William Powell and Myrna Loy made 14 films together. A majority of them in The Thin Man series, which remains their best known and most beloved pairing. Take that, The Great Ziegfeld! Well, 14 if you count her quick cameo in The Senator Was Indiscreet, but that is an argument I would have both internally and in my writing to justify either covering it or ignoring it if I was tackling all of their films.
I am not. I am simply covering the 2007 box set, Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection, that gathered five of their lesser-known films. Nothing against the duo, who individually and together are among my favorite cinematic dishes, but it was easier to find these five films than all six films in The Thin Man series. (Besides, the first one is the best and the series quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns.)
What enchants me about Loy and Powell is their dry martini wit and sexual chemistry. They make marriage seem like a perpetually fun little lark with the right person. One who can match wits with you as well as they can keep up with your drinking and crime solving. Ok, maybe the crime solving only appears in that series, but the rest of it remained throughout their various pairings.
What empowers their chemistry is that playful sensuality and matching of wits. They volley like two great tennis pros. Their amusement with and sense of fun in each other’s company is palpable. They made a long-term monogamous relationship seem like something that encouraged the best parts of the other person. A stark contrast to decades of sitcoms and films that made marriage seem like something between two hostages trapped in heteronormative hell. Instead of a gigantic man-child and battle axe wife, they were a true partnership.
I have already discussed The Great Ziegfeld in my Luise Rainer essay and Libeled Lady will be discussed in depth during the in-the-works Jean Harlow essay. But this will be the longest, most sustained period of time I will spend writing and thinking about them. Covering a seven-year period, 1934 – 1941, these films represent their first meeting and the various films they made in-between Thin Man reunions.
1934’s Manhattan Melodrama was intended as a cheaply made programmer, low risk/low budget films intended to turn a small profit between more prestige productions, and wound up a box office sensation. Coincidentally, it was also the first pairing of Loy and Powell. But perhaps most famously, this was the film that John Dillinger had just exited when he was gunned down.
While not a great film, Manhattan Melodrama is filled with these kinds of trivia bits that make it a worthwhile curio. You will notice pretty early on that a nightclub singer belts out a tune called “The Bad in Every Man” that sounds suspiciously like “Blue Moon.” No, your ears do not deceive you – it was rewritten by lyricist Lorenz Hart to its more well-known version. But audiences came to this to see rising stars Clark Gable, Loy, and Powell ignite the screen in a love triangle between two lifelong friends and the woman in the middle.
After years of playing exotics, roles she loathed and criticized as being ridiculous at the time, Loy finally find her métier here. She makes sense delivering sharp wit with dry martinis, glamorous furs, and elegantly long cigarettes alongside the likes of Powell and Gable. Especially opposite Powell who immediately feels in sync with her humorous rhythms, sexual energy, and acting style. No wonder the studio rushed them into repeat pairings nearly instantaneously. Which is not to discredit her chemistry with other co-stars like Gable, Fredric March, or Cary Grant, all of whom she delivered some of her most varied and consummately skilled supporting performances, but there really was something unique and special about her matching wits with Powell.
In fact, whenever the film pulls away from the two of them and instead focuses on the friendship between the two men things can grind to a halt. An entire third act bit involving a courtroom proceeding needs to be endured to get more glimpses of Loy and Powell locking horns. Thankfully, audiences in 1934 would get numerous chances to witness just that. After Manhattan Melodrama, the pair were reunited for their best known pairing, most beloved film, and the all-around masterpiece, The Thin Man.
Released the same year, Evelyn Prentice finds the pair once again in a dramatic mode. This film, their third pairing, has the unique distinction of giving the bulk of the screen time and narrative importance to Loy rather than Powell. In their other collaborations, she is either on roughly equal footing with him or clearly in a supporting role in comparison. She is, after all, the titular role here.
John (Powell) is a work obsessed lawyer who has been ignoring his wife (Loy) and focusing too much on work lately. Thinking her husband has been unfaithful, Evelyn starts a mild flirtation with a ruthless blackmailer/lothario (Harvey Stephens). When the lothario winds up dead, Evelyn becomes not only obsessed with her husband defending the main suspect (Isabel Jewell) but lets her guilt about the whole thing start to eat away at her. You see, Evelyn was the one who actually shot the creep and worries this poor woman is being railroaded for a crime she did not commit.
