Meet Nick and Nora and Repartee

The best part of home video is being able to view films long lost to memory or last seen on late-night TV in mutilated, scratched, barely viewable prints cut up for commercial breaks that come every 1O minutes.

That brings us to Nick and Nora.

Nora: (Commmnting on a woman she has seen her husband with) “Pretty girl.”

Nick: “Very nice type.”

Nora: “You got types?”

Nick: “Only you, darling. Lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.”

A case can be made that Nick and Nora Charles, the wickedly sophisticated husbasbaand wife detective team that burst upon the scene in 1934 in “The Thin Man,” changed America’s perception of what married life could and should be.

Here, finally, were two witty people, in love and married, just as clever and affectionate after marriage as their single screen counterparts were before marriage. This was a radical concept in the 1930s when director W.S. Van Dyke decided to put the Dashiell Hammett characters in the movies. Sharp cookies like William Powell and Myrna Loy, who played the “retired” detective and his heiress wife, were usually single, sexy heroes who didn’t marry, if they married at all, until the fade-out.

Not Nick and Nora.

They were two mature adults cavorting on the screen, bickering, trading one-liners, obviously enjoying each other’s company. They did everything worldly married couples do except sleep in one bed-in those years, everyone in the movies slept in twin beds.

The grand surprise is that Nick and Nora, deliciously played by Powell and Loy, are just as wonderful company today as they were 50 years ago. MGM/UA has released the “Thin Man” series of six films on videocassette at less than $25 each.

“The Thin Man” (1934, 93 minutes, tape and laser videodisc) was shot in 16 days and opened to sensational reviews. It was box-office smash, and Powell and the film received Oscar nominations. Watching “The Thin Man” on the small screen is the best of champagne, all sparkling and so agreeable to the senses that the rather overwrought plot can be ignored.

Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich fashioned the daring repartee and fast-moving screenplay from the more serious Hammett novel. (After Nick is wounded fighting the good fight, he opens the paper, looks at the front page and says, “I’m a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.” Nora: “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids.” Nick: “It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”)

Here was a married couple who had a sense of humor about each other, who drank more than today’s health-conscious generation would allow and who still had time to face danger and solve a mystery. Add a surrogate child (the perfect child, silent and housebroken) in the guise of a wire-hair terrier, Asta, and you have a symbol of wedded bliss.

Incidentally, the name of the film and series has little meaning. The “thin man” is not Nick Charles but an eccentric inventor (played by Edward Ellis) whose disappearance sets the plot in motion.

“The Thin Man” and its sequel, “After the Thin Man” (1936, 107 minutes) are glorious romps. It’s also fun seeing young actors in the series who would go on to more fame, including Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and Cesar Romero.

Director Van Dyke was responsible for two more films, but they never equaled the bubbling quality of the first two. One problem is that the Charleses are given a human child, who along with Asta, threatens to turn the series into “Ozzie and Harriet” solve a crime.

The third film, “Another Thin Man” (1939, 101 minutes) was the last to be based on a Hammett story and holds up. “Shadow of the Thin Man” (1941, 97 minutes) features a young Donna Reed .

Although Powell and Loy remain as ingratiating as ever, the series turns into a predictable sitcom with “The Thin Man Goes Home” (1944, 100 minutes).

The last in the series, “Song of the Thin Man” (1947, 86 minutes) is better. Dean Stockwell (of “Quantum Leap”) makes an appealing Nick Jr.

MGM/UA has done a fine job of packaging, and the videos have the crispness of the original prints.

The idea that wedded life can be the greatest of fun may be just as revolutionary a lesson for the video generation as it was for 1930s moviegoers. Nora had the money and the kind of husband to be as independent as she wanted to be. Nick loved her for who and what she was, not for what she could do for him.