A Very Late Halloween Post… A Review of “Arsenic & Old Lace”
Greeting and hallucinations, ladies and gentle-geeks, and (a late) Happy Halloween! First of all, allow me to welcome Lisa Daum to our merry and slightly-demented band of followers. Thank you, Lisa, and I hope you don’t regret it.
There are movies that are holiday traditions in my family: the first two Die Hard movies for Christmas; certain Old Testament movies leading up to Easter, and The Empire Strikes Back for Father’s Day. For the week leading up to October 31st, the lineup is usually the original Universal monster movies (with maybe a few remakes thrown in for fun), and this movie, originally a Broadway play.
We have a few light laughs before the darkness gets introduced. On Halloween in the 1940s, Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), theater critic and self-proclaimed confirmed bachelor, gets married in secret to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), whose family has lived across the Brooklyn cemetery from the Brewsters for years. Mortimer’s aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), offer a room to rent as a form of charity, among toy donations and food for the sick. Mortimer’s brother Teddy (John Alexander) thinks he’s his namesake Roosevelt; when he needs to go to the second floor, the stairs are always San Juan Hill (complete with shouts of “Charge!”). When Mortimer comes home to tell the aunts of his marriage, he find a dead man in the window seat.
The next few scenes are a study in panic (Mortimer’s) and serenity (the aunts’) when Abby and Martha explain that this isn’t the first dead body in the house; there are 11 graves in the basement already! (Teddy digs “locks” for the Panama Canal and believes the corpses died of yellow fever.)
Things become further complicated by the return of Jonathan (Raymond Massey with obvious facial stitches), Teddy and Mortimer’s brother, who ran away years earlier. With him is Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), a plastic surgeon who’s given Jonathan multiple faces in multiple countries; and Spinalzo, another corpse who made the mistake of telling Jonathan he looked like Boris Karloff. (Einstein saw that movie right before this last face job; “I was intoxicated,” he sheepishly admits to the aunts.)
Now Mortimer wonders, considering his family history, if marrying Elaine is best for either of them.
This movie has always been a perfect balance between comedy, suspense, and even action and romance. The variety of faces Grant alone makes through the film is beautiful. Alexander so perfectly embodies Roosevelt, it’s no surprise that he did play Roosevelt in 1950. Scariest of all might be the aunts in all their sweet obliviousness. The solution to all the problems tie them off very neatly and perfectly.
If at all possible, find this on DVD, and don’t speed through anything, not even the bits that may terrify you. Even in the darkest moments, there will be something to laugh at, marvel at, and wonder at. Then find the original stage play on YouTube, and see how the movie stacks up to the original.
Thank you for reading my ramblings, my dears, and I hope to hear from you. If you’d like to recommend a book for me to read and review, or even need me as an editor for your own work, please contact me on my Facebook page, for Just Write! Ink.
In the meantime, keep reading, keep writing, and never give up making your own magic. Be well, my dears.