The Key was released in early 1934, the seminal year for Powell’s fame. He was riding high at Warners, but the studio was undergoing financial problems. National theatre attendance, having soared during the first years of the Depression, suddenly started to sag. Warners, the cheapest of the studios, prudently began to cut costs. Never the studio to care about its acting talent as much as it should have, it began to cut star salaries. Powell was informed that his weekly pay would be reduced from $6,000 to $4,000. He refused to cooperate. Warners had Powell’s up-and-coming lineup of films ready: He was about to make another Philo Vance film, The Dragon Murder Case (1934). Instead, he was replaced by Warren William and released from his contract. It had been agreed that the accompanying publicity announcement would indicate that Powell had chosen to go freelance, but Warners later let the fan magazines know the truth.
In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to Powell. Studios fought to sign him to long-term deals. But before that could happen, David O. Selznick grabbed him for a one-picture deal at MGM, to play the second male lead in Manhattan Melodrama. The enormous success of the movie, and Powell’s contribution to it, so impressed MGM that they then signed Powell to a long-term contract. He would remain at Metro (although he was occasionally loaned out) for the bulk of his career, becoming a fixture at the studio with the most star prestige.*
In 1934, Powell would appear in three MGM movies: Manhattan Melodrama, The Thin Man, and Evelyn Prentice: a gangster film, a murder mystery that helped define the screwball comedy, and a melodramatic women’s film. (The Key, in which he had been a soldier of fortune in war-torn Dublin, was also released in 1934.) Manhattan Melodrama is famous for being the movie that John Dillinger attended the night he was gunned down outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, having been betrayed by the notorious “lady in red.” It should also be famous as a classic example of a movie in which movie stars are effectively used. MGM cast two solid male stars: Clark Gable, their machine-made leading man, and William Powell, a newcomer to them who was going to become one of the best bonuses they ever had. Gable had reached the very top, having just made It Happened One Night, which would bring him the Oscar, and Powell’s successes at Warner Bros. had fully defined him. They are both in their prime, looking good and feeling self-confident.
The story concerns two little boys who lose their parents to a fire on a Hudson River excursion boat in 1904. (A young Mickey Rooney plays Clark Gable as a child.) They are adopted by a man from their neighborhood who has lost his own son and wife in the same disaster. (This “adoption” sparks an interesting conversation. When the man makes the offer to the two boys, Rooney says to him, “I’m not a Jew and neither is Jim [Powell].” The man answers, “Catholic, Protestant, Jew, what does it matter now?”) This man also dies when the boys are small, after challenging the oration of a soapbox communist. By claiming America is wonderful, the old man sparks a riot, and he is trampled in the ensuing rush. (It was tough days in a 1930s plot.)
The boys grow up to be Gable and Powell, with Gable a notorious gambler and gangster and Powell the district attorney who is elected governor. Gable was often cast as a gambler. Like Powell, his type was also a man living outside normal societal constraints, but his “outsider” status was shaped for women—he offered sex outside the marriage bed. Gable at this point looks entirely the way Gable is supposed to look. He has the trademark mustache, the lopsided grin, the squinty eyes that crinkle up to assess a woman’s availability. His hair falls charmingly across his forehead, and his ears really do stick out. (Somehow this makes him more attractive, more real.) Powell is also on top of who he’s supposed to be. He’s intelligent, suave, smooth-spoken, and witty. Although Powell’s role is that of the good guy, he’s still allowed scenes with Myrna Loy (Loy’s character, Gable’s girl, ends up marrying Powell) in which they exchange witty repartee, à la their Nick and Nora roles.*
The film is essentially an old-fashioned story about a good kid and a bad kid who grow up to be a good man and a bad man—but the bad man is noble and teaches something about life to the good man. Without Clark Gable and William Powell to embody these roles, Manhattan Melodrama would be nothing. It’s a movie that reveals why stars were developed, and how stars were used … to elevate ordinary material, to spin gold out of straw. With Gable and Powell in the frame, the film gains real glamour, resonance, and pizzazz. Gable ramps up his ordinary gangster role, creating a devil-may-care roué whose advice to a pal is, “Die the way you live—all of a sudden.” One of his final acts before going to his execution is to send a “black nightgown” over to “Toots Malone at her hotel room … she’s always wanted one.” When Powell tries to commute Gable’s sentence, he snarls, “Hey, where do you get off, commuting me? … If I can’t live the way I want, then at least let me die when I want.” The dash and flash of Gable are exciting, and well balanced by the inner power and calm of Powell, who takes on a role that, played by anyone else, would have been an unsympathetic prig. He turns it into a charmer who gains audience sympathy. In their final scene together in Gable’s jail cell, the two boyhood friends look at each other and try to say good-bye. Both underplay, drawing on the audience’s understanding of the types they represent.
