Arsenic and Old Lace

Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies," I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the black comedy farce "Arsenic and Old Lace," directed by Frank Capra for Warner Brothers and released in 1944.

It was an adaptation of the play by Joseph Kesselring, which debuted on stage in January, 1941, and ran for an astounding 1,444 performances before closing in June, 1944, just three months before the premier of the movie.

The film version stars Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre, with memorable support from John Alexander, Jack Carson, James Gleason, and Edward Everett Horton.

The story opens on Halloween, in the New York City Marriage License Bureau, where Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic, is preparing to marry Elaine Harper.

Mortimer is attempting to stay incognito, because he has written a series of books denouncing marriage as an old fashioned superstition.

Afterwards, Mortimer and Elaine take a taxi to Brooklyn on their way to Niagara Falls, to break the happy news about their marriage to their families.

Elaine's father, a minister, lives next to a churchyard cemetery, bordering the old Brewster house, where Mortimer's two made aunts live with Mortimer's brother Teddy.

Teddy is well known in the neighborhood, he believes he's Theodore Roosevelt, yelling "Charge!"

as he runs up the stairs thinking he's assaulting San Juan Hill, and playing his bugle in the middle of the night.

The Brewster aunts, Abby and Martha are delighted to Learn Mortimer has married Elaine, and set about preparing a celebratory meal.

Mortimer uses this opportunity to search the house for the manuscript of his latest book "Attacking Marriage," so he can destroy it, but his search leads him to discover the dead body of an old man in the window seat.

Mortimer shocked at the turn, Teddy's delusion seemed to have taken, reluctantly breaks the news to his aunts, but they assure him Teddy isn't the one to blame.

They poisoned the man themselves with elderberry wine.

They see it as an active mercy for lonely old men, and in fact, have 11 other old gentlemen buried in the basement.

That's where Teddy has been eagerly, digging the Panama Canal, and he buried the men, believing them to be victims of yellow fever.

To add to Mortimer's family woes, his other brother Jonathan suddenly arrives at the house, after escaping from a prison for the criminally insane.

Accompanying Jonathan is Dr. Einstein a jittery plastic surgeon, and the recently deceased Mr. Spenalzo, whose corpse the two fugitives need to dispose of quickly.

Dr. Einstein also needs to correct his most recent facial operation on Jonathan, carried out after a drunk Einstein had just seen a horror film.

The resulting face made Jonathan eerily familiar to too many people, and when anyone tells him who they think he looks like, it drives Jonathan to an into a murderous rage.

Playwright Joseph Kesselring's plot for "Arsenic and Old Lace" may have been inspired by the case of Amy Archer-Gilligan, who ran a nursing home in Windsor, Connecticut, between 1907 and 1917.

She was widowed twice, her wealthy second husband dying of severe digestion, after only three months of marriage, leaving her financially secure.

Over 10 years, there were 60 deaths at the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm, and many of the people who died did so after giving Archer-Gillian large gifts of money.

After complaints to the police by relatives of one of the deceased went unheated, a series of investigative newspaper articles in the Hartford Courant finally led to a year-long police inquiry.

It was determined that at least five former residents of the Archer Home had in fact died from poisoning.

Archer-Gilligan was tried and convicted, and ultimately died in a hospital for the insane in 1962.

Kesselring's original intention was to use this macabre material to write a drama, but producers Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, who were also well known as play doctors, convinced Kesselring that the material would serve much better as the basis for a black comedy.

It was also Lindsay and Crouse, who came up with a title for the play, a variation on the name of a book by the humorist Frank Sullivan, "Broccoli and Old Lace."

The Warner Brothers contract with the Broadway producers of "Arsenic and Old Lace" stipulated the film version would not be released until the Broadway run ended.

The movie was originally scheduled for release on September 30th, 1942, but the plays immense popularity delayed the release for almost two full years.

The adaptation of "Arsenic and Old Lace" from stage to screen was pretty straightforward.

Philip and Julius Epstein, who wrote the screenplay, later called their work on the picture abnormally a good situation.

They spent most of the production rewriting the script, with relatively little contact with Frank Capra.

They added several scenes at the beginning of the film, providing a short introduction to the people and culture of Brooklyn, and the scenes with Mortimer and Elaine applying for a marriage license and dodging nosy reporters.

Elaine's father's objection to Mortimer were now based on his books against marriage, rather than his profession as a drama critic.

The Epsteins also added the character of the cab driver who waits and waits, for the newlyweds while his cabs meter keeps running.

Because the production code forbade murder without punishment, they eliminated the play's original ending with the Brewster sisters pouring Mr. Witherspoon a glass of elderberry wine before leaving for Happy Dale, and Mortimer's happy declaration to Elaine, "I'm not a Brewster, I'm a bastard," in the play, which changed in the film to, "I'm the son of a sea-cook," but audiences laugh just loudly.

The movie version of "Arsenic and Old Lace" owed more than its plot and its characters to the hit stage comedy.

Josephine Hall and Gina Dare, who played the Brewster sisters Abby and Martha, and John Alexander who played Teddy, reprised their stage roles in the motion picture.

They received an eight week leave of absence from the stage production, which was still running strong when the film was shot.

But the same opportunity was not given to the play's main draw, Boris Karloff, who played Jonathan on stage, so Raymond Massey played the role in the movie instead.

The fact that Jonathan became enraged whenever someone said he looked like Boris Karloff was originally intended, as an inside joke, Jonathan was Karloff.

Karloff was both angry and disappointed, that he was not allowed a chance to do the film, but he did later play Jonathan in a television version of "Arsenic and Old Lace" in 1955, and again in 1962.

Frank Capra relished the opportunity to make a frivolous farcical comedy.

He had directed a series of serious comedy dramas over the previous seven years, including "Mr.

Deeds Goes to Town" in 1936, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1939, and "Meet John Doe" in 1941.

He said "Arsenic and Old Lace" contained no great document to save the world, no worries about whether John Doe should or should not jump, just good old fashioned theater.

Capra set out to make what he called, "and anything goes rip-roaring comedy about murder," matching the place frenetic energy and letting the scene stealers run wild in a sort of mugger's ball.

He later said it was the first time he had really enjoyed himself making a film, since "It Happened One Night" in 1934.

Capra pushed Cary Grant and supporting actors to do broad comedy takes, and Grant for one was not pleased.

He had appeared in many comedies and considered his performance in "Arsenic and Old Lace" to be too over the top.

He often said it was his least favorite of his movies, but Grant also said Capra helped him to get the comic effect he was unable to achieve on his own.

Screenwriter Julius Epstein told Capra, Grant was going overboard with the comedy, and Capra agreed with him.

The director said he had plans to tone down the comedic takes during editing, but when the Second World War began, Capra left to film the "Why We Fight" series for the US government, and he didn't have the opportunity to edit the film the way he had intended.

Many audiences in fact, enjoyed Grant's broad comedic performance in "Arsenic and Old Lace."

Mortimer as the only normal member of the Brewster family, provides the lens through which the audience experiences the action.

His numerous double takes and frantic behavior, are not only funny in themselves, but they reflect the sane's person reaction to the insanity of the situation in which Mortimer finds himself.

Grant's extreme reactions as Mortimer help the audience laugh at what is really a series of terrifying situations.

The result?

The horrific becomes hilarious, as a credit wrote in the New York Times, after the film's premiere, "as a whole 'arsenic and Old Lace,' the Warner picture, which came to the Strand yesterday, is good macabre fun."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night of the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.