‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ or — Real Time Insanity?
Confirmed bachelor, and author of the best-selling book ‘Marriage, a Fraud and a Failure’, Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), is a tad agitated because he’s about to tie the knot to the woman he loves, Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), and is terrified this news will ruin his reputation as the world’s harshest critic of the state of matrimony.
“Aha!” I thought to myself as I watched Frank Capra’s ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ (1944) for the first time last night (yes, I know, but do you seriously expect me to have seen EVERY movie ever made?), “This is going to be a tale about a reformed ladies’ man struggling to adapt to a new life of domesticity whilst simultaneously keeping up the appearance of his former Lothario lifestyle in case it impacts the sales of his latest book.”
And that’s sort of what happens, for a bit… until Grant and Lane visit Mortimer’s two aunts in Brooklyn on Halloween where Grant makes a horrifying discovery that renders everything we’ve seen before now instantly irrelevant because the only sane reaction to what he’s just found is — “HOLY SHIT!!!”
So any notions concerning marriage, love, freedom vs. settling down, literary success, etc go flying out the window with the speed of a bullet as we watch Grant spending the next couple of hours working himself up into an increasingly frazzled nervous breakdown. Indeed, Grant’s discovery about his sweet, little old aunties and his reaction to what they’ve done might be the best example of a “What the fuck?!” realisation followed by its resulting panic I’ve ever seen, and from this moment on the film never lets up for second.
And I kept waiting for this terrible secret to be revealed as a simple misunderstanding, but no! It really is as grisly as it appears, and the more macabre it gets the funnier it becomes which is why Aunt Abbey’s (I love the way she bounces on her heels when she walks like she’s a tiny pony) response to Brewster’s shock with the line “I do think Aunt Martha and I have the right to our own little secrets” is so hysterically funny.
The film only slows down (and that’s relatively speaking) to allow time for introducing Mortimer’s long-lost brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), and his plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre in maybe his best performance?), and even then it does so by further cranking up the morbid insanity of it all.
“But what about Elaine?” you might ask. Who cares! Do you really think there’s time to spare even a nano-second for love and romance when there’s all this shit to deal with? So this is not smooth, sophisticated and urbane Cary Grant we’re dealing with here but more a human tornado in a suit (the more panic stricken he becomes the more he looks like Talking Heads’ David Byrne in full-on sweaty performance mode meets an unleashed Jim Carrey). In fact, things get so out of control and deranged that Grant, and even the film itself (there’s quite a bit of meta stuff going here), in what I can only describe as a moment of script-writing genius simply gives up and throws in the towel. And we don’t blame either of them for doing so.
I sometimes find it can be easy to take Capra for granted because his films always seem to be there, floating about like oxygen, and that it’s only when I sit down and actually watch one that I remember just how good he could be. But ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ isn’t just good — it might be his best.