Powell’s next film was The Thin Man (1934), a typical studio product, made quickly and rather cheaply—a movie that everyone expected to be successful but no one expected to become what it became, and certainly one that no one expected to be a beloved movie more than seventy years later. Powell’s casting as the leading character—Dashiell Hammett’s detective Nick Charles—seemed at the time to be not much more than a rip-off of his Philo Vance success.
The Charles family at home, facing the “What’s for dinner?” question: Asta, Nick, and Nora; a.k.a. Skippy (Asta’s real name), William Powell, and Myrna Loy, from The Thin Man.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s star machine made the very shrewdest assessments of actors for type. They understood that Powell was already a star and didn’t need defining or fixing up. He was already Nick Charles, so it took no genius on their part to cast him that way. Dashiell Hammett’s detective Nick Charles was the perfect movie character for Powell.* Charles is rich because he married rich and a detective because he has maintained his connections to the underworld. Thus, “Charles”/Powell can have it all—Long Island estates, ritzy nightclubs, furs and diamonds for his wife—and also a roster of former convicts, current gangsters, and permanent hoods. The latter legitimize him as not being a snob.
The Thin Man was studio product, nothing more, but with all systems go. MGM assigned the direction to their ever-reliable “house” man, W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, and scheduled the film for a quick shooting, a quick postproduction process, and a rapid release into theatres. To support Powell, a cast of characters were put together all to be played by top names: Maureen O’Sullivan, Nat Pendleton, Minna Gombell, Porter Hall, Henry Wadsworth, Cesar Romero, Edward Brophy, and many others. For his leading lady, Powell was once again given Myrna Loy, as the two had meshed well in Manhattan Melodrama. The source material, the Hammett novel of the same name, was adapted for the screen by the first-rate writing team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.
The Thin Man series is unique in movie history. As Leonard Maltin has pointed out, the Thin Man movies were “one series that stands apart from the others: its episodes were filmed two and three years apart, and its stars were those of the major rank, and the films were not looked down on as Grade-B efforts.” Today most people know Powell—if they know him at all—as Nick. Powell and Loy co-starred in six movies based on the Nick and Nora Charles characters from 1934 to 1947. The five movies that followed the original took the Charleses forward in life as well as mystery: They have a son, he gets older, they go to Nick’s hometown to visit his family, et cetera. All the films are good, and no one else ever played the roles of Nick and Nora in the movies.*
At the heart of the original movie was an ultramodern married relationship. (The screenwriters were marrie
d to each other, and not enough credit has gone to them for creating the witty, sparring, modern couple whose marriage worked as opposed to the competitive and frequently destructive relationship between Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman.) In the depth of the Depression, Nick and Nora had clothes, money, cars, and plenty of pizzazz. Watching Powell swan around nonchalantly in the Thin Man movies explains why no one can make screwball comedies today. It’s not, as everyone supposes, that they can’t write them; it’s that there’s no one to play in them. Powell fills the frame, but without seeming even to care that he’s in it. While players all around him are chewing up the scenery, their entire performances coming out of their mouths, Powell cocks an ear, leans casually forward, stuffs his hands in his pockets, raises an eyebrow, and steals the show.
