Arsenic and Old Lace – (1944) Frank Capra’s spooky comedy, based on Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 Broadway play, had us howling with hilarity. Dramatic critic and bachelor extraordinaire Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), author of Mind over Matrimony and other books of misogyny, marries the daughter of Reverend Harper, Elaine (Priscilla Lane), the girl next door to his two aunts in Brooklyn. Mortimer and Elaine return to Brooklyn with an intention of taking off to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, but first Mortimer stops in to tell his aunts of having wed Elaine aboard ship.

By accident Mortimer discovers a dead body under the window seat. Guileless Abby and Martha Brewster (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) explain Mr Hoskins’s demise, poisoned with their elderberry wine, and the graves of eleven other men in their cellar, all charitable acts of providing eternal peace and rest to lonely old men who have come unwittingly to their home to rent a room. Mortified Mortimer tells his aunts, “It’s not only against the law, it’s wrong.”  Mortimer’s brother “Teddy Roosevelt” Brewster (John Alexander) charges up the stairs as if the stairs were San Juan Hill, blows a bugle, and digs locks in the cellar for the Panama Canal where he buries the bodies the aunts tell him are victims of yellow fever.

As Mortimer puts off the honeymoon and runs about getting signatures from a lawyer and a doctor to commit his brother Teddy to the Happy Dale Sanitarium, another brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), a sociopath looking like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, shows up with his accomplice Dr Einstein (Peter Lorre), a plastic surgeon, and another dead stiff. Officer O’Hara (Jack Carson) gets involved, wanting to share his ideas for a play with Mortimer. This circus goes round and round, and where it stops there’ll be no frowns. (When Archie Leach, who became Cary Grant, was nine, he came home from school one day to discover that his alcoholic father had secretly committed his quite sane mother to the Country Home for Mental Defectives; he wouldn’t see her again for 22 years. There’s a fine review by Benjamin Schwarz of books written about Cary Grant in the January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic.)

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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