The Thin Man

On the data. One novel, six films, and a title that has confused people for ninety years. The thin man is not Nick Charles. In the 1934 film it is Clyde Wynant, the missing inventor Nick is hired to find. In Hammett's novel Nick is described as heavy set. William Powell happened to be slim, audiences assumed the title meant him, and MGM leaned into the mistake by putting Thin Man in all five sequel titles as though it were his nickname. Only the first film adapts the novel. The second and third come from original story treatments Hammett wrote for the screen, which were published as books in 2012 under the title Return of the Thin Man. Those are screen stories rather than a lost Hammett novel, and they get shelved wrongly all the time. The last three films have no Hammett involvement at all. Watch them in order. Nick and Nora have a son in the third film and he ages across the rest, so the sequence is visible on screen. The 1957 television series is a separate thing with different actors, seventy two episodes across two seasons, and it was MGM's first television production. One of its episodes borrows Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, which is why that episode turns up as an extra on the Forbidden Planet disc. A radio series ran for nine years from 1941 across three different networks, with one actress playing Nora throughout and four different actors playing Nick. No reliable episode count for it exists, so none is given here. A remake has been reported in development since 2023 with no cast, director or date.

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