There is no actor today who can pull off Powell’s elegant thumbing of the nose at society while maintaining the sense of a man who can be counted on, a loyal, loving husband and father, but, still, a dude, an outsider. And no one can toss off a line like Powell. After Nick and Nora have a son, Charles is asked, “What’s the big idea of the kid?” He replies, “We have a dog … and he was lonesome.” He turns to Loy. “That was the big idea, wasn’t it, Mommy?” His cadence is perfect. His emphasis impeccable. He often delivers his dialogue with his head tilted back, his chin up, sometimes swinging his body side to side. In Another Thin Man, he makes a small half-twirl toward Loy after their Long Island weekend has descended into a murderous hell, and semi-whispers in a sing-y little challenge, “How do you like our peaceful weekend so far?”
Nick and Nora Charles are remembered as a smart, sophisticated couple who drink martinis and solve murders, and that is indeed who they are. But Nick Charles is also a domesticated man. Without William Powell, the Thin Man series could have disintegrated into Blondie and Dagwood with murders. Not only does he become a father, but in The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) he has a mom and a dad and the dad doesn’t approve of him. Powell and Loy take the train back to Sycamore Springs, the small town where Nick Charles grew up. His dad’s a doctor and his mom bakes. The Charles homestead is a big old house with a fireplace and a giant kitchen. It’s filled with knickknacks and chintz and ruffles on the curtains. There’s a grandfather clock, chenille bedspreads, and a hammock out in the yard. (How clever was it to create an ordinary small-town background for Nick Charles? It’s unexpected, and slightly embarrassing—a perfect contrast for William Powell to play off while Myrna Loy looks bemused but fits in perfectly, better than her husband does.) The Charles parents are well enough off but not sophisticated. Mom shouts, “Hilda! Bring the coffee in here!” when she wants coffee served in the living room. (There’s no ringing a dainty little bell.) There’s something satisfying about seeing the dapper Powell wearing sneakers, his old school letter sweater, and a shirt that says “Sycamore Springs High School.” He lounges in the hammock reading a Nick Carter Detective mystery magazine, while Nora struggles to set up a lawn chair and he ignores her efforts. (She points out how good an idea that is, because if he helped he “might get all sweaty and die.”)
Nick is still cool and elegant, but his parents are critical of him. His father puts him down. He has never once visited his son in New York and definitely disapproves of his drinking and his lifestyle (but not, of course, of his fabulous wife). Hollywood was business sharp. The 1930s were over, and the series had been around a while when The Thin Man Goes Home was released. By taking Nick out of the bars and nightclubs of Manhattan and sending him back to his small-town roots, the series connected Powell/“Charles” to the 1940s small-town audiences. Since many of them didn’t have Dad’s approval either, it all worked well. It was a bold and clever move—letting people see where Nick Charles came from and managing to make it funny while it subtly established the original source of his rebellion and his desire to become a sophisticated urbanite. However, it required an actor who could go there, be there, and not lose himself, and Powell can hold his place no matter what the setting. (Needless to say, Nick solves a murder as a bonus.)
After the first Thin Man, Powell was fully established at MGM as their go-to guy for the elegant gentleman in any genre. He alternated between comedies and dramas, and the studio also loaned him out to Universal for one of his greatest movies, My Man Godfrey, in 1936. Godfrey is one of Hollywood’s most popular 1930s screwball comedies. Never shrill and always funny, it’s a Depression-era story that holds up over time. Godfrey is living in a city dump when a brainless heiress (Carole Lombard) offers him five dollars to be her “forgotten man” in a society scavenger hunt. When Powell becomes Lombard’s butler, her family’s screwball antics never undo his cool, even when Mischa Auer, her mother’s protégée, does gorilla imitations. The movie hit the perfect balance between serious issues and screwball antics, and not only was it a gigantic hit, but it was nominated for Oscars in the categories of Best Actor (Powell), Best Actress (Lombard), Best Supporting Actor (Auer), Best Supporting Actress (Alice Brady, as the nutcake mother), Best Direction (Gregory La Cava), and Best Screenplay (Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind). No one won, but the nomination officially sealed the Philo Vance/Nick Charles elegantly cool customer type for William Powell. The Academy had endorsed him in the role: He was Godfrey Vance Charles. William Powell had found and secured his type forever, a type that could fit in anywhere, in any era, and could be played by him at any age. He was set for his acting life.
