This time it’s not personal for Nick and Nora Charles (the joyous William Powell and Myrna Loy), as they stumble upon the murder of a race-fixing jockey and the subsequent killing of a corrupt journalist… and then one of their friends (Barry Nelson, aka the first screen James Bond) is accused. Oh, OK, maybe it’s a bit personal.

As ever, the true delights of a Thin Man film lie in its characters, the teasing interactions between Nick and Nora, and between Nick & Nora and anyone else they share a scene with. As incidental as the case may be, it’s a pretty good one — the solution to the jockey’s murder is a particularly neat change of pace, and while the culprit is deducible using the series’ regular “the least-likely person did it for a reason we’ll cook up at the end” formula, if you play by the rules it’s a trickier spot.

The previous film’s baby is now a toddler, thankfully sidelined but for a couple of sequences. One of those sees Nick, Nick Jr and dog Asta on a merry-go-round in a complete aside that nonetheless stands as one of the film’s more memorable moments… though that’s once again thanks to Asta.

As murder mysteries go, the Thin Man series tends to offer plots that are somewhere between perfunctory and over-complicated to the point of being unsolvable, and Shadow is a typical example. But that doesn’t matter a jot, because the story’s abundance of incident keeps things moving, and the real entertainment value lies in the comedy chops of the three leads: Powell, Loy, and, of course, Asta the dog.

Read my reviews of all the Thin Man films on Thin Man Thursdays.