Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) - film review

Mortimer Brewster returns to Brooklyn to visit his elderly aunts Abby and Martha with the news that he has just got married.  The last thing he expects to find in his old home is a dead body in the window seat.  His aunts casually admit that this is the latest of their mercy killings.  Whenever a solitary old man enters their house, they take it upon themselves to put him out of his misery, with a glass of elderberry wine laced with poison.  Mortimer’s retarded brother Teddy, who thinks he is President Theodore Roosevelt, has already buried 11 bodies in the cellar.  Mortimer is still reeling from this revelation when his other brother, Jonathan, a sadistic psychopath, puts in an unexpected appearance, with his sinister accomplice, Dr Einstein.  They too have a dead body to dispose of...

Frank Capra was so taken with Joseph Kesselring’s comic play Arsenic and Old Lace when he saw it performed on Broadway in 1941 that he immediately resolved to make a film adaptation.  Working for Warner Brothers (who had already bought the rights to the play), Capra shot the film in just four weeks on a budget of 400 thousand dollars.  Unfortunately, owing to a clause in the contract with Kesselring, the film couldn’t be released until the stage play had finished its run on Broadway – which, as it turned out, wasn’t until 1944.

The film version features three of the actors of the original hit Broadway production – Jean Adair, Josephine Hull and John Alexander.  Boris Karloff was also in this production, but he couldn’t be released, and so his part in the film was taken by Raymond Massey, made up to resemble Karloff’s most famous role, Frankenstein’s monster.  Bob Hope was originally considered for the part of Mortimer, but he was locked into a contract with Paramount Pictures, and so the part went to another rising star, Cary Grant.  

Although it is far from being Capra’s best film, Arsenic and Old Lace is a delight - a delicious concoction of madcap farce and macabre black comedy.  The film’s main assets are the beautifully understated performances from Jean Adair and Josephine Hull, who manage to persuade us that murdering lonely old bachelors is a perfectly respectable occupation for charitable old ladies.  Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre, by contrast, are infinitely more sinister and behave exactly as psychopathic killers ought to behave, albeit with a very subtle edge of pantomime campness which strangely heightens their Gothic horror creepiness.

The only let down is Cary Grant’s way over-the-top performance, which must hold the record for the number of double takes in a single film.  Grant may have got away with such wide-eyed, arm-throwing over-acting in a stage production, but in a film it just looks silly and badly undermines the comedy.  Fortunately, the cumulative talent of the rest of the cast more than compensates for this histrionic excess.  Thanks to its menagerie of bizarre characters, its slick direction and weirdly black humour, Arsenic and Old Lace is a highly enjoyable film which stands up well to repeated viewings.

© James Travers 2008

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