Song of the Thin Man

Song of the Thin Man is a 1947 American comedy-drama mystery from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the sixth and final film in the studio's Thin Man series, in which married detectives Nick and Nora Charles investigate the murder of a bandleader aboard a New York gambling ship. It was directed by Edward Buzzell, produced by Nat Perrin, and stars William Powell and Myrna Loy, with Keenan Wynn and eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell in supporting roles.^{1 • 2}

Production

MGM moved ahead with a sixth Thin Man film after The Thin Man Goes Home proved another financial success, though its reception was weaker than earlier entries, and the studio brought in a new producer, Nat Perrin, a gag writer and story contributor for the Marx Brothers since 1931. Perrin co-wrote the screenplay with Steve Fisher from a story by Stanley Roberts, working far removed from series originator Dashiell Hammett and the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Albert and Frances Hackett who had written the first films.³

A bebop setting. Perrin wanted to place Nick and Nora in the fashionable bebop era of the late 1940s, and he consulted the jazz pianist Harry "The Hipster" Gibson to understand the subculture. Gibson provided the basis for Clarence "Clinker" Krause, the jive-talking musician played by Keenan Wynn, who accompanies the Charleses into the jazz world. To direct, Perrin chose Edward Buzzell, who had directed the Marx Brothers films At the Circus (1939) and Go West (1940).^{3 • 2}

The supporting cast mixed series veterans with actors early in notable careers. Gloria Grahame played the sultry band singer Fran Page; being tone-deaf, she was dubbed over, though her gold-lame outfit drew contemporary attention. Jayne Meadows, Ralph Morgan, Leon Ames, Patricia Morison, Don Taylor, Marie Windsor, and William Bishop filled other roles, and Asta the dog returned as the Charleses' pet.^{2 • 1}

Music

David Snell scored the film, and it is the only entry in the series with a substantially longer score: music covers about 50 percent of the 86-minute runtime, closer to the practice of higher-budget films of the period, whereas the first five Thin Man films carried very short scores typical of B-scale productions. The songs include "You Got to Have a Beat" by Harry Nemo and "You're Not So Easy to Forget" by Herb Magidson and Ben Oakland.^{8 • 1}

End of the series

The film was the last of many pictures co-starring Loy and Powell, a screen partnership of fourteen films, and it was Loy's last film at MGM, where she had made most of her pictures since the early 1930s. She made a brief cameo in Powell's 1947 picture The Senator Was Indiscreet afterward.^{1 • 2}

In her autobiography Being and Becoming, Loy was blunt about the experience: "Song of the Thin Man was a lackluster finish to a great series. I hated it. For Bill and me, the characters no longer had any sparkle, and those who understood the whole thing were out of the picture. Woody Van Dyke was dead. Dashiell Hammett and Hunt Stromberg had gone elsewhere. The Hacketts were writing other things." She noted, though, that the film was pretty well received, particularly in England.^{3 • 2}

Commercial outcome. Though it did respectable business, earning $2.3 million against a $1.6 million negative cost, the film lost $128,000 on MGM's books, and that result signaled the end of the still-popular series. Movie mysteries were declining as a genre at the time, with the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series having ended the year before.⁴

Reception

Contemporary and later critics generally treated the film as a pleasant but lesser entry carried by its stars. The New York Times called it "no world beater" but "a mighty pleasant picture to have around"; TV Guide Magazine wrote that while it was hardly in a league with the earlier films, it could hold its own against any B movie mystery of the period; the Chicago Reader's Dave Kehr judged that it "gets by, just barely, on the charm of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy." The aggregated Metacritic score is 60 from six reviews.⁵

Retrospective assessment has been warmer on the mystery itself. Deep Focus Review ranks it among the better entries of the six-film franchise, just behind The Thin Man and After the Thin Man, crediting its tightly constructed mystery and its distinctive gambling-ship and jazz-subculture setting; the review also observes that the film's comic treatment of the Charleses as aging squares amid the bebop world has aged well. Rotten Tomatoes records 91% among eleven critics.^{3 • 6}

References

1. Song of the Thin Man (1947), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Song of the Thin Man, Turner Classic Movies article by Eleanor Quin
3. Song of the Thin Man (1947) Movie Review, Deep Focus Review, Brian Eggert
4. The Complete Thin Man Collection, DVD Talk review by Stuart Galbraith IV
5. Song of the Thin Man (1947) Metacritic reviews, IMDb
6. Song of the Thin Man, Rotten Tomatoes
7. Three Cases for the Cops, The New Yorker, September 6, 1947
8. Title Tunes and the Branding of Music in Hollywood Film Franchises, University of Edinburgh thesis

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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