Arsenic and Old Lace (1962) is actually a play written by Joseph Kesselring, but we saw it in its movie form. This reminds me a little bit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in that both are about the unsuspected, shocking secrets we keep from even our closest friends and family. Drama critic Mortimer Brewster’s surviving family consists of his delusional brother, Teddy, who believes he’s T. Roosevelt, currently President, occasional digger of canals, and someday to go on a famous safari in Africa (his sense of time is remarkable); his unmentionable and, well, loathed brother Jonathan, unseen for years since his eviction from the family home; and his spinster aunts, Martha and Abby Brewster.
He’s hoping to add a new member to the family in the form of Elaine Harper, asking her to marry him, and she is joyful to answer yes. But while hunting for some papers at his aunts’ boarding house, he discovers a body hidden in the windowseat, a discovery which doesn’t perturb his aunts, since, you see, they stored the body there after poisoning the poor man.
One might say Mortimer’s hair becomes a trifle undone at the revelation, but it nearly flies from his head when he learns that Teddy digging his “canals” means the digging of graves, and there’s eleven more, or is it twelve, down in the basement. (I feel a little as if I should be doing Dr. Seuss rhymes at this point.)
Distressing as this is, it’s merely a warmup, for it turns out that long-lost brother Jonathan may not be sentimentally missed, but neither is he lost. The aunts Mabel and Abby are distressed at his unexpected return and his desire to make their home his on a long-term basis, but they soon become absolutely furious. Why?
Well, his count of kills rivals their’s, for one thing. This is intolerable, now isn’t it?
The plot continues on, to Mortimer’s distress, as he tells his beloved that he cannot possibly marry her because of unnamed defects in his family. But as the police descend on them, albeit for a chip and a sandwich, who will end in the lead in their morbid little race, and where, geographically, in their midnight travels? And about that story-ending twist…
I thought this was a lot of fun, if not quite as agile and slick as The Importance of Being Earnest. The script had been slightly modified, I assume, for the presence of Boris Karloff, and the mods gave it a little bit of an extra kick. The only real problems are the production values, as there’s quite a bit of glare and occasionally the sound is a bit off. But if you like farce, this is not a bad one at all.
