Warner Brothers-First National, 1944
Starring: Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, and John Alexander
Directed by: Frank Capra
The plot: Drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Grant) goes over the bridge to Brooklyn to tell his maiden aunts Abby and Martha (Hull and Adair) that he is marrying Elaine (Lane), the minister’s daughter who lives next door. Within moments of arriving, he discovers a corpse in the window-seat. Convinced the killer is his brother Teddy (Alexander, who thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt), he breaks the news to the two sweet elderly ladies. They inform him that the body is simply one of the 13 gentlemen they have poisoned and buried in the cellar, and not to worry. Mortimer loses it it.
Why it’s good: “Arsenic and Old Lace” is brilliant. The war horse stage-play ran for 1,444 performances on Broadway (delaying the release of the film by three years) and became a staple of high school productions and Halloween movie marathons on TV, so it’s easy to forget (like Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” also done-to-death) just how masterful and perfect it is. The screenplay by brothers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein (who also wrote “Casablanca”) is actually much funnier, laugh-per-laugh, than Joseph Kesselring’s stage original (itself allegedly punched up by producers Lindsay and Crouse). Director Capra knew at this point in his career how to use the confined space of the Brooklyn brownstone to accentuate the comedy, whether playing across Grant’s endless series of reactions or Lane’s desirable face and figure. The scene where murderous brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey) opens a bag of gleaming surgical instruments to torture Mortimer to death is chilling. The great Max Steiner’s score is both playful and perverse.
Should you own it? Comic acting rarely gets better than this. Grant, unbelievably, always remained embarrassed by his hysterical antics, feeling far less elegant than Cary Grant should be. Capra was right to push him over the top—he’s hilarious. Hull and Adair as the two spinsters, and Alexander as Teddy, had played the roles on Broadway for years by the time the film was lensed. Edward Everett Horton and James Gleason turn in their pitch-perfect stock characters, and Peter Lorre shows how criminal it was that he was rarely allowed to be funny. He and Jack Carson as the dim, aspiring-playwright cop (“I get great ideas, I just can’t spell ’em!”) are true stand-outs. But it’s a photo-finish for all. The Warner Brothers DVD includes a lovely black and white transfer and a few minor extras.
—Kenneth Butler
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Source:
http://www.wirenh.com/2013/10/15/tales-from-the-video-vault-arsenic-and-old-lace/
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