Return of the Thin Man

by Dashiell Hammett

  Hammett’s “Sequel to the Thin Man” features a merry pastiche of bantering romance, eccentric encounters, greed, and crime. While not a recipe for a true screwball comedy, it would have complemented contemporary popular releases like Holiday (directed by George Cukor, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Bringing Up Baby (directed by Howard Hawks, also starring Grant and Hepburn, with Asta cast as her dog George), both released in 1938. Hammett’s blend of mystery and comedy was in vogue, but in this instance he may have pushed his literary license beyond what MGM could bear. Reluctant screenwriters, an unenthusiastic leading lady, and an indisposed leading man spelled troubles enough for the film franchise. The potential for public distaste for the sour turn of a sympathetic character might have been anticipated as beyond the pale. A scribbled annotation on a draft of the “Sequel” (“what is audience reaction to . . . being murderer . . .”) suggests that the dénouement in Hammett’s final Thin Man offering gave MGM one more reason to reject the story.

  J. M. R.

  “SEQUEL TO THE THIN MAN”

  Metro Goldwyn Mayer Script Dept.

  December 7, 1938

  Nick, Nora, Tommy, and Dorothy arrive in San Francisco and are met by reporters who want to know about “new developments” in the Macaulay case. Nick ignores their questions as he has ignored the telegrams he has been receiving en route. They are driven to his house and have settled down with signs of relief at being in a quiet place once more when a mob of surprise party guests comes out from behind furniture at them.

  While the party is going on, Mimi phones from New York to say that Macaulay has escaped and she is afraid he will kill her, since she was the chief witness against him. Nick, uninterested, hangs up and tells Nora it was a man trying to sell him something.

  Nick and Nora are asleep when Mimi—fresh from a plane—crashes their bedroom to demand Nick’s protection. She is followed by Gilbert, complaining about the cost of taxis in San Francisco. He has become a miser since inheriting money. Nick and Nora unwillingly tell them they can stay.

  In New York, Macaulay—disguised as a middle-aged woman—learns Mimi has gone to San Francisco and dashes for a plane, being helped aboard by Guild, who is at the airport hunting for him.

  Next day Mimi phones Chris in New York, begging him to come out. He pretends indifference until his first wife, Georgia, comes in, overhears the conversation, and starts a quarrel, saying she will never let Mimi have him unless she gets some money out of it. Chris laughs at her threats and leaves for the West. Georgia goes out to keep a date with Morelli, who has been in love with her since Nick’s dinner, and tells him about the dirty deal she is getting. He is having the first “clean” love affair of his life and thinks this slut is Joan of Arc. He offers to take her to San Francisco and see that her wrongs are righted.

  In San Francisco Nick and Nora have been leading dogs’ lives for a couple of days. In addition to Mimi—who keeps complaining about Gilbert’s stinginess—and Gilbert—with his complaints about her ­extravagance—they have an antique uncle and aunt of Nora’s visiting them, people who never trusted Nick very much and now suspect him of everything down to being Mimi’s lover and Gilbert’s father.

  Chris arrives on the Coast and phones a man called Dancer—a man of Chris’s type but much more dangerous—who tells Chris, “Yeah, I remember you,” and hangs up. Chris calls him back and with promises of easy money persuades Dancer to meet him.

  Nick and Nora, fed up with their guests, sneak out the back way, run into Tommy and Dorothy doing the same thing, and they all set out for a peaceful evening somewhere away from home.

  In a Chinatown joint Chris tells Dancer he knows he can get a lot of money from Mimi, because she is crazy about him, but he is afraid of Nick, Georgia, Morelli, etc., as well as having no local connections. Dancer is skeptical, especially since Chris has no cash now. Nick and his party come in, are greeted warmly by the proprietor, and Dorothy sees Chris; she’s angry at his having followed Mimi to San Francisco and tells him so. When Chris starts to tell her what he thinks of her, Tommy hits him, and as much riot as we want is on—winding up with Chris and Dancer out on the sidewalk. Dancer says: “If you’re on the level, now’s your chance. Let’s go up and see the dame while these people are here and collect.” Chris agrees to call on Mimi.

  Across the street from Nick’s house Macaulay, still in disguise, sees Morelli and Georgia arrive and go in.

