YMMV / The Thin Man

• Award Snub: It received four Academy Award nominations, but Myrna Loy wasn't nominated for Best Actress. There was indeed a minor uproar from fans about it, but she had the bad luck to also be competing with Bette Davis - who was also infamously snubbed for Of Human Bondage, meaning the controversy surrounding that eclipsed everything else.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the book, Nightmare Fetishist Gilbert Wynant asks Nick Charles about various criminal and insane behaviors, like cannibalism. Nick points Gil to the story of Alferd Packer — and Hammett inserts an in-story reference article on Packer that runs roughly six pages (in a mass-market paperback edition). It's never brought up again.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The book and film provided the code name for a nuclear bomb design in the Manhattan Project. "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" bombs, which went on to be dropped on Japan, were named according to the convention set by Thin Man.
• I Am Not Shazam: Nick Charles is not the Thin Man. However, some of the later sequels' titles gave in and used it like he was.
• Retroactive Recognition: Dean Stockwell plays Nick Jr. in Song, near the start of one of the longest acting careers in film history.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Nick and Nora's heavy drinking is played for laughs, but to modern eyes it's easy to see them as raging alcoholics.
  • There's about as much joking about threatened spousal abuse as The Honeymooners. Plus, in the first film Nick actually does hit Nora in the face (to get her out of the way of a bullet, but still). He also spanks her with a newspaper in ...Goes Home—clearly teasing, but it can still be awkward for modern viewers to watch.
  • In the book, Guild uses the N-word when referring to a mugger who had killed another man. The slur is casually used once in the book's dialogue, but would be completely unacceptable in today's world.

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