Arsenic And Old Lace (1944)
Director Frank Capra, known for his movies about the great American underdog, war propaganda films, and for that one where Jimmy Stewart saves Christmas, explores the glorious American family in Arsenic And Old Lace and shows us that the violent, murderous society we pride ourselves on now, isn't merely some recent invention of the absent parent, video game industry, and liberal media bias.
Presumably designed to be a rather broadly played black comedy, the movie works periodically though it goes on way too long with too little happening for it to be entirely successful. Grant spends most of the movie making a variety of faces that vacillate between flummoxed and exasperated and though he reportedly didn't care for his performance in the picture, he's the one reason to watch it. Despite some who have complained that his work here is over the top, if he acts like a cartoon character sometimes in this movie, it's because the movie itself is a cartoon.
Even worse than that though, I was reminded of one of those Abbott and Costello movies where the fat one would always see a monster or a dead body and try to choke out some kind of warning to the skinny one, but couldn't because he was so distraught over what he'd seen. You get quite a bit of this from Cary here and after a while, you start to wish for the old moving candle gag that A&C never failed to include in their haunted house pictures. The real problem with the movie is that it's basically a one joke affair that is stretched out over two hours. This only amplifies the feeling that you're not just getting double takes from Grant, but triple and quadruple takes.
Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic who has also written several well-known books that speak out against marriage. When we first meet him, he's trying to keep a low profile down at city hall while getting his marriage license. The whole business with him being against marriage, but getting hitched anyway has no real effect on the plot, but is used to get a few early laughs as he attempts to tell the clerk who he is without anyone else knowing. The part of him being a drama critic is used only sporadically, most notably during a really funny scene where he describes some horrible play he saw about a guy being too stupid to realize he's being menaced by killers, even as Mortimer himself is being too stupid to realize he's being menaced by killers. It's one of the funnier bits in the movie and nails dead on what's wrong with a lot of horror movies. Those moments of inspired lunacy don't happen nearly enough though.
Following his marriage, he and his new bride head back to Brooklyn where she and Mortimer's two elderly aunts live to break the good news to their respective families. Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha are a pair of pleasant old biddies that even the neighborhood cop loves. Despite being well provided for, they even rent out a room for guys who don't have anywhere else to go. That's just the sort of Good Samaritans they are. You and I both know that renting rooms to drifters usually results in one of two bad things happening. Either the drifter ends up being a psychopath who kills a bunch of people, or the people renting the rooms to the drifters are really running a roach motel for down on their luck bums. This time it's the latter case, with the black humor supposedly coming from the juxtaposition of the sweet little old ladies and the fact that they're good naturedly poisoning people and burying them in their basement.
I don't know, maybe this sort of thing was hilarious in the 1940s when you didn't have everyone from six year old kids to eighty year-old broads whacking everyone and their brother, but watching this, I wasn't thinking that the idea of a nice old ladies being a pair of serial killers was instantly hilarious. I'm probably just too desensitized or something, but I couldn't help but think that there was every chance I'd see something similar or even more ridiculous if I turned on the news. I'm not saying that a movie parodying the hideous things of real life can't be funny, just that the idea by itself isn't enough to get any laughs. The idea needs some sort of comedic spin to make it successful and the surprise appearance of a long lost brother who also happens to be a serial killer just wasn't it.
Mortimer discovers a body in the window seat in his aunt's house and after lots of breathless gesticulating and such he confronts them about it. They calmly explain that they murder these people because their victims are lonely and don't have any family. You see, they're really doing them a favor. He tells them in no uncertain terms that they can't go around killing hapless old dudes. To further complicate things, he has a crazy brother who thinks that he's Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, this is a different crazy brother than the one that shows up later, on the lam from the law with his good buddy Peter Lorre. (Hey, I never said the movie didn't try to be a whacky farce, I just questioned its success.)
Teddy is the most harmless of the family, but is always running afoul of the law because he insists on blowing his bugle at all hours of the night. He also has a penchant for yelling "charge!" and running up the stairs to his bedroom. The old gals use him to their advantage by letting him go down in the basement and dig lochs for the Panama Canal which double as graves. Teddy is told that the bodies are merely victims of Yellow Fever and is surprised when he hears about a dead body in the window seat because they've never had Yellow Fever spread all the way over to the window seat before. There are some funny scenes with Mortimer attempting to humor Teddy's delusion and watching Teddy tell Peter Lorre to put on his pith helmet when they go down in the basement to check the Canal's progress is the type of offbeat foolishness you expected from this picture.
Unfortunately, the movie achieves a sluggish pace as soon as Mortimer's other crazy brother appears. Jonathan is a criminal who is looking for a place to hide out while the heat dies down and what better place than his family's unassuming home in Brooklyn. He brings his plastic surgeon associate Dr. Einstein (a very funny Lorre) as well as his own murder victim. Lots of monkeying around with that body ensues and it naturally ends up in the window seat with the other body. Once Jonathan finds this out, he uses this as a way to prevent Mortimer from telling the cops about his own identity as a wanted man.
That brings up one of the big problems I had with the movie. All the manic action depends on Mortimer doing everything he can to prevent anyone from discovering that his aunts have committed a string of murders. Though you may be able to understand someone protecting a family member who's committed a crime, maybe even murder, is it reasonable to expect a guy to bust his hump to cover up twelve murders? Even worse is that Mortimer is going to try and pin the last dead body on President Roosevelt and have him committed to close things out. He also makes his aunts promise not to kill anyone else. Well, that's just peachy except that even as Mortimer is on the phone screaming at the operator in an attempt to contact the Happy Dale Sanatorium to make arrangements for Teddy's commitment, the gals are trying to poison another old dude! Mortimer is obviously trying to commit the wrong family member here.
Mortimer's misguided attempts to protect his aunts causes all sorts of problems between him and Jonathan as well as with his new wife. Yes, she's still milling around, appearing to act huffy or be terrorized by Jonathan every so often, but by and large she doesn't add much to the goings on. Raymond Massey plays Jonathan pretty straight as a psychotic killer who goes bananas whenever someone mentions that he looks like Boris Karloff thanks to Dr. Einstein's latest botched plastic surgery attempt (sounds funnier than it actually was). One can only imagine how much funnier it all would have been had Boris Karloff who played the role on stage, been in the movie. It's not a knock on tractor magnate Massey (he was one of the Masseys of Massey-Ferguson fame), but they weren't trying to wring laughs out of the fact that Jonathan looked like Raymond Massey in piles of make up were they?
The expectedly manic wrap up to all this madness goes on way too long, though with having to wrap up the fates of the two aunts, the two crazy brothers, Dr. Einstein, and Mortimer and his wife, you can imagine the gyrations the script has to go through to make sure everyone gets what's coming to them while giving us a happy ending. Make no mistake, the movie is funny in spots and all involved are complete pros. It's just that with the movie's pedigree you expect so much more from it. Frank Capra, Cary Grant, a great cast of character actors, and a successful Broadway play as source material and I still found myself bored intermittently. I felt a bit like Mortimer when towards the end of the movie, he sits exhausted on the stairs inside the house smoking a cigarette. He's just muttering to himself about everything as everyone else is fighting and destroying the house. It's a great scene, but it seems as if it was Cary Grant himself sitting there, completely spent from trying to make the movie work out better than it did.