“Here, let me give you one of my cards. If you should ever want to call me, call me at this number, don’t call me at that one. That’s the old one. If you happen to lose the card, don’t worry, I have plenty more.”

If you have ever met Elwood P. Dowd, then he’s already told you this. He offers everyone he meets his card and invites them to dinner with him and his friend, Harvey. Doctors, ex-cons, gatekeepers, he doesn’t mind anyone’s company. You will never find a more congenital, gracious person. His sister and niece, however, are intent on having him institutionalized.

You see, Elwood’s friend is a six-foot three (and a half) tall white rabbit. Veta and Myrtle only want Elwood to get better and stop going on about Harvey as if he exists. There’s only one problem: Harvey does exist.

In the audio forward recorded before his death, Jimmy Stewart states that Harvey had always been one of his favorite films. That may seem odd at first, given his extensive career; but there’s an indubitable charm about the film. He goes on to say that the nature of the subject matter required two things to work: good writing, and better acting.

Harvey first ran as a play in the United States. Both Stewart and Hull acted their respective parts for the run. This aided in their timing and deliveries when the play was later adapted to film. Although many characters are affected by Harvey, the film relies on Stewart and Hull’s performances as its center of gravity. Hull for her hilarious, somewhat absent-minded reactions (a la Arsenic and Old Lace), and Stewart for his Zen-like tranquility no matter what the circumstances are.

The circumstances are fairly straightforward: in trying to have Elwood placed in an asylum, Veta is mistaken as the “insane” one. Mayhem ensues as doctors, judges, and family members try to get Elwood in his supposed rightful place. All of this, of course, isn’t a coincidence. Harvey has been hard at work. After all, he’s a pooka:

poo·ka [poo-kuh] -noun (in Celtic mythology) a fairy spirit in animal form, always very large. The pooka appears here and there, now and then, to this one and that one; a benign but mischievous creature; very fond of rumpots, crackpots…

The character of Harvey epitomizes the deceptiveness of the film itself. At first glance, it has all the trappings of a light screwball comedy. Yet there’s always that faint vein of sadness lying just below the surface. While being questioned by a psychiatrist, Elwood says: “Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” The film never goes into what his life was like before he met Harvey. Did he feel a need to escape something or someone of his past? Elwood never says. By all outward appearances, he has simply withdrawn from the world around him into one within him. Whatever he has found in this seclusion has turned him wiser.

The source of his sadness? Perhaps it’s Veta and Myrtle. Their desire to “help” Elwood is less altruistic than they would admit to others: so long as Elwood is known as a crackpot in their social circles, Myrtle will be shunned by any available men. As it turns out, Harvey solves this problem by setting her up with a handler named Wilson from the psychiatric ward–the very one that had seized her mother and threw her in the hydraulic tank. This roundabout way of settings wrongs to right seems to follow Elwood and Harvey wherever they go:

Harvey and I sit in the bars… have a drink or two… play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, “We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.” Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers – soon we have friends. And they come over… and they sit with us… and they drink with us… and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey… and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.

It’s this acceptance of something bigger than him that has removed Elwood from the vicious circle that keeps us preoccupied with nothing at all until our time here is up.

Veta and Myrtle finally get what they want. Elwood graciously returns to the asylum to take a serum that will make him normal, better. The taxi driver that has driven the family there parts with a telling anecdote on the pitfalls of medicated normalcy:

I’ve been driving this route for 15 years. I’ve brought ‘em out here to get that stuff, and I’ve drove ‘em home after they had it. It changes them… On the way out here, they sit back and enjoy the ride. They talk to me; sometimes we stop and watch the sunsets, and look at the birds flyin’. Sometimes we stop and watch the birds when there ain’t no birds. And look at the sunsets when its raining. We have a swell time. And I always get a big tip. But afterwards, oh oh… They crab, crab, crab. They yell at me. Watch the lights. Watch the brakes, Watch the intersections. They scream at me to hurry. They got no faith in me, or my buggy. Yet, it’s the same cab, the same driver. and we’re going back over the very same road. It’s no fun. And no tips… After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are!

In the end, the two women must decide whether they want Elwood or their idea of who Elwood should be. Truthfully, it’s a decision we all have to make at some point.

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.