After Godfrey, MGM quickly brought Powell “back home” to make their own wildly successful screwball hit. Libeled Lady (1936) stars Powell, Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Jean Harlow—enough star wattage to light the state of Texas. All four are wonderful, and despite what might seem to be a set of actors who could contradict one another, the mix is terrific. Tracy is allowed to be tricky and conniving, a nice opposite to his noble priest in San Francisco that same year, Harlow is allowed to be both trashy and appealing, and Loy and Powell, of course, portray their established roles. Their playful needling of each other is right out of the Thin Man movies, but taken out of the marital status and into a sparring courtship.
In Libeled Lady, Powell performs one of his best acts of comedy, a masterful example of the extended physical play he was capable of. The situation is simple: He’s got to hook a fish to impress Loy’s wealthy father, whose only obsession is catching “Old Wall Eye.” Powell’s famous fishing scene in Libeled Lady gives him the kind of acting test that the stars of the past had to be up to—an extended physical sequence that should look easy, move the plot forward, and make the audience laugh. Since he is a cynical newspaperman whose usual tools of sport are the cocktail shaker and the cigarette lighter, he’s first got to learn how to fish. Powell knows just what to do: He’ll take fly fishing lessons in his hotel room, ending up bagging a lamp, the curtains, and Jean Harlow’s rear. Then he sets out to impress the rich girl he’s really trying to land (Loy) and her sportsman father (Walter Connolly). First, he wields the rod and reel with all the ineptitude of Laurel and Hardy, and then he ultimately triumphs, presumably because he’s William Powell and can never really lose his sang- froid. He battles “Old Wall Eye” in a perfect physical dance of comedy action. Powell does what he does. He keeps cool and hangs on, acting as if he’s in full control. He’s a gentleman even when he’s at the mercy of a fish.
For more than two decades, William Powell was an actor who could play it straight or play it funny with any actress of his era: with the fashion plate Kay Francis as doomed lovers in One Way Passage
… as a Jeeves with sex appeal opposite Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey …
… paired with the woman he was going to marry until her untimely death, Jean Harlow, in Reckless
with Franchot Tone on the right) … and charmed by Hedy Lamarr in The Heavenly Body.
One of the routine comedies Powell made for Metro, I Love You Again (1940), shows how clearly he had mastered his type. The story mines that tired old staple of desperate screenwriters—the amnesia plot. Amnesia was a “we can’t figure out what to
do” fallback for movie plots, suitable for drama (Random Harvest [1942]), film noir (Somewhere in the Night [1946]), and countless comedies, among them Powell’s turn with Loy in I Love You Again. Given the required bump on the head, Powell’s Milquetoast character wakes up as William Powell—a sassy con man with a strong libido. He then finds out that his “other self” was a repressed teetotaling cheapskate married to Myrna Loy, who is wisely trying to divorce him. As the silly plot unfolds, Powell is remarkable. He sits up in bed with an ice bag on his head, “forcing” himself to down a slug of scotch (his “medicine”). He hits his high point of sophistication on the dance floor, after Loy refuses to be his partner. He suavely says, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to dance by myself,” and he takes the floor, executing a perfect routine with empty arms. The high point of his slapstick tradition (which some might feel is the low point of his oeuvre) comes when he finds out that his former self is the head of the Boy Rangers. Forced to don his uniform and lead the brats into the forest, he is given a surprise reward—the Brown Beaver. Solemnly, Powell tells the boys, “When I came out here this afternoon, about the last thing I expected was to get the beaver.” For his deadpan delivery of this line alone, Powell deserved his stardom. In and of itself, it’s not such a funny line, but Powell loads it up with innuendo, sarcasm, and all the bored but gracious acceptance of banality that shaped his charm, connected him to his viewers, and kept him on the screen for nearly thirty years.*
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