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A little drop of poison
Kathy Hofmeyr
Posted Wed, 03 Jan 2007
Elaine: Oh, but Mortimer — you’re going to love me for my mind, too?
Mortimer: [pouncing] One thing at a time!
Mortimer Brewster, successful drama critic and author of such improving volumes as ‘Mind Over Matrimony’, ‘The Bachelor’s Bible’ and ‘Marriage: A Fraud and a Failure’, falls head over heels in love with the girl next door, Elaine. The film opens on Halloween morning, as the young couple is getting married on the sly. Just a few things to take care of before they can head over Niagara Falls in a barrel: pop home; inform their respective families of the nuptials, and pack.
But on his arrival home, Mortimer finds his brother Teddy’s conviction that he is Theodore Roosevelt has worsened — and that there’s a dead body in the window seat. Number twelve, in fact, in a line of nice, respectable, quiet old gentlemen who’ve been put out of their misery by Mortimer’s sweet, hospitable old spinster aunts.
Add to that a crazed killer on the loose and you have a vague idea of what goes on in ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’, a good, old-fashioned, horror-filled comedy.
Somewhat surprisingly then it's helmed by celebrated director Frank Capra, making an uncharacteristic move away from social-conscience heartstring-tuggers like ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (referred to by critics as “Capra-corn”).
Produced in 1944, ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ remains hilarious despite the passage of time. It’s got black humour by the truckload, wonderful dialogue, a terrific cast and brief moments of slapstick worthy of Buster Keaton. Despite its screwball elements, however, there is a layer of Gothicism that underlies the comedy and adds a chill to the proceedings.
Aunt Libby and Aunt Martha, the Misses Brewster, are a lovable and dippy pair of old ducks. Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, both of them stage actresses, reprised their Broadway roles as Mortimer’s aunts in the film. Despite some rather over-played saccharine sweetness, which may be the result of their theatrical background, it's delightful to watch their complete innocence of any idea that knocking off “an even dozen” men by poison could in any way be immoral.
They are the classic stock types of doting maiden aunts — indulgent, twittering, overgrown schoolgirls. Aunt Martha rattles off her recipe for the lethal cocktail as though describing the process of concocting a family favourite: “For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide.”
would like to be remembered as a best-selling author, a little-known blues singer and perhaps someone’s favourite aunt. She lives in Jo’burg with her dogs, two pure-bred mongrels named Harpo and Buffy.
Got something to say about The Maguffin? Email her!
Cary Grant, known primarily as a heart-throb leading man since the early 1930s, takes a comic turn as Mortimer, the eye of the Brewster insanity storm. Think Brad Pitt taking a pratfall. Grant’s performance is splendid and dauntless. The measure of comic ability can take the simplest forms: it is hard enough for an actor to produce a convincing double-take, but in one scene Grant executes no less than a perfect quintuple-take.
Despite his suavity and good looks, Grant’s English roots bring to the role a slight awkwardness that just make the earnestness of his character all the funnier. Thank God for small mercies — the part was originally offered to Ronald Reagan. Enough said.
Interestingly, Grant hated this performance most of all his work, feeling it was over-the-top. Perhaps so, but the film as a whole has a rather frantic, excessive undercurrent which makes the style of acting seem appropriate. Besides, playing opposite Adair and Hull, no actor could have chosen a different approach for fear of being swept away altogether. His shocked, shrill, abject astonishment at their behaviour matches perfectly their own naiveté — after trying over and over to explain to them why they can’t go about murdering people — it’s against the law, it’s wrong, it’s antisocial — he finally settles for scolding them with: “This is developing into a very bad habit!”
The filming of a play is a tricky business and where the film does lose some ground is in the soliloquies. In theatre, the audience sees nothing odd in an actor speaking his internal monologue — it is a convention of the medium which we are conditioned to accept. In film, however, soliloquising can look more like a distracted person talking to himself, however real the thought process behind it may look.
Just as the comedy of the early stages of the film is beginning to wane, Act II begins with the arrival of the psychotic, long-lost brother Jonathan and his attendant plastic surgeon, Dr Einstein, whose sole purpose (it seems) is to operate on Jonathan’s face every time he commits a crime and is identified. The extensive cosmetic work, however, along with the good Doctor’s fondness for alcohol, has taken its toll, and Jonathan’s face is a veritable patchwork of asymmetry.
Of course he looks like no-one quite so much as Frankenstein’s Monster, and one of the film’s running jokes is that people constantly mistake him for Boris Karloff, the English actor who had played that role in James Whale’s 1931 Hollywood adaptation. It would have been lovely if Karloff himself could have played the part, but as luck would have it he was playing Jonathan Brewster on Broadway at the time, from which producers wouldn’t release him for filming. The part was taken by the very able — and equally menacing — Raymond Massey.
It is at this point that the film changes course into thriller territory. There are still a great many jokes, and the humour is carried by the dialogue throughout, but Jonathan is nonetheless a petrifying, humourless and inhuman character. His presence brings an ominous, overarching tension to the action of the film.
Balanced tenuously somewhere between Mortimer, who wants to call the police, and Jonathan, who wants to torture his brother to death, is the good doctor, played by Peter Lorre. Lorre’s performance is almost too good for comedy. Instead of the stock happy drunkard usual to the genre, Dr Einstein is a man tormented and savaged by alcoholism; a man of weak character but who has a good heart lurking at his core.
Lorre is by far the best of the character parts in the film, but he is in good company: there is the cab driver (Garry Owen), made to wait outside for the duration of the film for a fare to Niagara Falls that may never materialise; Mr Witherspoon, the custodian of Happydale Sanitarium reluctant to rock the boat (“We have too many Theodore Roosevelts… we’re a bit short on Napoleons”) and a brace of inept Brooklyn beat cops, including Jack Carson as Officer O’Hara, a rookie who’d rather be a playwright.
‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ is a strange combination of hilarity, wit and unnerving tension. It’s a little long for comedy (certain scenes could have been shortened or omitted without damage to the plot) and probably works better on stage than on film.
Nonetheless, it is a delicious handful of popcorn to gorge on when the wind whines and the ghouls are on the
march.
