Movies and Martinis
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| Instagram: @ericdiesel #martini |
The Thin Man set a standard for style
and sleuthing that we have to wait for Hitchcock before there's any
improving on. Perhaps that's why there were five sequels – they
slaked the audience's thirst for mystery, delivered it with quips,
wrapped the unthinkable in Hollywood glamour. In their way, the Thin
Man movies are the shining example of the Hollywood treatment. They
are based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, who along with Raymond
Chandler and James M. Cain formed the trifecta of hard boiled
detective writers whose stories, heavy on the whiskey and iron style
of LA Noir, attracted a broad audience at the movies. Cain and
Chandler significantly influenced film noir with such classics as The
Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce.
Hammett's The Maltese Falcon got the full guns and dames treatment with
Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, but his Thin Man novel, both as
literature and as film, went a different route.
Hammett's novel and its subsequent
novellas circulate not through Cain's working class or Chandler'sstreet scene but through high society. While Hammett is a pivotal
writer of hard-boiled fiction, The Thin Man went not down dark alleys
but lit amongst penthouses and estates. While The Thin Man as a book
is a true detective story right down to the one-liners and the
rat-a-tat-tat, it is through the movies that The Thin Man landed its
most influential punches. Perhaps because they didn't deliver
fisticuffs, except as necessary elements delivered almost comically,
the Thin Man movies were hugely successful at the box office. They
were mysteries but they weren't noir. They were social comedies built
around solving a mystery, conveyed via Hollywood high style, less
about crime or its victims than about the social structure of
Prohibition America.
Of course, any man who's ever affixed
his cufflinks or doffed his fedora understands that hard-boiled is as
much a style as Nick and Nora's martini shaker or Philip Marlowe's
loafers. But the men and women of The Thin Man are moneyed, which
turns out to be a theme with noir – the Sternwoods in The Big Sleep
have big money, the characters in Cain are chasing it. Detectives on
the street beat are working class. In some ways, that is the point of
the hard-boiled American detective: he pounds the pavement, can throw
a punch and dodge a bullet, carries a flask of brown liquor alongside
his pocket change. These elements signify that he is from the
streets, and being from the streets he is smart in their ways,
including being broke or just getting by. Street life and high society are very separate worlds, and when a street detective
interacted with high society, it was as a visitor – and because as
a detective, an observer. With The Thin Man, Hammett subverted the
formula by inverting it: his detectives Nick and Nora Charles are
from high society so that is their world. In the grand tradition of
being summoned to the mansion, the underworld visits them.
The Thin Man was written during the
Great Depression and rushed to camera during the same era. This was
at a time when Hollywood considered it a patriotic obligation to make
movies that cheered an audience up, gave it hope. This is how much of
Hollywood glamour evolved in the 1930s: it was as shiny and clean as
newly minted coins, embraced by the swoop of art deco whose core was
hope in the future. The Thin Man also came from a society freshly out
of Prohibition. The signifier of the good life was the wine of an
elegant dinner party, but the highest aspiration was club society,
where cocktails were served.
Enter, perched glamorously on Nick and Nora's barcart, the martini. Gin was the preeminent spirit of both Prohibition
and the deco-gilded lives of movie stars. There were countless recipes
for making bathtub gin during Prohibition, all of them ghastly and no
few of them lethal. The most common, as mythological as Hollywood's golden era itself, was a mixture of denatured alcohol, flavorings,
and effort, known but not to be taken literally as bathtub gin.
While the common assumption is that bathtub gin was actually mixed in
the bathtub, it was called that because the plastic jugs filled with
it didn't fit under the sink but sat just fine in the tub. Hollywood, center of lax morality that it was, barely took notice of Prohibition, and notably neither did Nick Charles nor the girlfriend of
the actor who played him, Jean Harlow. Stories about Harlow's
excesses abound, none more potent than those entwined around her love
affair with William Powell. Harlow's drink of choice was the Gibson,
a gin martini crowned with a pickled onion and mixed with its juice.
Perhaps because it’s been a
cornerstone of the movie colony since the Silent Era, the standard by
which all Hollywood martinis are measured is built and served at
Musso & Frank. At this legendary mahogany bar, legendary
bartender Manny delivers a crisp slap of juniper topped with a sweetkiss of vermouth, crowned with a slick, salty olive on a pick. Here is the recipe for a swank Hollywood martini, mixed by the pitcher at the sophisticated Nick and Nora ratio of 3:1. The pour is elegant, the texture silken, a true classic given the star treatment. And, not to argue with another legendary Hollywood martini drinker, as all should be, this martini is stirred, not shaken.
Hollywood Martini
Use a metal pitcher or glass shaker to build your martini; stir until the wall of the vessel is too cold to touch. For my recipe for martini olives, click here. This recipe makes four cocktails.
9 ounces gin
3 ounces dry vermouth
1 lemon twist
martini olives
- Place 3 ice cubes into a metal pitcher or shaker.
- Place the twist in the shaker.
- Measure the gin and vermouth into the shaker in that order.
- Gently stir the martini until the wall of the vessel is too cold to touch.
- Strain into chilled martini glasses.
- Top with a martini olive on a pick.
- Serve immediately
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