The Grant Mystique: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, directed by Frank Capra) is probably the most divisive film in Cary Grant's filmography. It is perennially popular among fans of old movies, among fans of Cary Grant, and among fans of what I can only describe as "cozy horror." Many other viewers, including the actor himself, don't much like it. Grant thought his performance was among his worst. Some viewers don't care for Frank Capra's brand of corny, though I would argue that this is a different kind of corn than the director usually served up. There is a category of viewer who dislikes the film not for what it contains, but for what it left out. Let me explain: Arsenic and Old Lace was a huge success on Broadway. Most of the Broadway cast reprised their roles in the movie version, with the conspicuous exception of Boris Karloff. Karloff played the criminal, Jonathan Brewster, the film's villain. The script mentions Karloff by name in describing Jonathan Brewster. That the role was played by Karloff himself is one of the play's best jokes. Karloff had a financial stake in the play, so rather than abandon the production for a piecework paycheck in the film version, he remained in New York for a more lucrative and extended paycheck. His part in the film was filled with Raymond Massey, but the Boris Karloff joke remains, with Karloff's blessing. The film was shot in 1941 with the stipulation that it couldn't be released until the play closed. The play ran for three years, much to the consternation of Warner Brothers. Karloff backed the right horse.*

Arsenic and Old Lace follows Mortimer Brewster on the eve of his marriage to the minister's daughter who lives across the cemetery. Mortimer is notorious for writing books deriding the institution of marriage, so for him to get married is news. Mortimer lives with his two aunts and his uncle. His uncle, Teddy, is under the delusion that he's actually Theodore Roosevelt. His two aunts are the salt of the Earth as far as the neighbors are concerned. They serve cookies to guests and give to charity and are pillars of the community. They also have a habit of murdering their boarders. They've hidden one such victim in the bench under the window, where Mortimer finds him. He is confronted with the fact that his entire family is mad. "Insanity doesn't run in my family, it practically gallops," he tells his bride at one point. Further complicating things is the return of Mortimer's brother, Jonathan, who has escaped from prison and had surgery on his face to hide his identity. The result has left him resembling Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. Where Mortimer's aunts are kindly murderers who see themselves as performing acts of mercy, Jonathan is a cold-blooded killer...

Arsenic and Old Lace was made at the tail end of Grant's golden period right before the war--production on the film wrapped on December 12, 1941, five days after the attacks on American bases in the Pacific roped the United States into the war. It probably was the wrong film for its intended release date in late 1942. The war went badly in America's early going, with defeats in North Africa and the Philippines and the Coral Sea. Moreover, the film has a coded criticism of America's propensity for violence. The Brewsters live in the nicest house on the block in a neighborhood that's in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it's a house built on the graves of murder victims. You can see the critique without having to squint too much. The presence of a character who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt--he of the big stick--puts a fine point on things if you miss it. By the time the film was actually released in 1944, Grant was in something of a slump. None of the films he made during the war have the same kind of sparkle as the ones he made from 1937 through 1941, so Arsenic and Old Lace stands out in this period as an outlier. It's a broad entertainment from a period when the actor was making more serious films like None but the Lonely Heart and Destination: Tokyo. Like the stage play, it was a huge hit.

The closest analogue to Mortimer Brewster in Grant's portfolio is David Huxley from Bringing Up Baby. Like Huxley, all Brewster wants to do is get married and like Huxley, he is increasingly frantic as one screwball situation snowballs into another. The difference is one of degree. Brewster more or less starts frantic at the city recorder, chased by reporters who smell his hypocrisy like blood in the water. Huxley was more restrained at the outset, which set the scale of Grant's performance. Huxley had room to let his panic grow. Brewster starts at a high pitch and has nowhere to go but over the top. And so he does. Also like Huxley, Mortimer Brewster is the straight man in a film full of lunatics. Grant hated his performance in this film, but there are plenty of examples of technical acting here that demonstrate Grant's absolute mastery of comic timing. In this shot, for instance, he's just realized that his family are all serial killers. He's mostly acting with the back of his head, which is something most actors can't manage and rarely even try. Grant uses his body language--specifically the tilt of his head--to communicate exactly what he's feeling here while also listening to his co-stars, Jean Adair and Josephine Hull. He's not the center of the shot until his costars exit, but you can see him thinking about what's happening:

In other scenes, Capra encouraged Grant to play his panic broadly, though it stops short of the sight of Grant in a chiffon negligee, a la Bringing Up Baby. Grant complained about the occasional whinnying in his performance here, but truthfully, Capra had a point. The other characters in the film are so outre that if Grant underplayed or even just played everything at a normal level, his performance would be swamped. This is what happens to his leading lady, Priscilla Lane, who is fine I guess, but nobody remembers her from this film even though she's second billed. This is a film in which the grotesques run roughshod over the normies.

