Pun Salad

This winds up, at least for now, our Thin Man marathon. William Powell and Myrna Loy made six Thin Man movies, but for some (probably economic) reason, Netflix only currently provides four. This one was the last made, 13 years after the first.

So: Nick and Nora are in attendance at a charity function staged on a gambling boat when—darnit, Nicky, something like this always happens—the leader of the ship's jazz band gets shot in the back while attempting to burgle the ship owner's office safe.

Suspicion naturally falls on the ship's owner, but he can't be the culprit, because he's engaged to Jayne Meadows. The band's songbird (Gloria Grahame, woo!) looks suspicious, but—again, darnit—she soon turns up with a knife sticking out of her lovely back.

There are a whole bunch of other suspects and colorful characters. Nick and Nora wind their way from clue to clue, and eventually (no surprise) determine the culprit, thanks to Nora's timely observations and Nick's quick deductive wits.

Trivia: an 11-year-old Dean Stockwell plays Nick Charles Jr. There's significantly less boozing in this movie than in the early ones.