ARSENIC AND OLD LACE: This Will Do

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (DVD)

1944 / 118 min

Warner Bros

Available at www.MovieZyng.com

Review by Mr. Paws😽

For a long time, Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace was on my dreaded List of Shame…classic films I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t yet seen. I always meant to get around to it, being something of a latent Cary Grant fan, especially the thrillers he did with Alfred Hitchcock.

But Grant was also one of those great Hollywood actors who was equally at home in many genres, including screwball comedies. Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story are a couple of his best ones, of course, and I was confident that Arsenic and Old Lace was probably worth putting the Criterion Collection Blu-ray in my Amazon cart sight unseen. Being directed by Frank Capra, how could it not be?

And there it stayed among the floral shelf liners, coloring books & suncatchers my wife had sitting in the same cart...for months. I still haven’t ordered it, and after finally watching Arsenic and Old Lace on this DVD re-issue from Warner Bros, I’m glad I waited. 

Not that it’s a bad movie by any stretch. This farcical comedy of murder and madness on Halloween night is pretty fun. Grant plays Mortimer, a just-married theater critic whose family has a history of insanity, such as a brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and another brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), who’s wanted by the police. Worse yet, Mortimer discovers his kindly aunts, Abby and Martha (Josephine Hull & Jean Adair), have a body stashed in the family home, who they cheerfully admit to killing.

"You win...I saw him blink."

But they don’t consider it murder. They simply wanted to free the man of his loneliness. In fact, Abby and Martha have previously freed 11 other men from their loneliness. To protect them, Mortimer has a plan to have “Teddy” committed to a mental asylum. That way, if the bodies are discovered, Teddy’s insanity could explain everything. But at the worst possible time, Jonathan returns home with a dead body of his own, Mr. Spenalzo, whom he just murdered. Assisted by his alcoholic plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), Jonathan also plans to stash the body in the house.

An amusing chain of events unfolds, with increasingly panicky Mortimer caught in the middle, when all he wanted to do was go honeymooning with his new bride, Elaine (Priscilla Lane). It’s all fairly funny - sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - but I don’t feel this one ranks among Cary Grant’s greatest comedies. While the combination of clever and broad comedy is certainly enjoyable, and the ensemble cast has a lot of fun in their roles, Arsenic and Old Lace is a little too long and never really escapes its stage origins.

Still, I scratched another movie off my List of Shame, and didn’t need to invest in the pricey Criterion Collection edition to do it. This DVD doesn’t boast any bonus features, nor has the film been given any technical upgrades. But at least it’s back in print at a reasonable price, and for a classic that I consider good but not great, this'll do. Perhaps it will for some of you, too.