of his car, and had to dig himself out of a snowbank, on his way to meet us at the office.
When I was young, both smoking and drinking were considered rites of passage to adulthood.
That’s changed for the better, thank goodness.
BTW, when I was a child, I read detective novels in which the good guy woke up with a raging hangover, stuck his head under the cold water tap in order to wake himself up properly, then drank a tumblerful of raw whisky in order to clear the cobwebs from his brain and get on with his day of detective work.
Oh? I just figured Nick’s liver tests had come back looking bad.
Perhaps we should not forget that both Nick and Nora Charles were constructions of Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the hard-boiledest of hard-boiled detective stories. The Continental Op wasn’t comfortable getting out of a hotel bed, let alone stepping out of a hotel room, let alone solving a murder, without having consumed a goodly amount of whiskey.