Will DiGravio
Brooklyn, the most-populated of New York City’s five boroughs, was named by the Dutch, after Breukelen, a town located in the Utrecht province of the Netherlands. They first colonized the area in 1646, eight years before the opening of the graveyard that sits beside the Brewster residence in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). We see the grave after a warning: this is Halloween night, on screen text tells us immediately after the opening credits, in Brooklyn, “where anything can happen — and it usually does.”
From the first minutes of the film, adapted from a play of the same name by Joseph Kessl, Capra has us thinking about America in the abstract. The above is a comedic spin of familiar refrains, including the common description of America as the “land of opportunity.” And he begins not at the Brewster household, where nearly all of the rest of the film will take place, but at Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who, on this day, are playing their rivals from across the river, the New York Yankees.
Opportunity. Baseball. What could be more American? Certainly class and privilege, which we soon witness up close as Capra’s camera finally takes us into the inner lives of the Brewster family, Mayflower descendants who live in one of the nicest areas of Brooklyn, or, as a police officer at the film’s outset puts it, one of the cushiest beats to patrol.
Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, a renowned playboy and drama critic: the quintessential job for a direct descendent of colonial America. On this day, however, Mortimer has married his neighbor, Elaine (Priscilla Lane), in a low-key courthouse ceremony. He has panned every romance on Broadway, he says, and cannot risk letting the press know he has finally succumbed to love himself. What transpires will soon inspire Mortimer, in true screwball comedy fashion, to try and call off the wedding, Insanity, as he puts it, runs in the family.
Before heading on their honeymoon to Niagara Falls, he returns with the news to the beautifully preserved and spacious family home in Brooklyn, where his two sweet, elderly aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), care for Mortimer’s grown brother (John Alexander), who goes by “Teddy,” believing he is, in fact, the deceased 26th President of the United States. Teddy’s harmless view of the world, Mortimer soon learns, is far more sensical than his aunts, who have a new mission in life. The pair have fatally poisoned a dozen lonely men, an effort they claim is born from compassion for their victims. The bodies are then given a Christian burial in the cellar by Teddy, who believes he is disposing of Yellow Fever victims in the not-yet-finished Panama Canal. To walk into the Brewster home is to be greeted by the good fairies of Sleeping Beauty, only to then meet one’s end at the hands of two witches in the style of Hansel and Gretel.
Showing off his background in acrobatics, Grant as Mortimer flies throughout the house, trying to keep his aunts at bay, securing the necessary paperwork to send Teddy to a sanitarium, assuaging the concerns of Elaine, and then finally dealing with the return of his other brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), a serial killer whose dark face has been cosmetically altered by his accomplice, Dr. Herman Einstein, played by the great Peter Lorre. Jonathan was originally played by Boris Karloff (who is referenced multiple times), and his makeup is made to look like the Monster, giving the scariest moments of the film the feel of an even-more-scary Universal Monster movie.
To point out the obvious: the Brewster family has secrets, dark ones. Like the Newton family of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, released one year earlier, the outwardly beloved family is actually anything but— their comfortable home contains unthinkable evils. In America, the cushy police beat is often anything but.
Part of the genius of Arsenic and Old Lace is how it masterfully blends genre and tone. It is at times a farcical screwball comedy, and at others a deeply sinister satire, exposing the closest thing America has to royalty: the old families that have extracted wealth since the days of the colonies. That privilege has unthinkable effects on their psyches, and on those unfortunate souls who cross their path. In its treatment of colonial America and its legacy, the film has elements ranging from the Puritanical fury of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to the dark fun of Hocus Pocus.
The character who so beautifully captures this tonal blend is Teddy (a member of another American royal family, the one, in fact, then occupying the White House), and the goofy, loveable man who acts as the unknowing accomplice to his aunt’s murders. After Jonathan arrives at the home, the aunts enlist Teddy’s help to secretly bring the body of the man down to the cellar (the Panama Canal). They all go to bed and the cozy front room becomes a haunted house, plunged into darkness.
Then comes Teddy, who we hear shuffle his way over to the hidden body, throw it over his shoulder, and make his way to the cellar door. He opens it, and the glowing, after-life-like light from the cellar reveals the silhouettes of both victim and undertaker. Teddy then slowly makes his way down, down into the cellar where the secrets hide. Arsenic and Old lace takes a similar descent, down into American life’s dark underbelly, one that has existed since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
“Arsenic and Old Lace” is available for digital rental or purchase, and is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
