Arsenic and Old Lace (Preview)
by J. E. Smyth

Produced by Jack L. Warner; directed by Frank Capra; written by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein from the play by Joseph Kesselring; cinematography by Sol Polito; edited by Daniel Mandell; music by Max Steiner; starring Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, John Alexander, Jack Carson, Edward Everett Horton, and James Gleason. Blu-ray or DVD, B&W, 118 min., 1944. A Criterion Collection release.

Come on, ladies. Time to break out the school chemistry sets and prepare something extra-special nice for the next lonely old gentleman who crosses your threshold. I’ve got an eighty-year-old recipe here, courtesy of Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair) Brewster, and it hasn’t aged a day. For one gallon of elderberry wine, add one teaspoon of arsenic, a half teaspoon of strychnine, and one pinch of cyanide. Down the hatch. Just don’t offer it unless you’ve got a nice, roomy cellar for burying your test subject(s).

Abby and Martha Brewster were from one of the oldest, most respected families in Brooklyn. Pillars of the community. Good Christians. Always giving to charity. In fact, their room[and drink]-for-rent setup in their homestead was nothing less than an act of mercy for the elderly male population of greater New York. And it was successful. They never had to stir from their door to rack up twelve victims for their cellar. Their nephew Jonathan (Raymond Massey), a small-time killer with a reckless taste in plastic surgeons, had to travel the world to collect as many hot stiffs—and even then, his rather unlovely Boris Karloff face was on record with every police station in America.  

So, you thought all serial killers were men? Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) will teach you better. Of course, historians know of Jane Toppan, Amy Archer-Gilligan, Hell’s Belle Gunness, and Nannie Doss. But Abby and Martha are truly out of this world. As Jonathan’s dipsomaniac partner in crime, Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), burbles gleefully, “We’ve been chased all over the world; they stay right here in Brooklyn and they do just as good as you do…You got twelve, they got twelve…The old ladies is just as good as you are.” And the old girls don’t bump off just any old gentlemen. It helps if they’re good Methodists with truly American sounding names—the Brewster sisters certainly wouldn’t stoop to adding a foreigner to their collection. They’ve got their reputations to consider.

How do I explain the allure of Arsenic and Old Lace to someone who’s never seen it? I’ll be candid. Most films aren’t a two-hour escape from boredom—they are variations of Jonathan’s two-hour “Melbourne Method” of torture. Hollywood produced a handful of classic comedies in its golden period—Arsenic’s director Frank Capra directed a few of them, including It Happened One Night (1934) and You Can’t Take It With You (1938). But even the most vintage Hollywood fare dates, especially when it draws upon genre conventions, antediluvian sexual politics, and middle-class morals. Even if you’ve seen the best of them before, you’re always just one yawn away from checking your phone—admit it. But not this film, Dr. Einstein. This one has a way of making you drop everything and just watch, stunned, your stomach sore from laughing too hard as the Brewster family pastimes collide with the unravelling sanity of nephew Mortimer (Cary Grant). The film’s black humor can even become a lifestyle. And it’s not simply that most of us empathize with poor Mortimer and his collection of certifiably funny and nutso relatives. Or that we haven’t sometimes looked at our colleagues at work or in-laws or soon-to-be-ex-spouses and pondered whether our chemistry skills could measure up to Abby’s and Martha’s. Or whether our own cellar is deep enough…

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J. E. Smyth is a writer and professor of history living in England.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2