Shadow of the Thin Man

[rinue]

From a Dissolve article about comedic detectives:

"And the Charleses remain a magnificent comic creation; a loving couple who enable each other’s best and worst traits. Light TV mystery shows have been trying to copy that chemistry for decades, with limited success."

I suspect the first sentence explains the second one. The Charleses work not only because of the chemistry of the leads (which, boy howdy) and their covetable lifestyle, but because the two characters amplify each other. It seems to me that most film and tv romantic characters either "make me a better person" or "bring out the worst in me." It's got to be both. Or it's not funny.

Comments

[movingfinger]

I'd never seen that trailer! That's just amazingly good!

That mid-Atlantic accent sounds stranger and stranger as time goes on, doesn't it.

[rinue]

It's kind of close to my accent (Dallas/London), which I freely admit I have held onto partly for comedic effect. People always feel they should be able to guess where I come from, and can't. They know they've heard it before, but where?

An odd advantage is that I'm very, very recognizable to speech recognition software, which tends to be optimized for that kind of "no accent" accent that nobody genuinely has. (As long as I don't talk too fast, and let us bow down to William Powell as the king patterer.)