Up until recently, Mortimer Brewster thought he had it all.
I mean, he’s a successful writer and theater critic. He’s got looks and money. And he’s even respected by thousands of unfortunate men who have floundered around in the misery of relationships with the opposite sex. He wrote a book considered to be the “bachelor’s Bible,” after all, decrying that crusty old superstition also known as “marriage.”
Problem is, well, Mortimer just got … married. Ugh!
Elaine Harper is her name. While other women may be vile, Elaine is the complete opposite. (Unvile?) Mortimer met her, fell in love with her and couldn’t keep himself from wanting to, you know, enter into that arrangement. Just to be with her, talk with her, smile with her, breathe with her.
I know! Even someone like Mortimer can be susceptible to that terrible thing called love. And what a wonderful, perfectly delightful terrible thing it is.
Is he going crazy?!
No, he’ll just need to make some adjustments. He’ll have to cancel his second anti-marriage book for one thing. He’ll work that out.
But hold up, newly married Mortimer: There’s one other tiny problem to deal with before you wing off to marital bliss. While breaking the news to his elderly aunts, the Brewster sisters, Mortimer finds something nestled peacefully in the two old girls’ window seat: A decidedly dead body!
Wha .. wha … what?!
After a little panicked probing, Mortimer discovers that the corpse is definitely not there by happenstance. Oh, and the man wasn’t killed by Mortimer’s cousin Teddy, either. Teddy’s as crazy as a loon and thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, but Mortimer’s aunts assure him that Teddy is innocent. And it wasn’t Mortimer’s brother Jonathan, either. Jonathan is indeed a killer, but he’s safely locked away in prison.
No, the killers are definitely Mortimer’s kindhearted and gentle aunts. They admit their crime and what they see as a completely reasonable rationale for doing it. In fact, they report, there’s something like eleven other bodies buried in the basement. At that announcement, Mortimer’s jaw drops. And his aunts smile sweetly and tell him he should be off on his honeymoon.
And here Mortimer was afraid he was a little crazy for giving into the lure of love.
But he ain’t got nothing on the rest of his screwball family.
To his credit Mortimer drops everything, even his honeymoon, to see his beloved aunts through the trouble before them. Frankly, he doesn’t always treat Elaine as well as he should, but she goes with the comedic flow. And its apparent that the two do love each other.
Members of the community around the Brewster Sisters all seem to uniformly love the two older ladies. A local beat cop and a pastor, for instance, both praise the sisters’ kindness and generosity.
The Brewster sisters mention always holding a religious service while burying their victims in the basement.
Mortimer and Priscilla hug and kiss several times, and it’s apparent that both are eager to get on to their much-delayed honeymoon. While kissing, Elaine tells her husband, “But Mortimer, you’re going to love me for my mind, too.” “One thing at a time,” He replies.
We find out that Mortimer is actually the illegitimate child of the family’s cook, who the Brewster’s adopted as their own.
This movie tends to deal with all of its killing in a quirky, playful way. But murder is still the thrust of the story. Only once do we even see a body, when someone carries a shadowed form over his shoulder in a nearly pitch-black room (backlit by the light from the basement).
That said, Jonathan (who shows up later in the story) actually is a cold-blooded killer. He presents a much more menacing persona. That menace is lightened by the fact that Dr. Einstein has been changing Jonathan’s face after each of their crime waves. And the last time he made Jonathan look like an almost comically scared version of Boris Karloff.
Jonathan and the doctor bring their own corpse into the Brewster’s home. (Again, in the dark.) And Jonathan notes that his aunts have killed as many people as he has, so he determines to kill at least one more in order to be the “better murderer.” He has his eye on either Mortimer or Elaine.
Mortimer gets tied up and gagged. Jonathan pulls out sharp tools and suggests they kill his brother with the “Melbourne Method.” “Oh, no. Not two hours,” Dr. Einstein moans in reply. Jonathan talks to Mortimer about sticking needles under his fingernails when they were boys.
Jonathan grabs and lightly manhandles Elaine, beginning to choke her before being pulled away. He also sneaks up behind a cop with a knife in hand. He and several policemen eventually struggle and fight. Jonathan gets hit with a billy club and punches. Someone is hit with a chair. And still another character tumbles over a chair to land face-first in a heap.
None.
The sisters talk about their recipe for poison wine that includes both strychnine and cyanide. Though it appears that the drugged wine will be consumed on a couple occasions, it never is.
Dr. Einstein is an alcoholic who occasionally takes a swig from a bottle in his pocket. And he mentions that he was inebriated the last time he performed plastic surgery on Jonathan. Jonathan drinks alcohol as well.
Several people smoke cigarettes, including Mortimer. Jonathan smokes a cigar.
Though this film is certainly not trying to make a statement about euthanasia, it still perhaps unintentionally stumbles into that territory for anyone watching it 80 years after the fact.
We learn that the Brewster sisters choose their victims based on their desire to ease those men’s loneliness and relational isolation. “If we could help other lonely old men find peace, we would,” one of them says. (The sisters would invite lonely elderly in for a warm evening, a delicious meal and a glass of poison-laced wine.)
The film wants us to see their motivation as somehow positive and redemptive—not to mention funny. This is a comedy after all. But sometimes when we’re laughing, we may not be paying attention to the idea a film is suggesting: in this case, judging the lives of some not to be worth living because of their struggles instead of seeing even a hard life as having worth.
Mortimer tries to circumvent the law to help his aunts. But in the end, the law (and everyone else) is satisfied.
Arsenic and Old Lace is undoubtedly one of the wackiest Cary Grant films ever made. It’s a broad, screwball farce filled with gasping double takes, outlandish silliness and pratfalling face-plants. It’s widely been noted that Cary Grant felt his over-the-top comical performance was the worst of his career. That said, many of his fans have chalked the movie up as their favorite entry in Grant’s extensive catalouge.
This pic was closely based on a very popular Broadway hit of the 1940s. In fact, three of the original cast members, Josephine Hull (Aunt Abby), Jean Adair (Aunt Martha) and John Alexander (Teddy), took a leave of absence from the ongoing play to reprise their roles on film.
Boris Karloff was part of that stage production too, playing the deadly brother, Jonathan, who’s said to look like, well, Boris Karloff. But he was so instrumental to the success of the play that he couldn’t step away. So Raymond Massey gave the role his best Karloff-like glare for the movie.
Throw in fabulous supporting performances from Peter Lorre and Priscilla Lane; the brilliant comedic direction of Frank Capra; and a whackadoodle story about a pair of sweet but murderous (and insane) aunts, and you’ve got a very different kind of Halloween movie.
Of course, this is a comedy that also runs topsy-turvy through a rather macabre setting. Though we don’t actually see any killings or their aftermath, there are unseen dead bodies stashed or buried everywhere in this play-like gambol. And we hear of people being deliberately poisoned. Younger viewers may not actually understand the tongue-in-cheek nature of the tale’s lethality. In fact, even some teens may look at this pic’s absurd and madcap wit and not quite get it.
But this is indeed a slice of film history. Can’t say there’s any point or message in the goofy and frantic mix. But it does rank No. 30 on the American Film Institutes top 100 comedy films of all time.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
