rating:
(out of
4 stars)United States; 1944
Directed by Frank Capra; produced by Frank Capra; written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein
Starring Cary Grant, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Priscilla Lane, Jack Carson, John Alexander
The surprising thing about 'Arsenic and Old Lace' is how good the comedy still works today. At first the film plays like a lot of those good but simple comedies from the fourties, showing us the love between Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) and Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane). They are just married and Mortimer wants to break the news to his aunts Abby and Martha. The film and the comedy really start when Mortimer finds a dead man in the window seat in the house of his aunts. He suspects his brother, who thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt, is responsible until his aunts calmly explain to him that the man is Mr. Hoskins, one of twelve men they have poisoned.
Most of the comedy here comes from Abby and Martha, played by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair. They seem to be perfectly nice ladies and keep this attitude all the way through the film. They believe they do a good thing since the men they have killed were lonely and now they have peace. The other eleven men are buried in the cellar where they let "Teddy" dig the Panama Canal. Teddy (John Alexander) thinks the men have died from yellow fever. Mortimer, slowly losing his mind, wants to stop his aunts from killing innocent men while dealing with his new wife and the lost brother who happens to return home this very day.
The lost brother is Jonathan (Raymond Massey), an unpleasant man wanted by the police along with his sidekick Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), an alcoholic plastic surgeon who has changed Jonathan into a Boris Karloff lookalike. They have their own body they need to get rid off, causing even more complications. As you can understand the story is an entertaining mess, where most things occur simply for the convenience of the plot. It doesn't matter much; the comedy becomes better when the chaos gets bigger, so we just go along without thinking too much of implausibilities.
This chaos in a way gives away that the film is based on a play (from Joseph Kesselring), making the transition to the screen not that smooth. Maybe director Frank Capra has intended it that way to keep the intensity of the play. If so, he has succeeded most of the time. Some in-jokes, really meant for the stage, are losing their power. For example, Mortimer is a dramatic critic and comments on that from time to time. Although we get the joke, especially in a later sequence, I found it a lot funnier in the version of the play I saw. The Boris Karloff joke is nice, but it must have been hilarious back then when Jonathan was really played by Karloff on stage. I could have imagined a better and more funny ending as well.
One last thing. The performances are all quite good, especially from Hull and Adair, but the big star is uneven. From time to time Grant goes over the top, playing Mortimer as if he is in silent film twenty years earlier. Of course we are used to his more serious roles which doesn't help either, but I guess he could have done a lot better. Yet, it is not distracting from the film and he gives us quite some laughs as well. Probably I was just looking for some complaints about this terrific film. May be not as good as his 'It's a Wonderful life', but Capra's 'Arsenic and Old Lace' is on par with 'It Happened One Night', which is quite an achievement.