In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie come to realize there's nothing like discovering a spouse is a hired assassin to put the magic back into a marriage. But William Powell and Myrna Loy knew better. If a husband and wife treat their marriage as one long date, danger is just the icing on the wedding cake. When Powell and Loy played Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) and five sequels, the characters were perpetually dreaming up ways to woo each other, or top each other's banter, or spring some new surprise. Nora: "It says you were shot six times in the tabloids." Nick: "Not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."
Of course, it helps to be wealthy. Nick has retired as a detective to manage wealthy Nora's millions, though he spends most of his time haunting race tracks, buying Nora expensive baubles and slinging back whisky in nightclubs that had just been legalized with the end of U.S. Prohibition. He downs an unearthly and unhealthy amount of booze, though, to his credit, he has someone else drive. Nora, when asked whether Nick is working on a case, replies, "Yes, he is." "What case is that? " "A case of Scotch."
The conceit is that Nick, whether at home in San Francisco or on holiday in New York, is invariably pulled back into solving cases despite having promised Nora that he would give up detecting. She invariably seeks to help and, when rebuffed, helps or hinders anyway. Bodies pile up, cauliflower-eared prizefighters and second-string mobsters from Nick's old days drop by to say hi, Nick and Nora eventually put the clues together, and all the suspects gather in a room for the big revelation.
But really, the mystery is just the clothesline on which to hang the banter between two characters deeply in love (and two actors with terrific chemistry). The Complete Thin Man Collection includes The Thin Man, the original and best of the series, based on Dashiell Hammett's novel (the thin man is not Nick, but an inventor who dies early on); After the Thin Man (1936, with James Stewart among the suspects) and Another Thin Man (1939), for which Hammett wrote the plots; Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) and Song of the Thin Man (1947). All feature Asta, a rambunctious wire-haired terrier, and, as of Another Thin Man, a son named Nick, Jr., who by the final film is played by Dean Stockwell. A seventh disc includes excellent profiles of Powell and Loy, an episode of the TV series The Thin Man, which ran from 1957 to 1959 with Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk, and a radio show of The Thin Man, with Powell and Loy.
Recently, Prozac Nation (with Christina Ricci) was released on DVD after sitting on the shelf for years. This week, it's the turn of Cypher, a Miramax release filmed in Toronto by Vincenzo Natali, who directed Cube. Cypher sets its puzzle in the world of corporate espionage. Jeremy Northam ( An Ideal Husband, Enigma, Gosford Park) affects a nebbishy voice as a henpecked fellow named Morgan Sullivan, though in his new job as a corporate spy-cum-pawn he must pretend to be a guy named Jack Thursby. Nothing is as it seems, including the Royal York Hotel and a guardian angel played by Lucy Liu. The film received excellent reviews in Britain, but wasn't released in North American theatres, perhaps because Northam and Liu ( Charlie's Angels) weren't considered big enough names to break a film that is, at heart, a cinematic game of Sudoku. It's an intriguing tale, intriguingly told.
Also out: the first season of The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby's classic 1980s sitcom, with cast interviews; director Oliver Stone's revised cut (18 minutes removed, 10 different minutes restored) of Alexander, with Colin Ferrell as Alexander the Great and Angelina Jolie as Alex's mom; the John Wayne films The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky, with extensive bonus features; and The X-Files Mythology: Black Oil, a thematic repackaging of 15 previously released episodes from Seasons 3, 4 and 5 of The X-Files, a series that knew a lot about ciphers.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
Some people reportedly fretted that this year's Downfall, a German film that tracks the final 10 days of the Third Reich, made Adolf Hitler too human. As director Oliver Hirschbiegel and star Bruno Ganz note in lengthy interviews on the DVD, being evil and being human are not mutually exclusive. Hitler could be charming if he chose to be, in the service of furthering his monstrous agenda, and to understand the levels on which he operated is not to whitewash him. Hirschbiegel: "These were not somehow beings from hell with claws and pitchforks. They were human. This Hitler was also human." Ganz: "Now he's thought of as the clown or the madman. But I think that's not enough." The interviews with the director, with author Melissa Mueller (who talks at length of co-writing a book with Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries) and several cast members are in German (with English subtitles), while Hirschbiegel's informative feature-length commentary is in English.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
Most parents have probably seen Ghostbusters, the 1984 supernatural comedy with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver. It's time to give the kids a look, if they haven't already marvelled at the machine that sucks up ghosts or the giant Stay Puft marshmallow man. The youngest ones may get nightmares from some of the spooky goings-on, but it's harmless stuff for the older ones and the infectious theme song will haunt them, and perhaps you, for days. ("Who ya gonna call? " "I ain't afraid of no ghost.") The disc has been re-released with the lesser, somewhat scarier sequel Ghostbusters II and a couple of episodes from a Saturday-morning cartoon series based on the films.