The Thin Man Is Cinema At Its Finest,

But What About All The Sequels?

The 1934 movie The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, undeniably is one of the finest American films of all time. Based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett, the storyline follows a leisure-class couple who enjoy copious drinking and flirtatious banter; Nick is a retired private detective who left his very successful career when he married Nora, a wealthy heiress accustomed to high society. The motion picture made several of the American Film Institute’s top lists, and such critics and scholars as Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and Pauline Kael have given it high marks. The Thin Man also spawned a bunch of sequels, including After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, and Song of the Thin Man, which (as is typical of a franchise) didn’t get the same overwhelming praise. As Hector Dean wrote last week in Crime Reads, “The series as a whole is surprisingly consistent, having been made over a thirteen-year span, and enjoyable elements from that first classic continue in the rest of the movies.” Viewers can make their own assessment of the series, now that all of them (with the exception of The Thin Man Goes Home) are up on HBO Max.

Bodyguard Is A Tight, Complex, And

Intelligent British Political Thriller

I just finished watching a six-part 2018 British crime drama that I found by accident my scrolling way down the Netflix menu. Bodyguard is an intelligent and intricate political thriller that focuses on police sergeant David Budd (Richard Madden), a British Army war veteran suffering from PTSD, who now works for the Royalty and Specialist Protection Branch of London's Metropolitan Police Service. After an act of heroism in which Budd which prevents a terrorist attack on a train, he is assigned to protect the Home Secretary, Julia Montague, and immediately finds himself in a conflicted and dangerous situation. As a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he saw many of his comrades killed or maimed in a war which Montague was to a degree responsible for, and in his new role as her bodyguard, he soon finds himself a pawn in a political power struggle. While I struggled to understand some of the accents and “Britishiscms,” I was hooked within the first sixty seconds, and was frozen by one exceptionally suspenseful scene that would be spoiled if I said one word about it. Only after watching the final episode last night did I learn that Bodyguard was nominated for multiple Golden Globes and Emmy Awards…and is now filming season two.

COLD CASE

DNA Helps Solve 1983 Murder Of

Woman Who Turned Down Date Offer

Nearly 40 years after a woman was found dead in a Northern California river, authorities said they solved the cold case thanks to the clothes she was wearing when she was killed. On March 27, 1983, Joette Marie Smith—the owner of Buffalo Gals, a restaurant in Ben Lomond—was seen leaving a nearby bar, and two days later her body was found in the Lorenzo River. Over the next several years, Santa Cruz sheriff’s detectives interviewed dozens of people and investigated numerous leads and tips, but they were never able to identify a viable suspect. Five years after the murder, a local resident named Eric David Drummond became a person of interest after investigators learned Smith had turned him down for a date not long before she was killed. Circumstantial information tied him to the crime, but no criminal case could be brought without further physical evidence. The case turned cold, until earlier this year, when new technology allowed forensics analysts to obtain a DNA profile from clothing she had worn when she was killed. Drummond, who had two sexual assault convictions (one in California and one in Nevada), was positively identified as the killer, but as deputies prepared to arrest him in Sierra County, near Lake Tahoe, he took his own life.

Years Before le Carré, Alistair MacLean

Was Cranking Out Great Spy Novels

Long before I ever picked up a le Carré or a Ludlum, I was hooked on Alistair MacLean. The first thriller of his I ever read (written under the pseudonym Ian Stuart) was The Satan Bug, only because the film version was televised on a TV channel we couldn’t receive with our clothes-hanger rabbit ears. I was hooked instantly and devoured everything he’d written up to that point, and it was such novels as The Guns of Navarone, Puppet On A Chain, and When Eight Bells Toll that really pulled me into a world of global espionage and international suspense. I was particularly enthralled by Where Eagles Dare, the heart-pounding World War II novel I’d picked up prior to seeing the Clint Eastwood/Richard Burton film on which it was based. (By that time in his career, MacLean was writing screenplays and then adapting them for print.) This story of Nazi treachery, double-agents, and triple-crosses was the first page-turner of its sort I’d ever encountered, and the motion picture kept my eyes glued to both the page and the screen—up to the amazing fight-to-the-death atop a cable car in the German Alps (pictured left). Alas, MacLean had a bit of a problem with alcohol and died in Munich of a stroke at age 64. As one obituary noted, "A master of nail-chewing suspense, MacLean met an appropriately mysterious death: when he died in the Bavarian capital after a brief illness, no one, including the British Embassy, knew what he was doing there."

Jennifer Lopez Plays The Mother Of All

Assassins In First-Look Netflix Teaser

This week Netflix released a first look at the upcoming action-thriller The Mother, which stars Jennifer Lopez as a deadly assassin who comes out of hiding to protect her estranged daughter, whom she gave up years before. The teaser begins with the actress’ character living in isolation in a remote, frigid locale, where she seemingly spends her days doing pull-ups and hunting deer deep within a snow-swept forest. Supported by such fine actors as Gael García Bernal, Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick, and Lucy Paez, the script was penned by Misha Green (Lovecraft Country) and Andrea Berloff (Straight Outta Compton); Niki Caro (The Zookkeeper’s Wife) directed. Movie trailers often tend toward the jumbled and disjointed, and this one is no different, but there’s enough action and suspense in its 60 seconds for me to add it to my must-watch list.

Coming January 10, 2023:

Greenwich Mean Time

“A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.