  Inside Mimi and Georgia have a grand row, Georgia demanding money for giving up Chris, Mimi saying she wouldn’t give her a cent if it meant losing him forever, throwing threats at each other and at Chris—“Even if I can’t have him, you won’t,” etc.

  Chris and Dancer arrive and after a bit of five-handed quarreling Chris gets Mimi aside and tries to get some money out of her but she is too afraid Georgia will get some of it, so she gives him very little. He tells her she has till the next morning to make up her mind and they rejoin the others for another battle-royal that lasts until Nick arrives and puts Chris, Dancer, Morelli, and Georgia out.

  Macaulay follows Chris and Dancer down the street and waits outside when they go into a saloon. When they come out Dancer says to Chris: “If the idea is for me to keep you from being hurt maybe it’s better I stick a little ways behind you,” so he follows Chris while Macaulay follows him. Meanwhile Nick and Nora have gone to bed; Mimi, after trying to get Chris on the phone, has sneaked out of the house, shadowed by the ever-spying Gilbert; and downtown, Morelli and Georgia, making lame excuses and a date for later, have separated and each is headed for Chris’s hotel.

  At Chris’s hotel—a small one in a dark and now foggy street—Mimi is told that he has not come in yet. She leaves the hotel. Morelli and Georgia arrive separately, neither aware of the other’s presence, and conceal themselves in darkness. (For reasons that will be obvious the audience should not know too much about their positions in relation to the hotel; they should simply be hiding in darkness.)

  As Chris, walking down the street, approaches a dark alley on one side of the hotel, Dancer silently moves up closer behind him. Macaulay is half a block down the street. A policeman standing on that farther corner hears two shots and turns toward the hotel. Dancer dashes into the dark alley and there are scuffling sounds, his voice grunting in surprise, the sound of running feet in the alley. Macaulay, scampering down the street, trips himself on his skirts and falls, losing hat and wig. The approaching policeman grabs him, drags him up to the entrance of the alley next to the hotel, and turns his light down on Chris, who lies dead on the sidewalk.

  In an all-night lunchroom Morelli and Georgia keep their date and immediately each knows the other was at the scene of the killing. They leave to find a place to hide.

  In the morning Guild and some local detectives call on Nick and tell him about Chris’s murder and Macaulay’s arrest. Nick tells them of the meeting between Chris, Dancer, Morelli, Georgia, and Mimi the previous night and arrangements are made to try to pick up Dancer, Morelli, and Georgia. Then Guild asks, “And how about this Mimi?” Nick says he thinks she is out of it—she was in the house. Guild says the clerk at Chris’s hotel described a woman like her calling for Chris not half an hour before he was killed. Nick sends for Mimi, who comes in followed by Gilbert. When asked about her whereabouts she says she was at home of course but Gilbert interrupts her. He tells her it is silly to lie at a time like this; he knows she went to Chris’s hotel because he shadowed her there and back again to Nick’s. Questioned, he places the time of her return early enough to make it impossible for her to have been in the neighborhood of the hotel at the time of the shooting, though the police do not altogether believe him.

  Macaulay is brought in and questioned again. He says he accidentally ran into Chris on the street, was surprised to know he was in the city, and shadowed him in an attempt to learn where he lived so he could avoid that part of town until he could board a boat f
or the Orient. He said he heard the shot and ran because as an escaped convict he could not afford to be around trouble, but he did not see the flash and could not tell whether the man walking behind Chris had killed him or not.

  Dancer phones Mimi, saying: “This is the fellow who was with your boyfriend. Can you meet me now?” She says she can and he gives her careful instructions. When she goes out a detective shadows her, with the result that both she and the sleuth have walked a couple of inches off their heights before Dancer can safely pick her up in his car.

  Later that afternoon, in a room behind drawn blinds, Morelli and Georgia see their pictures in an afternoon paper, with WANTED over them; Dancer looks at his as he leans carelessly against a police-call box on crowded Market Street.

  Morelli suggests that now her husband’s dead, Georgia should marry him so neither can be made to testify against the other in case they are caught, but she thinks it is simpler for them just to lie, and besides how could they walk into the City Hall with their faces spread over all the papers? Morelli has to go out, his only explanation being that he’s “got a job to do.”