First among the grotesques are Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the elder Brewster sisters, Abby and Martha. Indeed, the whole film is centered on the idea that these two kindly old biddies poison their lodgers like it was a hobby, like it was knitting or baking or whatever else kindly old ladies do in their spare time. The film is at pains to demonstrate that they are pillars of the community. When the two cops visit at the beginning of the film, the veteran tells the new guy that he won't hear a bad word about the Brewsters. It's the incongruity that provides the film's high concept. "What if?" right? What if the whole clan was mad. What if they all had particular insanities? Hull and Adair understand the assignment perfectly, having perfected the roles on the stage. John Alexander's Teddy Brewster, who thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt and continually charges up the stairs like it's San Juan Hill, is less ideal. Capra has encouraged him to overplay, too, which is maybe too much. The film gets a sinister jolt from Raymond Massey as Jonathan Brewster, who oozes menace. He's aided in this by how Capra shoots him, all upward angles and expressionist shadows when he's on screen. He may not be Karloff, but he's more than equal to the role. Beyond the Brewsters, this film has a bevy of familiar faces including Jack Carson, Peter Lorre, and Edward Everett Horton (who was one of Grant's frequent co-stars). Capra was still coasting on his laurels from the 1930s, a decade that included directing two best picture Oscar winners. He could pretty much pick and choose among actors.

Hidden amongst the shenanigans is the fact that Arsenic and Old Lace is a marriage comedy, which is familiar ground for Cary Grant. Most of his best comedies are marriage comedies (or re-marriage comedies as the case may be). The engine of the plot, laid out at the outset, is how Mortimer Brewster is to navigate through his family's various revelations in order to leave town with his new bride. This places a clock on the action and a moral dilemma: Can Mortimer prevent Elaine Harper (Lane) from discovering the murders in his house? Can he in good conscience enter into marriage when his family might be congenitally insane? What will the children be like? The body in the bench is only the first obstacle he must overcome. The film opens with an apt visual metaphor for Mortimer's character arc: there's a graveyard between his house and his bride's. Even when they are playing cute at the beginning of the film, there is often a spooky old tree between them. The first obstacle the film provides is mundane, perhaps to ease the viewers in, when Mortimer and Elaine are chased from the license office at city hall by a couple of reporters. This is a regular scene from classic studio films. Audiences were used to pestering reporters in films like The Thin Man and His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night. Next we see Mortimer's aunts gathering goods for charity and delivering them to the local cops on the beat, which is totally normal and sets them up as essentially good people. Salt of the earth, even. Then Mortimer discovers the body in the bench. From there, the film indulges a one damned thing after another plot, particularly once Jonathan and his entourage arrive and Mortimer feels an actual threat to his own life. In truth, the film loses sight of the underlying engine of the plot sometimes as it explores the various impediments it puts in Mortimer's way. The side stories are all uniformly more compelling than the marriage plot. Only the presence of Cary Grant, the biggest star in Hollywood, anchors the film to its through line, and then only just barely. Arsenic and Old Lace tests the allure of the Grant persona like few other films. Grant probably could not have made a horror movie that was fully a horror movie unless it was something in the mode of Suspicion. This is as close to a gothic horror movie as he ever came. It's the comedy underpinnings of this story that let the Grant persona work its magic. In truth, Mortimer Brewster could have been played by Jack Benny or Bob Hope or even this film's co-star, Jack Carson, and the film would have been none the worse for wear, but Grant certainly adds a glamour to the production that was well beyond other "might have worked" actors.

Ultimately, Grant cedes the stage to his costars. Hull and Adair as the Brewster sisters are the heart of the movie and Grant wisely gives them the space they deserve. Although Grant is known to have bristled at directors who gave more of the spotlight to other actors early in his career, I think here he learns how to be generous. I think, too, that he's aware that he's only borrowing Arsenic and Old Lace for the few weeks it took to make, while Hull and Adair (and Karloff, in absentia) owned it. Of course, by the time he made Arsenic and Old Lace, the Cary Grant Persona was firmly fixed in the legend of classic Hollywood and inseparable from it, so what did it matter to him if he shared the screen? His legacy was secure regardless.

For myself? I like Arsenic and Old Lace well enough. It's as well-made as any Capra film, which is well-made indeed (your mileage may vary on the content Capra preferred, but he was definitely a master craftsman as a filmmaker). Also for myself, it reminds me of certain registers of screwball comedy where the screwball elements seem like they're trying too hard. World War II would put a number of film genres into a tailspin, and they either retooled or vanished after the war. This included the screwball comedy. Grant, whose stardom rose with the screwball comedy, would have to reinvent himself, too. He'd done it once or twice already, so he would do it again.

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*There is a large gap in Karloff's filmography during Arsenic and Old Lace's initial theatrical run. The only film in which he appeared was The Boogie Man Will Get You in 1942, which was his last contracted film with Columbia. When Karloff returned to Hollywood after Arsenic and Old Lace closed, it was for an unsatisfying return to the Universal monsters in House of Frankenstein (which he called a "monster clambake"), followed by three films with Val Lewton. That collaboration only burnished his legacy. Karloff had another great stage success a few years later playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. My mother once told me that she had seen Karloff as Captain Hook when she was a little girl, and I say this truly: this is the only thing for which I ever envied her.

Karloff reprised the role twice for television. His 1962 performance is available online if you look for it, but the video quality isn't great. Caveat emptor.

The stage role of Jonathan Brewster has always been horror adjacent. Some of the first touring productions of the play cast Bela Lugosi as Jonathan who drew big audiences, while other actors who have played the role over time include Fred Gwynn, Jonathan Frid, and Karloff lookalike Abe Vigoda.

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My other posts on Cary Grant. Only about sixty more films to go:

This is the Night (1932)
Enter: Madame (1935)
The Eagle and the Hawk (1933)
The Last Outpost (1935)
Wings in the Dark (1935)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Penny Serenade (1941)
Suspicion (1941)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
North by Northwest (1959)
Operation: Petticoat (1959)
Charade (1963)

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