Arsenic and Old Lace was the first Capra comedy I ever saw, long before I cared about who Frank Capra was. As a young teenager watching a Halloween special, I thought it was howlingly funny. When I watched it again as an adult, I thought it was pretty bad. Nowadays, I still think it’s one of Capra’s poorer comedies, despite its immense popularity. Compared to the assured, almost epic visual storytelling of Lady for a Day and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Arsenic strike me as a cluttered jumble, a raggedy narrative hastily filmed, chaotically edited, bizarrely paced, with one of Cary Grant’s shtickiest performances. It’s based on a very successful Broadway play of early 1941 that was probably very funny on stage. Mixing elements of wholesome family comedy, screwball, Gothic horror, psycho-crime movies, with all their special effects, and with the Boris Karloff lampooning himself in the flesh — a concoction like the Brewster aunts’ “one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide” — it must have been a camp romp. From beginning to end, the play is a satire on contemporary dramatic and movie genres. With Capra, each mood is amplified as if it were independent of the others. Capra wasn’t great with camp.
The scriptwriter-adaptors, the well-respected brother team of Julius and Philip Epstein, felt Grant’s performance was so exaggerated that they complained about it to Capra, who is said to have promised to fix it in reshoots. (Those never happened; Capra enlisted after Pearl Harbor and the rest is history.) Grant shared their opinion. He considered Arsenic his least favorite film. (He believed Jimmy Stewart would have been a better choice.) His Mortimer Brewster is a bundle of frenetic tics, double-takes, and hysterical flapping around like a bird caught in a closed room. Capra was prone to encourage his male actors to exaggerate extreme moods — Gary Cooper’s depression in Mr. Deeds and Meet John Doe, Jimmy Stewart’s hysteria in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and both moods in the same character in Stewart’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Raymond Massey, the great leadfoot who played Honest Abe in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and John Brown in Santa Fe Trail, didn’t have a comic bone in his body and played Jonathan Brewster, the psycho whose equally psycho plastic surgeon buddy, Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), sculpts his face as the spitting image of Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, without an ounce of the humor that Karloff himself must have brought to the role on stage simply by being the real Karloff. Lorre is his usual groveling Hollywood gollum, so dispiriting after his years as Brecht’s epic theater star in Berlin. The only stars of the film are the pixillated homicidal Brewster sisters, played by Josephine Hall and Jean Adair, reprising their Broadway roles. For the most part, Capra abandoned control over the acting, the editing, even the camera placements. The Brewster Sisters are the only ones who maintain a modicum of control — and it’s as if the Faulkner Sisters from Mr. Deeds, who thought everyone in the world is pixillated, were given the showcase they so deserved. The continuity is clear:
Capra was great with elderly women — think of May Robson as Apple Annie in Lady for a Day — but he didn’t develop that gift; and it’s hard to see how Hollywood would have let him. The only reason audiences don’t feel Grant is out of control is that the sisters are so much in control.
Even so, I think there’s something to be said for certain moments of Cary Grant’s over-the-top Mortimer. The double-takes definitely get tiresome quickly, but I think some of them are pretty inspired. As if he was harking back to his pre-suave days and silent comedy, Capra gives Grant free rein to act entirely with his google eyes like in the old days. My favorite is the scene when Mortimer realizes that Jonathan has stashed a new body in the window seat. What has been a rather uninspired verbal comedy suddenly goes silent, and Grant acts with eyes only.
Like most of the Hollywood comedies of the War Years, Arsenic and Old Lace strikes me as a tepid compromise with middlebrow tastes. It’s said that Capra was eager to distance himself from his reputation as a hectoring moralist by this time. As his great Why We Fight wartime documentaries show, he retained the heart of a political moralist, and his attempts to mollify the escapist home front lacked inspiration. I’m sure Arsenic and Old Lace will remain popular precisely with folks that wish that history did not exist.