William Powell Collection

This collection gathers 27 William Powell films from 1930 to 1939, tracking him across three different studios in under a decade — Paramount, Warner Bros., and finally MGM — and through two distinct detective personas before he became, rather improbably, one of the era's defining romantic-comedy leads.

Powell had been under contract to Paramount since the silent era, where he played the detective Philo Vance across several films beginning in 1929. Unhappy with the direction of his career there, he moved to Warner Bros. in 1931 for a larger paycheck. The fit was awkward — Warners' house style ran grittier than the sophisticated material Powell did best — and by the time his contract there ended, with one more Vance picture (The Kennel Murder Case, 1933) closing out the run, he was reportedly earning less per week than he had the year before.

His agent, Myron Selznick, brokered a move to MGM in 1934, and the studio paired him for the first time with Myrna Loy, alongside Clark Gable, in Manhattan Melodrama — an unexpected hit that convinced director W.S. Van Dyke that Powell and Loy belonged together on screen. Van Dyke then had to talk MGM into both casting choices for his next picture, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, which the studio treated as a minor programmer. Shot on a shoestring schedule that sources place anywhere from twelve to eighteen days, it was released on May 25, 1934 — about five weeks before the Production Code's strict enforcement began under Joseph Breen on July 1 — and went on to become one of the year's top-grossing films and the start of a six-picture series.

That timing shows up across the collection: the earlier Paramount and Warner Bros. films here, along with Manhattan Melodrama itself, were made before the Code's strict enforcement, while later MGM entries such as After the Thin Man (1936) and Another Thin Man (1939) operated under it. Powell and Loy went on to appear together as co-stars thirteen times in all — a pairing MGM kept exploiting once its commercial value was obvious — including, elsewhere in this set, The Great Ziegfeld, Libeled Lady, and Evelyn Prentice.