The lead role of Mortimer Brewster was originally intended for Bob Hope, but he could not be released from his contract with Paramount Pictures. Capra had also approached Jack Benny and Richard Travis before learning that Grant would accept the role. On the Broadway stage, Boris Karloff played Jonathan Brewster, who is said to "look like Boris Karloff". According to Turner Classic Movies, Karloff, who gave permission for the use of his name in the film, remained in the play to appease the producers, who were afraid of what stripping the play of all its primary cast would do to ticket sales.[4]Raymond Massey took Karloff's place on screen.[5][Note 1] The film's supporting cast also features Jack Carson, Priscilla Lane, Peter Lorre, and Edward Everett Horton.
Josephine Hull and Jean Adair portray the Brewster sisters, Abby and Martha, respectively. Hull and Adair, as well as John Alexander (who played Teddy Brewster), reprised their roles from the 1941 stage production.[4] Hull and Adair both received an eight-week leave of absence from the stage production, which was still running, but Karloff did not, as he was an investor in the stage production and its main draw. The entire film was shot within those eight weeks. The film cost just over $1.2 million of a $2 million budget to produce.[7] The cost of the filming rights was $175,000.[8]
Plot
The Brewster family of Brooklyn, New York City, is descended from Mayflower settlers. Several illustrious forebears' portraits line the walls of the ancestral home.
Elaine (Priscilla Lane) and Mortimer (Cary Grant) waiting for a marriage license
Mortimer Brewster, a theater critic and author who has repeatedly denounced marriage as "an old-fashioned superstition", falls in love with Elaine Harper, his neighbor and a minister's daughter. On Halloween day, Mortimer and Elaine get married. Elaine goes to her father's house to share the news of her marriage with him and pack for the honeymoon, while Mortimer visits his aunts, Abby and Martha, who raised him in the old family home. Mortimer's disturbed younger brother, Teddy, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt, resides with them. Each time Teddy goes upstairs, he yells "Charge!" and runs up the stairs, imitating Roosevelt's famous 1898 charge up San Juan Hill.
Jean Adair, Josephine Hull, and Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace
Searching for the notes for his next book, Mortimer finds a corpse hidden in the window seat. He assumes in horror that Teddy's delusions have led him to murder. Abby and Martha cheerfully confess to murdering Mr. Hoskins and explain that they minister to lonely old bachelors by ending their "suffering". They post a "Room for Rent" sign to attract a victim, then serve a glass of elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide while getting acquainted with them. In addition to Mr. Hoskins, the aunts have murdered eleven other men; the bodies are buried in the cellar by Teddy, who believes they are yellow fever victims who died in the building of the Panama Canal.
While Mortimer digests this information, his older brother Jonathan arrives with his alcoholic accomplice, plastic surgeon Dr. Herman Einstein. Jonathan is a serial murderer trying to escape from the police and dispose of his latest victim, Mr. Spenalzo. Jonathan's face, altered by Einstein while drunk, resembles Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster makeup.[Note 2] Jonathan learns his aunts' secret and proposes to bury his victim in the cellar. Abby and Martha object vehemently because their victims were "nice" gentlemen while Jonathan's victim is a stranger and a "foreigner". Jonathan also declares his intention to kill Mortimer.
Elaine is impatient to leave on their honeymoon to Niagara Falls but is concerned about Mortimer's increasingly odd behavior as he frantically attempts to control the situation. He unsuccessfully tries to alert the bumbling police to Jonathan's presence. To draw attention away from his aunts and deprive them of their willing but uncomprehending accomplice, Mortimer tries to file paperwork to have Teddy legally committed to a mental asylum. Worrying that the genetic predisposition for mental illness resides within him, Mortimer explains to Elaine that he cannot remain married to her.
Eventually, Jonathan is arrested. Teddy is safely consigned to an institution, and his aunts insist on joining him. Einstein flees after signing the aunts' commitment papers. Upon hearing that Mortimer signed the commitment papers as next of kin, Abby and Martha are concerned they may be null and void; they inform Mortimer that he is not a Brewster after all: his mother was the family cook and his biological father was a chef on a steamship. Relieved, he kisses Elaine and whisks her off to their honeymoon.
The play Arsenic and Old Lace was written by Joseph Kesselring, son of German immigrants and a former professor at Bethel College, a pacifist Mennonite college. It was written in the anti-war atmosphere of the late 1930s.[9] Capra scholar Matthew C. Gunter argues that the deep theme of both the play and film is the United States' difficulty in coming to grips with both the positive and negative consequences of the liberty it professes to uphold, and which the Brewsters demand. Although their house is the nicest in the street, there are 12 bodies in the basement. That inconsistency is a metaphor for the country's struggle to reconcile the violence of much of its past with the pervasive myths about its role as a beacon of freedom.[10]
The set used for the Brewster home in Arsenic and Old Lace was reused in the 1942 film George Washington Slept Here. To ensure it looked the part of a dilapidated farmhouse in the latter film, Warner Bros. crews knocked out bannisters, rafters and floors on the set.[11]
Reception
Box office
Trailer (1944)Publicity photo of Grant and Lane
According to Warner Bros. records, the film grossed $2,836,000 domestically and $1,948,000 internationally.[2]
Critical response
The contemporary critical reviews were uniformly positive. The New York Times critic summed up the majority view, "As a whole, Arsenic and Old Lace, the Warner picture which came to the Strand yesterday, is good macabre fun."[1]Variety declared, "Capra's production, not elaborate, captures the color and spirit of the play, while the able writing team of Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein has turned in a very workable, tightly-compressed script. Capra's own intelligent direction rounds out."[12]Harrison's Reports wrote: "An hilarious entertainment, it should turn out to be one of the year's top box-office attractions."[13]John Lardner of The New Yorker called the film "practically as funny in picture form as it did on the stage, and that is very funny indeed."[14]
Assessing the film in 1968, Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg state in Hollywood in the Forties that "Frank Capra provided a rather overstated and strained version of Arsenic and Old Lace".[15]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 35 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10.[16]
Arsenic and Old Lace was adapted as a half-hour radio play for the November 25, 1946, broadcast of The Screen Guild Theater with Boris Karloff and Eddie Albert.[18] A one-hour adaptation was broadcast on January 25, 1948, on Ford Theatre, with Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, and John Alexander reprising their roles.[19]
Amy Archer-Gilligan – a nursing home owner accused of murdering elderly men in her care 1910–1917
Black Widow murders – a real murder case whose events were compared to the fictional murders in the film
Notes
^As stated in an episode of This Is Your Life, Karloff was actually an investor and a producer of the stage play who received royalties whenever it was performed.[6]
^The self-referential joke highlights Karloff's portrayal of the character in the Broadway production.[6]
^ abcWarner Bros financial information in The William Schaefer Ledger. See Appendix 1, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, (1995) 15:sup1, 1-31 p 25 DOI: 10.1080/01439689508604551
Gunter, Matthew C. (2012). The Capra Touch: A Study of the Director's Hollywood Classics and War Documentaries, 1934–1945. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN978-0-7864-6402-9.
