Plot
Nick Charles (Powell), a retired detective, and his wife Nora (Loy) are attempting to settle down when he's pulled back into service by a friend's disappearance and possible involvement in a murder. The friend, Clyde Wynant (Ellis) (the eponymous "thin man"), has mysteriously vanished just after his former girlfriend, Julia Wolf, was found dead. Wynant quickly becomes the prime suspect, but his daughter Dorothy (O'Sullivan) can't believe he did it. She convinces Nick to take the case much to the amusement of his socialite wife. The detective stumbles off to find clues, and manages to piece things together through intensive investigation.
The murderer is finally revealed in a classic dinner-party scene that features all of the suspects. A skeletonized body, found during the investigation, had been assumed to be that of a "fat man" due to its being found in clothing from a much heavier man. This clothing is revealed to be a diversion, and the identity of the body is finally revealed, on the basis of an old war wound to the leg, as that of a particular "thin man" instead— the missing Wynant. The murder has been disguised in a way to frame the dead Wynant, by people who have stolen a great deal of money from Wynant and killed him on the night he was last seen.
Read more about this topic: The Thin Man (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)