Essentially a ridiculous soap opera played entirely too straight, Evelyn Prentice keeps the duo largely pure and virtuous when confronted with the possibilities of marital infidelity and moral ruin. It keeps shuffling up to the line of impropriety and vice before demurely returning to more banal and safe territory. I imagine what the Pre-Code version of this may have looked like and it probably would have been a lot more fun and sexy. This version is stodgy, uptight, and takes its frankly silly material entirely too serious.
Powell and Loy leave the wisecracking to best friend Una Merkel, and she, as always, is entirely game and ready to launch her sarcastic quips whenever called into action, but she is operating alone. Powell and Loy are very serious, very staunch, and almost seem completely foreign to us when we remember them best together in their screwball comedies. This movie even commits the cardinal sin of wasting Rosalind Russell, here in her film debut, in a thankless nothing of a role. She is a client of Powell’s that he gets acquitted early on and tries to seduce him, which sets off a whole series of incidents which the film goes out of its way to tell you are more innocent than you would believe.
It frequently strains credulity, and its credibility, so often that by the time we get to the climatic courtroom scene we are so far out into the realm of make believe we may as well have landed in Narnia or Oz. MGM sold fantasies of the uber-wealthy in glamorous locales and created whole dreamy cinematic worlds that bore no resemblance to our own, but even by those standards this scene is a whopper. The last minute revelations and railroading of a witness into a forced confession is… really something. I am not quite sure what that something is, but it sure is something.
Evelyn Prentice was clearly a bottom of the barrel script that MGM had the pair film together between better projects because audiences were clamoring for the two to reteam. It is a blunder. If not the worst film that the pair made together, I cannot say for sure as I have not seen all of them, then it is definitely the worst one in this set. Powell and Loy could do drama with appropriate skill and flair but Evelyn Prentice is just too silly and self-serious in equal measure.
1937’s Double Wedding is a screwball romantic comedy made under a dark cloud. During production, Powell’s fiancée and Loy’s close friend, Jean Harlow, suddenly passed away. Powell described returning to finish the film as “very difficult under the circumstances” while Loy wrote in her autobiography that she disliked the finished work and called it “the scapegoat for concurrent despair.” It does not help that the film was made to finesse Loy’s prior box office failures so MGM buoyed her career by quickly reteaming her with the co-star that practically made the films a money-printing machine.
The basics of the plot follow your typical love square. Boy (John Beal) loves girl (Florence Rice). Girl’s controlling older sister (Loy) gets involved. Boy and girl break up while the boy’s bohemian friend (Powell) offers advice and becomes the unwitting recipient of the girl’s affections. Eventually, boy and girl pair back up while older sister and boho friend also marry, which gets us to the titular double wedding. It is pretty routine stuff and everyone hits their marks and plays it by the numbers.
That sense of merely going through the motions is evident in both the leading performances and the film as a whole. In later years they both maintained that they were not at their best in the film, and they are correct. They are not bad, exactly, more like they are disengaged from the material. The two of them have played this kind of romantic comedy inevitability so many times previously that they know what poses to strike and what vocal intonations to deploy to make everything work but it lacks the spark of their Nick and Nora Charles. There just is not much of anything going on here aside from Powell and Loy acting opposite each other, which is shockingly just not enough in this instance.
1940’s I Love You Again reunited the pair with “One Take Woody,” W. S. Van Dyke, one of their most frequent collaborators. Even at this earliest stage, Hollywood was big on the “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” ethos often reuniting directors, writers, and stars to essentially do the thing people liked again but slightly different. This time around, Powell is a fuddy-duddy who knocks his head in the opening reels and unlocks his true personality – a former cad and thief who got amnesia and became a stuff-shirt. Loy is, obviously, his wife who catches on to the change in personality and plays along with it.
I Love You Again is smart enough to allow Loy to get in on the fun, but not smart enough to give her more to do. She is rendered a supporting player while Powell and his old gang play act through various identities and disguises to keep the ruse going. The whole thing becomes a little muddled and confusing in the ways that screwball comedies can often get, but remains solidly enjoyable.
