A bit of a whiff for Frank Capra, though I’m not sure what anyone could have done with this material, written by Julius J. Epstein and based on the Joseph Kesselring Broadway hit. Part farce, part marital satire, and part Halloween holiday special, Arsenic and Old Lace stars Cary Grant as Mortimer Brewster, famous as both a drama critic and marriage skeptic. Nevertheless, we meet him privately marrying Elaine Harper (a spunky Priscilla Lane) at a civil ceremony, then stopping by to share the news with his elderly aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair). Their Brooklyn manse becomes the setting for the increasingly complicated plot, which only partly involves the reveal that the women have murdered 13 men and buried them in the basement. You would think that would be plenty of plot, but both they and Grant disappear for long stretches of screen time (this runs nearly two hours) to make way for story threads involving a relative who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt (John Alexander); a policeman who wants to be a playwright (Jack Carson); and another relative (Raymond Massey) who’s a homicidal maniac and has a tagalong plastic surgeon (Peter Lorre). Keeping it watchable is Grant, delivering a career’s worth of double and triple takes and miraculously making all of them work.
(3/17/2026)
