An interesting quality of all the Thin Man films is how fast they go by. Every event takes much more screen time than you'd think, each film feeling much too short. I suppose it's due to the whimsy, the all-is-well feeling even in the underworld, when someone in the movies dies no one blinks an eye, and the films are all the better for it. For example, when Peter Berton gets killed in The Thin Man Goes Home his landlord describes him, "Number 19 with a bath and shower." Murders follow Nick around, and while this sounds like a curse, or at the very least a damper on well-planned holidays, it's treated as a comedic element, less a loss of life and more of a plot device.
For a film rated the eleventh best film of all time by my own personal favorite director Akira Kurosawa, the sequels are bizarrely underrated and under-seen, and there is no excuse. Sure there are faults within each picture, but the point of this series is not that they function as individual films (and they do), but that they are pieces of an overarching story about two people who never seem to change, but exist in a fairytale world where murderers and backstabbers and nervous bookies and befuddled doctors all intertwine in order to give the Charleses a reason to exercise their superior intellects and charms. William Powell and Myrna Loy are the epitome of class as well as rambunctious teasing, and there is no couple more prolific (they made 14 films together over the years) or whose antics prove more enjoyable.
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