No one is going to mistake this for one of the premier pairings of the duo, but after playing so many stiff, supportive wives, it is nice to see Loy get the chance to match her co-star in shenanigans. The Thin Man franchise also made the mistake as it went on in making Nora less of a co-conspirator and more of a bland wife. Not only does she get her brain back, but she gets some zesty one-liners and that slowly simmering sexual chemistry returns.
Powell, always suave and gentlemanly elegant, seems to be having a ball playing a guy who pretends to be the staid man of virtue while pulling cons and wooing his frustrated wife. It may not be the best pairing the two ever made (would that they had a better director than “One Take Woody”), but it is utterly charming and watchable. Frankly, that is a good enough excuse to spend 99 minutes with two of the most underrated stars of their era.
The final film in the set, 1941’s Love Crazy, is an easy, breezy screwball comedy. Perhaps not one of the crown jewels of the genre but still a perfectly enjoyable time to be had. Rather than a comedy of remarriage, Love Crazy is a comedy about a couple perpetually on the brink of breaking up while never quite actually breaking up before joining back together. Our duo is joined by the likes of Gail Patrick (no stranger to the genre after My Man Godfrey) and reliable supporting player Jack Carson here.
We meet Steve and Susan Ireland on the eve of their wedding anniversary before his former girlfriend (Patrick) and current mother-in-law (Florence Bates) intervene to try and break up the pair. Powell and Patrick are involved in an early bit of physical comedy that allows Powell to play drunk and change up his debonair persona. The whole thing is a bit preposterous – he gets stuck in an elevator, shaken up, then plied with strong drinks by Patrick – but Powell plays it with such ease that the impressive physical comedy bits appear seamless.
While Loy gets to deliver her tremulous voice as a put-upon wife but not much else. Powell gets to fall out of a window, losing the sheet he had wrapped around him along the way, get in drag to escape a psychiatric hospital, and pretend to have a breakdown while marching barefoot through a party into a pool. Meanwhile, Loy is stuck playing the straight woman to the lunacy and she equips herself well enough, but it feels like she’s been stuck in neutral and told to rev. You want her to get her big moment as well and it just never comes around.
While it may not be the best pairing of the duo, it is very much on the higher end as it rarely drags (aside from a few spots) and manages a lunatic pace until Powell-in-drag and Loy ‘reunite’ in their apartment. How that ending made it past the censors is anyone’s guess, but it is so strange and wild that it charmed me. While not the end of their partnership, it was winding down by the time Love Crazy came out. This feels like the machine is well oiled and chugging along successfully.
They would reunite in three more Thin Man movies (Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, Song of the Thin Man) and Loy made an uncredited cameo in Powell’s 1947 vehicle, The Senator Was Indiscreet, before ending their partnership. Powell’s career largely cooled by the end of the 1940s with only sporadic appearances until his death in 1984 at age 91. Loy maintained an active career, largely appearing in supporting performances, engaging in political activism, and being honored by the likes of the Kennedy Center and the Academy with an Honorary Oscar until her death in 1993 at age 88.
What endures are their best-known roles, Nick and Nora Charles, and the ways in which they brought a sophisticated sexuality and desire to their long-married couple. It stood in stark contrast to the war of the sexes that so many contemporaneous films depicted. The two of them, both separately and together, are some of the best actors of their generation making their comedic skills look as easy as breathing and their dramatic work felt naturalistic to their personas.
The two of them debuted in the silent era transitioned to sound, where they excelled, broke away from typecasting to create diverse and unique careers for themselves. Individually and together, you are aware that you are in sturdy hands with them. Powell’s films such as The Last Command, My Man Godfrey, Jewel Robbery, and Mister Roberts are worth seeing and demonstrate his ease with both comedy and drama. Loy’s films such as The Best Years of Our Lives, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and Love Me Tonight deserve your attention which demonstrate not only her but how she made it all look so easy. Then there are the films they made together like Libeled Lady, The Thin Man, and After the Thin Man are all enjoyable and remain the best ones.
This set may not highlight the best or greatest films they made together, but it does gather five lesser-known films they made together. While largely enjoyable, it is not a set that demands you hunt it down and scoop it up. Unless you’re a huge fan of the two of them together and want to own all fourteen films they made together, then I can understand seeking this one out. But if you ever see any of them scheduled to air on TCM? Well, there are worse ways to spend 90 – 120 minutes.
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