  At cocktail hour Nick and Nora, with Mimi, Gilbert, Dorothy, and Tommy, are drinking in a front room in his house when somebody firing through the window from the street shoots a glass out of his hand. Nick digs the bullet out of the wall and takes it to headquarters, where the expert says it was from the same gun Chris was shot with.

  Dancer comes into headquarters and gives himself up, saying he had just seen in the papers that he was wanted. He tells of the proposition Chris made him, but said he had no intention of getting hurt, at least until Chris paid him something, which is why he walked behind Chris—he didn’t want to stop a bullet meant for the other fellow. He didn’t see the flash and as soon as he saw Chris fall he ran up the alley and away from there, taking no chances on being next. Nobody can prove he ever owned a gun or had the slightest reason for killing Chris, whom he had never known well and had not seen for years. Macaulay sends for Nick and makes a complete confession to having shot Chris over Dancer’s shoulders, involving Mimi in both the murder and his escape from prison. Nick says: “Hooey! Just a fellow who’d rather stall through a long, drawn-out murder trial here than go back to be burnt in a few days,” and tears the confession up.

  “Having,” as he says, “not only been shot at, but also insulted by yaps,” Nick decides to go to work. He goes down into Chinatown and gets a line on Dancer’s friends and habits and digs into them; he combs the waterfront; he has practically exhausted the city before he, also exhausted, returns home looking fairly satisfied with himself.

  Meanwhile Morelli, returning from his “job,” has arrived in the neighborhood of his hideout just in time to see Georgia being taken away by the police, so later that night he comes calling on Nick again, asking him to help save the little woman. Grilled, he admits that both of them were near the hotel when Chris was shot but swears both are innocent and didn’t even see the flash.

  Nick makes Morelli a proposition. He says he’s got everything he needs to convict Dancer except an eyewitness. If Morelli and Georgia can find it in their hearts to change their testimony just a little bit, even if only enough to swear there was nobody except Dancer within ten feet of Chris when he was killed (he was shot under one ear and there were plenty of powder-marks), Nick will promise to save them. Morelli balks; he would never frame anybody and he hadn’t thought Nick would. Nick insists that it’s not really framing to add a little needed evidence against a man you’re positive is guilty and keeps talking about “saving the little woman” until Morelli agrees.

  The next day Nick assembles everybody and goes to work on Dancer. He has a mob of witnesses: a bellboy to swear Dancer had a gun for years; a longshoreman to swear he saw him throw what looked like a gun off a dock the previous afternoon; a newsboy to swear he had seen him running from the direction of Nick’s house right after the shot had been fired through the window; a pool-room attendant to swear he had once told him when drunk that there was one guy in the world he wanted to get, a guy named Chris Something. He has more witnesses, but the most effective are Morelli and Georgia, who now almost remember seeing the gun in Dancer’s hand.

  Dancer gives up. “All right,” he tells Nick, “you win. I’ll take what’s coming to me but I don’t want a murder rap. It was all just as I told you till we got to the alley. I was closing in then, wanting to get some few pennies anyway from Chris before he went in his hotel, and then that gun came out and was almost under my nose when it went off, and I didn’t want to be the next on the list, so I grabbed it and then I see what I’ve got besides the gun. Real dough, if what Chris said was right. So I helped in the getaway and the next day I called her [nodding at Mimi] up and—”

  Mimi screams: “That’s a lie, you double-crossing—” and a copper grabs her and puts handcuffs on her wrists.

  Dancer shakes his head coolly and goes on talking: “Not her, you mug. I went to her and told her if she wanted the kid kept off the gallows I’d have to be fixed up regular and so—after a little trouble: she was kind of tough at first—we made the deal.” He scowls at Nick. “And a fine deal you turned it into.”

  Nick says excuse me and goes out to pay off his witnesses, one of whom suddenly looks up and asks: “Mister, was it just a joke like you said?” Nick assures him it was and goes back into the room where Gilbert was assuring the detectives very seriously that he did feel that now he was the head of the house he had a right to protect his mother from ravenous males, and after all the money she would waste on Chris was actually his money, since it was doubtful if she would get anything out of his father’s estate, and . . .

  THE END