Review of Arsenic and Old Lace

The Brewster sisters (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair) are the sweetest, kindest, most generous women you would ever meet. They put together toy drives for orphaned children, take care of a mentally handicapped relative, and offer a homemade dinner and elderberry wine to any aging gentleman who happens to pass by.

Unfortunately, they lace the wine with poison and have a mental handicap bury the bodies in the basement. But it’s not what you think, not really.

Arsenic and Old Lace is perhaps the single best example of dark comedy to ever be put to celluloid. It manages that delicate balance between morbidity and hilarity without effort. Its madcap pace gets faster and faster without ever stopping to take a breath. By the end, you can’t help but be caught in the whirlwind of absurdity, rooting for characters you never thought you could.

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) is the oddball member of his family in that he’s normal–mostly. He’s a dramatic critic who also holds the public persona of being against marriage. Thus, his elopement to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) needs to be kept hush-hush for the time being. Elaine is a minister’s daughter who happens to live next door to Mortimer’s two doting aunts. While dropping Elaine off to get ready for their honeymoon, Mortimer stops by his aunts’ home only to find that he’s not the only unexpected visitor: there’s a corpse underneath a window seat. The dialog that follows is priceless:

Mortimer: There’s a body in the window seat.
Aunt Abby: Yes, dear, we know.
Mortimer: You know?
Aunt Abby: Of course! We never dreamed you’d peek.
…
Mortimer: Men don’t just get into window seats and die!
Aunt Abby: Of course not, dear. He died first.
Mortimer: But how?
Aunt Abby: The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it. Now, I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal over this Mortimer. Don’t you worry about a thing!

You see, Abby and Martha like to believe they’re helping the gentlemen that they kill. They lead such lonely lives without family and all that a nice meal and conversation followed by a quiet passing is surely the best way to die. Afterwards, they convince Mortimer’s brother, Teddy (John Alexander), to dig a grave in the basement by telling him that the grave is, in fact, the Panama Canal. Teddy, you see, believes that he’s President Roosevelt.

As Mortimer tells Elaine, insanity doesn’t just run in his family, it gallops.

Mortimer, thinking quickly, believes that the best person to pin the blame on would be the family member that runs up the staircase screaming “Charge!” as if it’s San Juan Hill and blows the bugle at all hours of the night. So Teddy it is. Fair enough.

But when Mortimer’s other brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), arrives unexpectedly, his plans are up in the air. Jonathan has the distinction of being the only person to match body counts with his aunts: twelve dead, although he insists it’s thirteen. Jonathan, however, is a little less kind about his killing. In fact, he has a body in his car when he arrives. The unfortunate victim made the mistake of informing Jonathan that he resembles Boris Karloff (an inside joke, as Karloff was playing Jonathan’s part on Broadway as the film was being made). He just had to go.

It only gets crazier from here on out.

There are certain comedies that simply can’t age. When released, Arsenic and Old Lace pushed the boundaries of the censors. Even to this day it has a way of raising eyebrows with its premise. It lead the way for other films to laugh at the dead, from Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry to Kotcheff’s Weekend at Bernie’s. Without a doubt, Arsenic and Old Lace has long earned a place in anyone’s collection of classics.